LSI has announced an addition to its Nytro line with the introduction of the Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i card, which is designed for scale-out server and storage environments with high disk counts and capacity requirements. The 8140-8e8i card provides 1.6TB of onboard flash and 16 SAS/SATA connections doubling the flash capacity as well as a 4x increase in the number of ports compared to previous Nytro MegaRAID cards.
LSI has announced an addition to its Nytro line with the introduction of the Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i card, which is designed for scale-out server and storage environments with high disk counts and capacity requirements. The 8140-8e8i card provides 1.6TB of onboard flash and 16 SAS/SATA connections doubling the flash capacity as well as a 4x increase in the number of ports compared to previous Nytro MegaRAID cards.
Nytro MegaRAID cards have a unique process of integrating PCIe flash and intelligent caching software with LSI dual-core RAID-on-Chip technology, allowing for a simple, transparent application acceleration and RAID data protection for DAS environments. The 8140-8e8i card integrates an expander into the architecture as the controller only supports 8 devices natively, providing scale-out server environments with connectivity for up to 236 SAS and SATA devices using 8 external and 8 internals ports. Additionally, its 1.6TB of onboard flash for intelligent data caching allows server solutions to take full advantage of application performance where data traffic is heavy.
The Nytro Flexible Flash feature also gives users the ability to partition the flash as primary storage for data volumes, which allows latency-sensitive I/O to be stored and accessed from performance-optimized flash. This feature provides the flexibility to partition the onboard flash for data protection by applying RAID to a defined capacity. The RAID protection is designed with four flash modules and supports RAID levels 0, 1 and 5.
In addition, the Nytro Flexible Flash feature also allows users to partition the onboard flash as a boot drive, which eliminates cost associated with dedicating hard disk drives for operating system boot. Having boot volumes reside on flash also frees up the additional HDD slots for expanding system storage capacity.
The new Advanced Cache Statistics feature uncovers critical performance data and enhances the user experience by providing advanced diagnostics to make sure that production environments achieve optimal caching benefits based on their applications and workloads. Caching statistics are provided, which includes the number of I/Os completed from cache and the amount of hot data written to cache as well as host statistics such as the total I/O sent by the host count for both reads and writes. This reporting allows the user to properly measure the effectiveness of caching in their specific environment.
Availability
Production shipments of the LSI Nytro MegaRAID 8140-8e8i card are slated for a Q2 2014 release.
More information on LSI flash storage solutions, visit the official product page.
