LSI announced an expansion of their OEM relationship with Intel that will make LSI’s Nytro MegaRAID PCIe flash adapter technology built on LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processors available as part of Intel’s RAID product line. This news is being announced on the heels of flash technology picking up pace at an increasingly fast rate in the enterprise server market. This paradigm shift relates to customers’ desire to retain their existing HDD and DAS infrastructure and thus investment while still creating and operating within an integrated single architecture. Flash based solutions enable “hot” data caching to increase overall system performance.
LSI announced an expansion of their OEM relationship with Intel that will make LSI’s Nytro MegaRAID PCIe flash adapter technology built on LSI SandForce Flash Storage Processors available as part of Intel’s RAID product line. This news is being announced on the heels of flash technology picking up pace at an increasingly fast rate in the enterprise server market. This paradigm shift relates to customers’ desire to retain their existing HDD and DAS infrastructure and thus investment while still creating and operating within an integrated single architecture. Flash based solutions enable “hot” data caching to increase overall system performance.
Intel RAID Specifications
- RAID Card with 256GB SSD Cache2: RCS25ZB040
- RAID Card with 1TB SSD Cache2: RCS25ZB040LX
- RAID Levels 0, 1, 5, 10, 50, 60
- Data Protection and Feature Highlights
- Online Capacity Expansion
- Hot-Spare Support – Global & Dedicated
- Single Controller Multipathing (Failover)
- Enclosure Management
- Background Consistency Checking
- Patrol Read for Media Functionality
- S.M.A.R.T. Support
- Intel RAID Software
- Intel RAID Web Console 2
- Intel RAID Command Line Tool
- Intel RAID Flash Utilities
- I/O Processor: LSI SAS2208 ROC running at 800 MHz
- SAS 6Gb/s or SATA 6Gb/s, SAS 3Gb/s or SATA 3Gb/s
- Up to 128 physical devices supported
- One SAS SFF8087 x4 SAS internal connectors
- Cache Memory Embedded 1GB at 800MHz
- PCI Interface x8 PCI Express 2.0
- Optional Intel RAID Maintenance Free Backup Unit AXXRMFBU3
- Form Factor: Low profile, MD2 (6.6” X 2.536”)
- Operating Temperature: Maximum ambient: 65°C (55°C with optional MFBU)
- Operating Voltage +3.3 V
- OS Support includes Microsoft Windows Vista/2008/Server 2003/2000/XP, Linux, Solaris(x86), Netware, FreeBSD, VMware and more.
LSI’s Nytro MegaRAID has intelligent caching software that integrates server-side PCIe flash with LSI’s dual-core RAID-on-Chip (ROC). This configuration provides RAID protection for DAS setups and also allows for easy application acceleration.
LSI Nytro MegaRAID technology converts server-based flash into “hot” data cache. “Hot” data cache is data that is frequently accessed. Processing this way enables the high-performance flash-based system to work on critically important business applications while less data-intensive operations can be handled by users’ existing architecture. Overall performance increases and latency decreases. LSI and Intel recommend users of big data applications, Hadoop implementations, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to utilize this technology to achieve high random IOPS. According to LSI, compared to non-caching storage, LSI’s MegaRAID completed Hadoop jobs up to 33% faster while supporting twice the VDI sessions.
The LSI Nytro MegaRAID technology will be available on Intel RAID SSD Cache Controllers. The RCS25ZB040 will have 256GB of embedded flash while the RCS25ZB040LX will include 1TB.
