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LSI CEO Abhi Taklwarkar announced that EMC will be leveraging their WarpDrive PCIe line of SSDs for their Project Lightning during their recent earnings call.
This is a huge design win for LSI and its WarpDrive PCIe solid state drives. This is certainly welcome news as LSI begins to ramp up for production of the WarpDrive 2 family.
EMC is a very large company with 48,500 employees and a market cap of $52.43 Billion.
With 30+ years in the storage industry, EMC had total revenue of $17 Billion for 2010, a company record. This gives them a ranking of 152 on the Fortune 500 list. These financial results are impressive, and the company has 400 sales offices in 80 countries around the world.
Adding the EMC juggernaut to their list of customers is a huge vote of confidence for LSI and their server Flash caching technologies. These types of wins for LSI really highlight the wisdom of their recent acquisition of SandForce into their company.
The WarpDrive in its current iteration boasts speeds of 150,000 Random Read IOPS, and 190,000 Random Write IOPS. The 8-lane PCIe 2.0 device has capacities of 100, 200 or 300 GBs with SLC flash and an impressive 1.4GB/s sequential read speed.
Below is the WarpDrive 2 that was showcased to us at the recent Accelerating Innovation Summit 2011 that we covered, which will have even higher specifications upon release. We will be evaluating this as soon as samples become available.
With SandForce processors utilized as the primary NAND control architecture in the WarpDrive device, having that technology in-house is a huge win for LSI as well. Controlling the SandForce technology and the path that it takes as it matures is going to enable LSI to make even more rapid gains in this sector.
Flash devices currently only command roughly 2 percent of the worldwide data center storage mix. There is huge room for growth in this sector, as the vast majority of new integrations will be leveraging caching technology.
The WarpDrive and LSIs CacheCade technology are specifically designed to address this market segment, and LSI has positioned itself very well to capitalize on this booming market.
EMC will be holding a live announcement on the Project Lightning on February 6th, so stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.
if its like the revo drives……well…..no thanks