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LSI Corporation is announcing that it is expanding its product portfolio of Nytro PCIe Flash Adapters for Big Data / datacenter application acceleration. The new product offerings will include a high capacity 3.2TB Nytro WarpDrive flash adapter card. This latest LSI Nytro product expansion also includes increased capacity, connectivity and software features in their Nytro MegaRaid series of PCIe flash adapters
LSI’s Nytro product solutions allow their customers to increase datacenter efficiency and lower IT costs. The Nytro PCIe flash adapters deliver super-low latency and high-bandwidth performance. Big Data applications, cloud datacenters, hyperscale web applications, financial services, server workloads and virtual desktops all will benefit from the increased performance realized by utilizing Nytro-series PCIe flash adapters.
Leading off the new Nytro product offerings is the Nytro WarpDrive BFH8-3200. This is a full-height Nytro WaprDrive card with 3.2TB of eMLC NAND onboard. It features the industry’s first PCIe 3.0 connectivity interface, allowing sustained throughput of over 4.0 GB/s. The BFH8-3200 will meet the needs of customers that require higher-density flash-based server architectures with the ability to enhance and extend server performance; or to be able to utilize a significantly fewer number of SSDs. The BFH8-3200 cards feature LSI SandForce SF-2582 enterprise flash storage processors.
Next in LSI’s new lineup are the Nytro MegaRaid 8110-4e and 8120-4e. The MegaRaid 8110-4e integrates 200GB of eMLC flash capacity and intelligent caching algorithm software with LSI’s dual-core Raid-on-Chip (ROC) technology. With four external 6GB/s SAS/SATA ports, both the 8110-4e and the 8120-4e can support up to 128 storage devices (via port expanders).
The Nytro MegaRaid 8120-4e, with 800GB of eMLC NAND onboard, is LSI’s highest capacity MegaRaid flash adapter yet. Both the 8110-4e and the 8120-4e deliver intelligent application acceleration, enterprise-level data integrity, and much more flexibility in creating flash storage arrays for either rack-mounted disk enclosures or direct-attached storage (DAS).
Nytro MegaRaid software enhancements include Nytro Boot, which enables the ability to create an onboard flash partition to utilize as a boot volume. By moving the boot function to the MegaRaid card, the costs associated with dedicating hard disks to boot functions is eliminated. This frees up HDD slots that can then be converted to expanding the storage system’s capacity. This is an excellent solution for storage architectures that devote two mirrored HDDs on each server for boot-up; such as Big Data applications, web servers and other larger databases.
LSI’s Elastic Cache utilizes new algorithms to effectively extend the capacity of onboard flash to efficiently allocate “hot read” data for improved utilization of available flash and to improve performance of read workloads. When “hot read” data blocks are more efficiently managed, effective cache size increases, allowing existing hardware configurations to achieve higher performance.
LSI’s Flexible Flash is a new support configuration software tool that permits the flexibility of utilizing a portion of a Nytro MegaRaid card’s onboard flash capacity to create a data volume. This allows input/output operations that require minimum latency to be stored and accessed from performance-optimized flash. This would include situations such as storing the TempDB files in a SQL database in flash memory, which allows this global resource to be accessed much more quickly, and improves the overall performance of the database.
According to Gary Smerdon, senior vice president and general manager, Accelerated Solutions Division at LSI, “We are able to greatly improve datacenter performance with LSI PCIe flash acceleration solutions, and as a result we are seeing strong adoption and LSI has established itself as the fastest growing supplier worldwide. Working closely with our customers we developed these new product additions and enhanced features to drive greater performance in a smaller footprint and to increase the flexibility and application use cases Nytro cards offer customers.”
These latest offerings from LSI make the industry’s most impressive portfolio of PCIe flash adapters even more extensive. This wide product selection allows LSI to find the ideal solution for most any datacenter workload or enterprise application. Helping clients shrink their total storage footprint and power requirements lets LSI’s customers reduce their storage architecture’s all-important total cost of ownership (TCO).
These new LSI Nytro products are available today from select LSI OEM partners and via LSI’s worldwide distribution, integration and VAR network. LSI’s product page for the BFH8-3200 can be viewed here. The Nytro MegaRaid 8110-4e product page can be viewed here; and the 8120-4e product page here.
I would also like to extend a big “Thank you” to Deepak Sharma for conferencing with LSI on the details of these latest offerings.