LSI Nytro MegaRAID PCIe Card With 1.6TB eMLC Capacity

LSI Corporation has extended the Nytro portfolio with the introduction of the Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i card.

Designed for scale-out server and storage environments with high disk counts and capacity requirements, it provides 1.6TB of onboard flash and 16 SAS/SATA connections. This is double the flash capacity and a 4x increase in the number of ports compared to existing Nytro MegaRAID cards.

Nytro MegaRAID cards are part of the Nytro product portfolio of PCIe flash accelerator cards. Since introducing the Nytro portfolio in April 2012, the company has shipped more than 100,000 Nytro cards. The demand reflects the needs of hyperscale Web and cloud datacenters, financial services and other enterprises to accelerate application performance, increase datacenter efficiency and lower IT costs.

“We’re excited to surpass the 100,000 shipment milestone as it underscores the rapid customer acceptance of the LSI Nytro portfolio and its ability to uniquely address customer challenges across a wide range of datacenter workloads,” said Tom Swinford, SVP and GM, datacenter solutions group, LSI. “The Nytro MegaRAID 8140 card provides cloud and hosting companies with a single, integrated solution to simply and cost-effectively scale caching and connectivity to support their customers’ growing performance and storage requirements.”

Nytro MegaRAID cards integrate PCIe flash and intelligent caching software with LSI dual-core RAID-on-Chip technology to enable simple, transparent application acceleration and RAID data protection for DAS environments. The 8140-8e8i card integrates an expander into the architecture to provide scale-out server environments with connectivity for up to 236 SAS and SATA devices through 8 external and 8 internal ports. The card’s 1.6TB of onboard flash for intelligent data caching allow server solutions, particularly hyperscale environments such as cloud computing, Web hosting and big data analytics, to maximize application performance where data traffic is heavy.

In addition to using the onboard flash modules to cache frequently accessed data, the Nytro flexible flash feature allows users to partition the flash as primary storage for data volumes, allowing latency-sensitive I/O to be stored and accessed from performance-optimized flash. The feature also provides the flexibility to partition the onboard flash for data protection by applying RAID to a defined capacity. Designed with four flash modules, the RAID protection is flexible with the ability to support RAID levels 0, 1 and 5.

The Nytro flexible flash feature also allows users to partition the onboard flash as a boot drive. This ability to move the boot function to the Nytro MegaRAID card eliminates cost associated with dedicating HDD drives for OS boot. Having boot volumes reside on flash also frees up the additional HDD slots for expanding system storage capacity.

A new Advanced Cache Statistics feature exposes critical performance data and enhances the user experience by providing diagnostics designed to ensure production environments achieve caching benefits based on their applications and workloads. Caching statistics such as the number of I/Os completed from cache and the amount of hot data written to cache are provided, as well as host statistics such as the total I/O count, for both reads and writes, sent by the host. The reporting enables the user to measure the effectiveness of caching in their environment.

“By allowing Bluehost to provide unparalleled accessibility and uptime for our ever-increasing customer base, Nytro MegaRAID delivers accelerated performance without requiring us to change existing scale-out HDD drive storage by deploying a relatively small capacity of intelligent flash,” said Cody Burdick, computer operations manager, Bluehost. “Bluehost is proud to extend our relationship with LSI by adopting innovative solutions like Nytro MegaRAID that offer a highly efficient cost per performance metric.”

“As a key solution provider to the hosting market segment, Rausch is constantly seeking innovative technologies that will provide additional value to our customers and enable them to deliver more capabilities with every piece of hardware purchased,” said Sebastian Nolting, CEO, Rausch Netzwerktechnik GmbH. “The LSI Nytro MegaRAID product family delivers simple, cost-effective application performance acceleration for hosting companies, allowing them to support more customers on each server without compromising performance, uptime or SLA commitments. By delivering a product with a tangible ROI, powered by Nytro MegaRAID flash accelerators, Rausch continues to differentiate its solutions within the hosting market.”

LSI was demonstrating the Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i card in its booth at World Hosting Days taking place at Europa-Park in Rust, Germany. The product was also be showcased by Rausch in a solution demo powered by two Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i cards.

Production shipments of the Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i card are expected in the second calendar quarter of 2014. LSI flash storage solutions are available from select OEMs and through worldwide network of distributors, integrators and VARs.