LSI Increased Capacity of Nytro PCIe Flash Adapters

LSI Corporation has expanded the LSI Nytro product portfolio of PCIe flash adapters with a 3.2TB Nytro WarpDrive accelerator card, and expanded capacity, connectivity and software capabilities across the Nytro MegaRAID product family.

                                 Nytro WarpDrive

The new offerings extend its portfolio of PCIe flash adapter products, allowing customers to choose the solution to address their challenges across a range of enterprise applications and datacentre workloads.

Nytro products are being deployed to deliver the low latency and high-bandwidth performance required for big data applications, hyperscale web and cloud datacentres, financial services, and virtual desktop and server workloads. The products also help customers shrink their overall storage footprint and power requirements, leading to increased datacentre efficiency and lower IT costs.

New Nytro products include:

• WarpDrive BFH8-3200: a full-height Nytro WarpDrive accelerator card with 3.2TB of flash capacity. The industry’s first PCIe flash card with a PCIe 3.0 interface for sustained throughput performance over 4.0GB/s. Offering twice the flash capacity of low-profile, small form factor WarpDrive models, the card meets the needs of some customers for higher-density flash-based server designs that extend server performance with fewer flash cards or a fewer number of SSDs.
• MegaRAID 8110-4e: integrates 200GB of onboard flash capacity with intelligent caching software and dual-core RAID-on-Chip technology. With four external 6Gb SAS+SATA ports supporting connectivity up to 128 end devices, the product delivers intelligent application acceleration, flexible flash storage and enterprise data protection for DAS and external rack-mounted disk enclosure configurations.
• MegaRAID 8120-4e: a high-capacity Nytro MegaRAID card combining 800GB of onboard flash with intelligent caching software and 4 external ports, providing connectivity and MegaRAID data protection for up to 128 SATA or SAS devices.

New Nytro MegaRAID software features include:

• Nytro Boot provides the flexibility to partition onboard flash capacity as a boot volume. This ability to move the boot function to the Nytro MegaRAID card eliminates cost associated with dedicating HDDs for OS boot. This is suited for environments that dedicate two mirrored HDDs on each server for booting, such as big data applications, web servers and databases. Having boot volumes reside on flash frees up the additional HDD drive slots for expanding system storage capacity.
• Elastic Cache extends the effective capacity of onboard flash with evolved algorithms that more efficiently distribute ‘hot read’ data for improved flash utilisation and read workload performance. By more efficiently managing hot read data blocks, the effective cache size increases, allowing for higher performance with existing hardware.
• Flexible Flash new configuration support provides the flexibility to utilise a portion of the Nytro MegaRAID onboard flash capacity as a data volume, allowing latency-sensitive I/O to be stored and accessed from performance-optimised flash. Use cases include storing the TempDB in a SQL database in flash, allowing faster access to this global resource for all users, and improving overall database performance.

"We are able to greatly improve datacentre performance with Nytro flash acceleration solutions, and as a result we are seeing strong adoption and LSI has established itself as the fastest-growing supplier worldwide," said Gary Smerdon, SVP and GM, accelerated solutions division, LSI. "Working closely with our customers, we developed these new product additions and enhanced features to drive greater performance in a smaller footprint and to increase the flexibility and use cases Nytro cards offer customers."

Five9 Network Systems designs purpose built engineered systems and server-based appliance platforms, with extended life-cycles to meet the exacting requirements of OEM and ISV customers in key vertical industries.

"The LSI Nytro WarpDrive family provides the performance, capacity points and enterprise endurance Five9 flash servers require to meet the growing demands of customers in government, healthcare, printing, cloud computing, financial services and energy markets," said Souheil Saliba, CEO, Five9 Network Systems. "The new 3.2TB Nytro WarpDrive card provides the ability to design flash servers with ever greater total flash capacity, delivering high and stable performance across a wide range of applications and workloads with over 90 petabyte-writes of endurance. The card’s PCIe 3.0 capability will allow us to target customers in new markets such as video and entertainment where large block sequential performance is critical."

MapR Technologies, Inc. is a supplier to the Open Compute and big data markets with customers including leading Web 2.0, social media and hyperscale computing providers.
 
"LSI hit the sweet spot in the market, and enterprise customers will want to check out these new products," said Bill Bonin, VP business development, MapR. "The high, fast-growing demand for Hadoop and MapR is driven by customers needing speed, capacity and lower costs."

The new Nytro products are available from select LSI OEMs and through worldwide network of distributors, integrators and VARs.