LSI CacheCade With Dell PowerEdge RAID Controllers

LSI Corporation announced that CacheCade technology for application I/O performance acceleration is now available with Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) H700 and H800 family cards.

LSI CacheCade technology enhances the I/O performance of hard drive-based system storage by caching frequently accessed, or ‘hot spot,’ data to SSDs. Dell PERC H700- and H800-equipped systems configured with CacheCade technology are designed to deliver improved performance with no loss of existing drive space, and requires only a minimal investment in SSD technology.

"PowerEdge servers coupled with CacheCade technology, when deployed with just two SSDs, will automatically tier hot data and can deliver a database performance boost of up to 76 percent," said Brian Payne, executive director of Platform Marketing for Dell’s PowerEdge Server portfolio. "By enabling faster response times, customers can realize tangible benefits such as greater productivity, quicker and more informed business decision making, and improved agility in meeting market demands. By partnering with LSI, Dell is continuing to lead and offer innovative storage solutions that protect IT investments."

LSI CacheCade technology enables SSDs to act as a secondary tier of performance controller cache in front of hard drives, accelerating application and workload performance. By allowing for large data sets to be present in cache, the technology helps to maximize performance for transactional applications such as file and Web servers, data mining, OLTP and database servers. Designed to be scalable, users can accelerate database performance as much as 55 percent by adding a single CacheCade-enabled SSD virtual drive to a hard drive configuration. By adding an additional CacheCade-enabled SSD virtual drive, database performance can increase by as much as 76 percent. (A Principled Technologies Test Report. March 2011)

CacheCade solutions are easy to install and use. Users can place hot-swappable SSDs into server drive slots, and utilize the configuration utility to create CacheCade virtual drives. CacheCade technology determines and moves hot spot data to the virtual drives, with no performance impact to logs and other write-intensive areas and without placing any burden on the host CPU, host DDR and host OS.  

"LSI is committed to delivering innovations across our broad storage portfolio that help end customers address key business challenges while delivering a higher return on their IT investments," said Steve Fingerhut, vice president of marketing, Accelerated Solutions Division, LSI. "Dell PERC H700 and H800 controllers with LSI CacheCade technology provide customers with a low-cost, no-hassle performance boost for their transactional database applications."

LSI CacheCade technology is available on Dell PERC H700 and H800 controllers equipped with the Netlist 1GB NVvault module.