Intel recently gave us a peek at its next-generation PCI Express 3.0-based RAID cards. Designed to take advantage of the Xeon E5 family’s support for the third-gen connectivity standard, they’re able to accommodate more storage devices before encountering a bottleneck. The company claims the updated architecture has enough headroom for up to 700 000 IOPS. They're SAS 6Gb/s-capable, and armed with up to 1 GB of DDR3 data cache.
As with the generation prior, Intel plans to offer its cards with the option for battery-based cache backup, a maintenance-free backup unit (employing a large capacitor), or SSD-based caching.
We actually have plans to evaluate Intel’s latest cards as soon as competing models from LSI and Adaptec are ready for review. Keep an eye out!
For more information about Intel's cards, check out its product page.
