LSI WarpDrive SSD Card Selected by BYU-Hawaii

LSI Corporation announced that Brigham Young University (BYU)-Hawaii has implemented the WarpDrive SLP-300 acceleration card, a PCIe-based solid-state storage solution, to accelerate production of the school’s audio and HD TV materials.

The transactional I/O performance and low latency of the WarpDrive card has provided the university’s media lab with real-time access to large files, such as uncompressed 4K HD video, and improved control over raw content and workflows.

"The BYU-Hawaii media lab is a full-service studio that serves a dual role as a production and educational facility," said Russell T. Merrill, director, Instructional Media and Production, Brigham Young University-Hawaii. "It’s critical that our storage technologies allow us to enhance the creative process, increase content quality and work with the latest formats and tools for the benefit of both our clients and students."

The WarpDrive card’s high transactional I/O performance helped enable BYU-Hawaii to undertake new workflow possibilities in HD video production and enhance its editing experience with Avid HD systems and applications. Using the WarpDrive card in its media lab, BYU-Hawaii has achieved write performance of 511MB/s and reads of 488MB/s, supporting the delivery of 4K uncompressed HD video, as well as multiple streams of 2K uncompressed HD video. In addition, the write performance of the WarpDrive card helps enable the lab to consolidate workflows for large-scale CD-quality recording sessions.

The implementation of the WarpDrive card has helped BYU-Hawaii overcome the I/O limitations of its previous SATA-based storage solution, which was only capable of delivering half the throughput required to deliver a single stream of 2K uncompressed video. The SATA solution’s performance limitation was also causing audio delays in its Avid Pro Tools editing stations and preventing the use of needed plug-ins and filters.

"BYU-Hawaii has been extremely impressed with the LSI WarpDrive card," continued Merrill. "Not only has the card’s performance and reliability allowed us to improve audio and video production capabilities, it has also allowed us to improve efficiencies and simplify workflows. This has resulted in time and cost savings with minimal disruption to the media lab’s existing IT environment."

The LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 acceleration card offers performance up to 240,000 sustained IOPS and 300GB of SLC solid-state storage capacity within a low profile factor. It is designed to maximize transactional I/O performance of data-intensive applications and workloads such as Web serving, data warehousing, data mining, professional video and high-performance computing.

"The LSI WarpDrive card is a natural fit for today’s digital media environments," said Brent Blanchard, director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI Corporation. "With a single WarpDrive card, creative professionals can achieve the I/O performance of hundreds of hard disk drives, to more efficiently overcome the performance bottlenecks created by the increasing size and quality of today’s digital content files."

More on BYU-Hawaii’s WarpDrive card deployment