Shortcomings in SGPIO and The IBPI Specification Advantages
The original SGPIO stream was intended for a low-cost implementation in lower end systems, and is limited to the capability of representing activity, locate, and fail LEDs. SGPIO became popular and adopted by HBA backplane and backplane vendors in 2004, and increasingly popular after the launch of backplane controller chips that support the SGPIO standard, such as MG9077 and MG9082 from American Megatrends. The MG9082 is the first chip available on the market that fully support IBPI.
With the advent of SAS/SATA hard drives, backplanes typically do not vary much from low to high end systems, except the addition of an extra physical port in the case of SAS. Since it is not economical for systems vendors to design separate backplanes for high and low end systems, the SGPIO standard became popular also in mid-range and higher end systems.
In higher end feature-rich systems the Initiators are capable of providing additional useful status information, such as rebuilding drives and predicted failures of drives. There was no standard for representing these conditions in the original SGPIO specification, at the same time as efforts were being made to elaborate a variety of additions to the standard by component vendors. This resulted in the IBPI specification, which uses blinking frequencies of bits in the SGPIO stream to represent additional states of drives.
Read more about this topic: IBPI
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