LSI Nytro™ MegaRAID® card doubles Flash capacity and extends connectivity

LSI Corporation 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 datacentres, financial services and other enterprises to accelerate application performance, increase datacentre 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 datacentre workloads,” said Tom Swinford, senior vice president and general manager, Datacentre 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 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 maximise 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.