© 2008 American Megatrends Inc. - Specifications subject to change without notice
Data sheet
AMI’s MG9071 Enclosure Management controller provides exceptional flexibil-
ity: it can be utilized with both SATA or SAS backplanes for applications from entry-
level to mission-critical, while providing a cost effective solution that does not require
an expander. The chip implements the most widely used management protocols in
the field: SES-2 protocol over I2C and Serial GPIO for SAS and SATA HBAs, sup-
porting LEDs for up to four drives, temperature and fan management.
AMI works with a broad variety of HBA vendors to ensure compatibility.
Business-critical and telecom appli-
cations demand high-availability, which
means systems must be operational
99.999% of the time. This implies that
the system must be monitored to iden-
tify potential failures before they happen
and actively prevent them.
Proper environmental management
is needed in order to identify potential
problems before they cause failures and
help pinpoint their locations. Enclosure
management requires continuous moni-
toring of various sensors that detect vari-
ations in voltages, temperatures, humid-
ity, fans and the like.
When enclosure monitoring tasks
are off-loaded to a lower-cost chip on the
backplane, the server main processor is free
of ancillary tasks and its usage is focused
on mission-critical operations. In other
words, efficient enclosure management
is key to optimum system performance.
The MG9071 chip manages hot-
swap SAS/SATA-II backplanes with en-
closure management, ideal for cost-sen-
sitive and performance-oriented system
designs. The device is designed to work
with any SAS/SATA HBA that supports
SES-2 protocol over I2C. Alternatively,
each MG 9071 device has one SGPIO
port that can communicate enclosure
management information to the SAS
host bus adapter, support LED manage-
ment and detect drive presence for up to
HigHligHts
sgPiO & i2C interface to sAs/sAtA
HBA
Works with any HBA supporting
sgPiO or sEs-2 protocols over i2C
support for sFF-8448 Rev0.5 inter-
face
Each chip can support up to 4 sAs/
sAtA drives
Provides drive Activity, Fail and
locate indication for each drive slot
Number of drives supported can
easily be increased by a factor of 4
by adding similar chips
supports one 2 wire temperature
sensor
Provides Buzzer Control output
supports one Fan Fail & Fan Pres-
ence input
tested with numerous platforms
sgPiO Platforms:
- Adaptec
- lsi
- intel EsB2
- NViDiA
sEs Platforms:
- Adaptec
- AMCC
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04 29 2008
MegaRAC
®
MG9071
sAs/sAtA Enclosure Management Controller
four drives.
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Seri-
al ATA are the latest storage interconnect
standards, introducing higher speeds,
more robust data integrity, smaller de-
signs and wider standardization. The
SAS interface is compatible with lower-
cost-per-gigabyte SATA drives, giving
system builders the flexibility to inte-
grate either SAS or SATA devices while
slashing the costs associated with sup-
porting two separate interfaces. As the
next generation of SCSI, SAS bridges
the parallel technology gap in perfor-
mance, scalability and affordability.
The SAS interface is designed to be
compatible with the Serial ATA (SATA)
interface at physical layer level. This al-
lows SAS or SATA drives to be plugged
into a SAS backplane, which reduces de-
sign and inventory costs for backplane
manufacturers.
MG9071 can sync with the back-
plane to support either SES-2 or SGPIO
interface, according to the SFF 8485
Specification rev. 0.7.
The sideband signals defined in
SAS/SATA standard can be used to car-
ry SGPIO or 2wire signals depending
on Backplane ID and Controller ID.
A backplane required to support only
four drives can have just one MG9071.
By adding more devices, the backplane
can manage 8, 16 drives or more.
