LSI Contributes to Open Compute Project

LSI Corporation announced its membership in the Open Compute Project and is in the process of contributing two storage infrastructure reference designs to the community.

“Open Compute is about the ability to scale computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical way possible to achieve more work per dollar,” LSI CTO Greg Huff said. “LSI storage solutions play an important role in the datacentre, and our technology can be found in every current contribution to the Open Compute Project. We’re excited to formally join the OCP and look forward to continued contributions to the community.“

LSI is contributing two storage infrastructure reference designs to the OCP.

The first is a board design for a 12Gb SAS open vault storage enclosure. It is a storage solution with a modular I/O topology that’s built for the open rack. The storage solution is designed to enable Open Vault to optimise the performance of 12Gb SAS infrastructure by utilizing LSI’s DataBolt bandwidth optimiser technology. It aggregates the performance of storage devices to enable 30-60% higher bandwidth from existing SATA drives in the Open Vault enclosure.  

LSI is also contributing a design from its Nytro XP6200 series of PCIe flash accelerator cards, which are purpose-built to meet the requirements of Open Compute and other hyperscale servers. The Nytro XP6209 card is a 1TB flash card designed to provide hyperscale cloud datacentres with accelerated performance for read-intensive applications, optimised power and thermals, and an overall lower-cost-per-gigabyte PCIe flash solution for server-based applications.

Nytro XP6209

Quanta QCT is an active OCP solution provider. The company has collaborated with LSI to optimise its line of Rackgo X products, an all-in-one rack-level solution. For the portion of the Rackgo X product line that is optimised for OCP, Quanta QCT will offer integrated LSI SAS expanders and SAS storage controllers.

“Our collaboration with LSI will provide solutions that alleviate the significant storage performance challenges our customers face when implementing big data and business analytics applications on an exploding volume of data,” said Mike Yang, GM, Quanta QCT.

Rackspace US, Inc. is a player in hybrid cloud and founder of OpenStack, the open-source OS for the cloud.

“Hybrid cloud computing is reinventing the entire IT stack and enabling innovation in the datacentre,” said Aaron Sullivan, principal engineer, Rackspace. “Rackspace and LSI have a key role to play in the future of the cloud, and we’re collaborating on a number of hybrid cloud and Open Compute projects using LSI flash and SAS controller solutions.“

Technology Demonstrations
At the OCP Summit, LSI demonstrated a proof-of-concept Open Compute ‘ready’ Rack Scale Storage Architecture with Nebula, Inc., an enterprise private cloud company enabling distributed computing infrastructures.  

The demonstration is designed to enable configurable and sharable resources that provide applications with consistent performance, even in the event of multiple disk failures. Utilising the scale-out connectivity and performance of the LSI SAS 6160 6Gb SAS switch, combined with the Nebula One private cloud, the storage solution can integrate into an Open Compute environment, allowing benefits such as point-and-click spawning and teardown of dynamically sized LUNs of different characteristics under the Cinder presentation layer, as well as deployment of tasks or VMs on them.

“Our continued collaboration with LSI helps address critical challenges in datacentres, mobile networks and client computing by maximising storage connectivity and performance for the private cloud,” said Devin Carlen, founder and chief architect, Nebula.