LSI PCIe Flash Technology Selected by Intel

LSI Corporation has entered into an expanded OEM relationship with Intel Corp., whereby its Nytro MegaRAID technology will be available as part of the Intel RAID product family.

Flash technology is experiencing rapid adoption in enterprise servers as customers look for ways to accelerate storage performance while optimizing existing investments in HDD drive and DAS infrastructure. Nytro MegaRAID technology integrates intelligent caching software with server-side PCIe flash and LSI’s dual-core ROC technology. This integration is designed to enable simple, transparent application acceleration and RAID protection for DAS environments.

"Customers in virtually every industry are facing competitive pressures to increase datacenter efficiency and lower IT costs," said Noury Al-Khaledy, GM Intel enterprise platforms and services division. "Through our expanded relationship with LSI, we’re able to offer customers a single, integrated solution that enables exciting levels of application performance, data protection and a low TCO."

Nytro MegaRAID technology cuts latency and boosts application performance by converting server-based flash into a ‘hot’  cache for critical business applications. It will help to provide Intel server board and systems customers with high levels of random IO/s performance for data-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads such as databases and big data applications, Hadoop implementations and VDI.

Benchmark testing using Nytro MegaRAID cards have achieved up to a 33% improvement in the time it takes to complete Hadoop jobs and delivered support for up to twice as many VDI sessions compared to a non-caching storage implementation.

"Intel’s selection of LSI Nytro MegaRAID technology is another significant validation of our strategic focus and investments in flash-based server acceleration technology," said Gary Smerdon, SVP and GM, accelerated solutions division, LSI. "We’re excited to be working closely with Intel to bring the powerful performance, data protection and TCO benefits of Nytro MegaRAID technology to Intel customers."

Nytro MegaRAID technology integrates LSI SandForce flash storage processors to deliver performance, reliability and energy efficiency. The products use industry-standard and widely deployed RAID controller technology drivers and management support to enable compatibility with existing storage infrastructures as well as plug-and-play integration into today’s low-profile, high-performance system chassis.

Intel will offer Nytro MegaRAID technology within their Intel RAID SSD Cache Controllers RCS25ZB040 and RCS25ZB040LX which include embedded flash of 256GB and 1TB, respectively.

LSI showcased the Nytro product portfolio in technology demonstrations at the 2013 HPC Linux for Wall Street conference taking place at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, NY.