[section label=1. LSI Announces Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i]
According to a recent press release, LSI Corporation has recently announced the introduction of the Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i PCIe flash card, further extending the Nytro product line. The new card is primarily designed for scale-out server storage environments and hyperscale cloud/hosting companies with capability of supporting up to 236 SAS/SATA devices via 8 internal and 8 external ports (as indicated by the ‘8e8i’ in the product name). As the Nytro name implies, LSI has also included a whopping 1.6TB of onboard eMLC NAND flash with their Flexible Flash technology to handle even the most demanding of storage needs.
With the new Nytro MegaRAID 8140, one of LSI’s major features is the Nytro Flexible Flash which allows users the option to use the onboard flash as an intelligent cache, primary storage, data protection, and/or as an OS boot drive (Nytro Boot). This gives users the flexibility for example of using a portion of the flash as a boot drive while still retaining the ability to use another portion of the flash as an intelligent cache – a feature that’s been a staple of Nytro cards since its introduction. LSI is also integrating Advanced Cache Statistics into their intelligent caching solution which provides advanced diagnostics to ensure optimal caching is applied for any application or workload.
LSI claims that the LSI Nytro MegaRAID 8140 has been in extensive testing with two partners thus far – Bluehost and Rausch Netzwerktechnik, and both companies have fully integrated the PCIe solution to their current infrastructure.
“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 hard disk drive storage by deploying a relatively small capacity of intelligent flash,” said Cody Burdick, computer operations manager at 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 Nölting, CEO, Rausch Netzwerktechnik. “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 return on investment, powered by Nytro MegaRAID flash accelerators, Rausch continues to differentiate its solutions within the hosting market.”
Since 2012, LSI has shipped more than 100,000 Nytro series RAID cards, effectively maintaining the company as the second largest supplier of PCIe based flash storage. The LSI Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i is expected to debut at a MSRP of $9,995, and LSI hopes to have it out before Q2 2014.
[section label=2. Press Release]
Press Release
LSI Corporation today announced it has extended the Nytro™ product 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.
LSI® Nytro MegaRAID cards are part of the comprehensive 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 worldwide. 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, senior vice president and general manager, 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 uniquely 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 Nytro MegaRAID 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 internals 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 has never been more 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 unique ability to move the boot function to the Nytro MegaRAID card eliminates cost associated with dedicating hard disk drives (HDDs) for operating system 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 advanced diagnostics designed to ensure production environments achieve optimal 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 properly measure the effectiveness of caching in their unique environment.
Supporting Quotes
• “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 hard disk drive storage by deploying a relatively small capacity of intelligent flash,” said Cody Burdick, computer operations manager at 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 Nölting, CEO, Rausch Netzwerktechnik. “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 return on investment, powered by Nytro MegaRAID flash accelerators, Rausch continues to differentiate its solutions within the hosting market.”
Production shipments of the LSI Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i card are expected in the second calendar quarter of 2014. LSI flash storage solutions are available from select LSI original equipment manufacturers and through the LSI worldwide network of distributors, integrators and VARs.
More information on LSI flash storage solutions is available at LSI’s website here.
