Adaptec Adds SSD Cache to Its RAIDs

Adaptec, Inc. announced the first solution for building and managing High-Performance Hybrid Arrays (HPHAs) – storage arrays that use both solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) – delivering up to five times the I/O performance, up to 50 percent savings in capital and operating expenses, and a dramatic reduction in power consumption over HDD-only arrays.

Adaptec’s new MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution integrates a tuned 32GB Intel X25-E Extreme SATA SSD, used as high-performance cache, with Adaptec’s MaxIQ SSD caching software to provide I/O intensive data center and cloud computing customers with cost-effective scalability without disrupting existing operations.

The Adaptec MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution represents the next phase in Adaptec’s Data Conditioning Platform strategy, an innovative approach to deliver business value to data center managers by intelligently routing, optimizing and protecting data as it moves through the I/O path. The strategic decision to partner with Intel underscores Adaptec’s commitment to developing easy-to-integrate, standards-based I/O solutions to meet large-scale computing challenges in demanding IT environments.

"By incorporating Intel’s SSDs into our MaxIQ solution, we’re able to offer data center managers, particularly those running massive on-demand cloud computing data centers, a non-disruptive, scalable approach to managing storage with maximum application performance and reduced capital and operating costs," said S. ‘Sundi’ Sundaresh, Adaptec president and CEO. "Adaptec MaxIQ underscores the potential that we see for significant future management and conditioning of data through the I/O path, which is central to our new Data Conditioning Platform strategy."

"We have entered an era in data center operations where escalating performance and energy demands requires the integration of technologies to ensure uninterrupted system performance and ongoing financial viability," said Pete Hazen, director of product marketing, Intel NAND Solutions Group. "Data center managers will have the opportunity to easily leverage the value and extreme performance of the Intel high performance SSDs to dramatically scale performance to meet the needs of their growing user base, in a non-intrusive and affordable manner."

Adaptec MaxIQ SSD Caching Software
and High-Performance Hybrid Arrays (HPHA)
HPHAs built on the Adaptec MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution deliver up to five times more IOPS than HDD-only arrays, and can provide capital and operating cost savings of up to 50 percent by improving system resource utilization. Depending on individual data center requirements, an HPHA can consist of any combination of high-capacity, low-cost SATA (Serial ATA) drives or higher-performing SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives, plus SSDs. The result is a cost-effective, scalable hybrid storage solution that can deliver the highest I/Os per dollar at the lowest dollars per gigabyte.

The MaxIQ SSD Caching Software includes a patent-pending ‘Learned-Path‘ algorithm that identifies frequently (hot) read data blocks and optimizes subsequent ‘reads’ by moving ‘hot’ data directly into the SSD cache for lower latencies and higher system performance. By leveraging its unique presence in the data path to create a ‘read cache pool’, a high-performance hybrid array with a single MaxIQ SSD cache can deliver up to five times the IOPS (input/output per second) of comparable SAS-only deployments. The result is a dramatic acceleration in application performance, alleviating the bottleneck that can occur between server processors and hard drives, allowing data center managers to increase the number of users hosted per IT dollar, reduce the need for additional equipment acquisition and significantly cut data center energy costs.

MaxIQ is ideal for data centers running applications with high ‘read’ demands such as web serving, file serving and databases. MaxIQ can be deployed using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, allowing data centers to convert industry-standard servers into cost-effective, high-performance, scale-out application storage appliances that require no modification of existing storage architectures, application software or operating systems for easy integration. It also offers simple and flexible expandability allowing up to four additional SSDs to be added to, or removed from, the cache pool without impacting data integrity or operations.

Paired with Adaptec Series 5Z, Series 5 or Series 2 Unified Serial (SATA/SAS) Storage Controllers, the MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution provides the following industry leading features:

• Adaptec Intelligent Power Management (IPM) – user-directed power management allowing for 3 levels of hard disk drive power modes
• Adaptec Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection – flash-based cache protection in the event of both power loss and drive failure, eliminating battery back-up (Adaptec Series 5Z only)
• Adaptec Storage Manager(ASM) – centralized management by local/remote browser or application-based interface across the network from a single console

Adaptec’s Data Conditioning Platform Strategy
The Adaptec Data Conditioning Platform is at the core of the company’s strategic goal of lowering costs, maximizing performance and achieving Green IT objectives in next generation enterprise and cloud data centers. Leveraging its 28 years of I/O innovation, Adaptec developed its Data Conditioning Platform to serve as the foundation for intelligent, high-payback I/O solutions that protect, accelerate and optimize data as it moves through the I/O path. Adaptec customer solutions built on the Data Conditioning Platform provide data center managers, system integrators, and storage and server OEMs with optimal hardware and software utilization, simplified, non-intrusive technology integration, and minimal risks and performance hits traditionally associated with incorporating new data center technologies.

"The data centers of the future will require technologies that can provide transformative increases in performance while efficiently decreasing power consumption and space requirements," said John Monroe, a research vice president at Gartner, Inc. "We believe that new generations of cost-effective enterprise-grade solid-state drives (SSDs) will deliver orders-of-magnitude enhancements of speed and efficiency in storage infrastructures that require less space and power. Integrating high-performance SSDs in a variety of enterprise environments with new storage management techniques will help to overcome the ‘I/O bottleneck,’ which has grown at greater rates in recent years as the power of multi-core processors has accelerated in scale compared to the performance of traditional hard disk drives (HDDs)."

Pricing and Availability
The Adaptec MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Kit (MSRP US$1,295) includes one MaxIQ-tuned 32GB Intel X25-E Extreme SATA SSD used as high-performance cache and MaxIQ SSD Caching Software, and is currently available through worldwide distributors and resellers.