Date: 29/11/2010

New PCIe card from LSI with performance up to 240,000 sustained IOPS

LSI Corporation has released the LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 acceleration card, a PCI Express (PCIe) card rated to offer a performance up to 240,000 sustained IOPS and 300GB of SLC solid-state storage capacity within a low profile form factor. To achieve equal performance on a write IOPS basis utilizing hard disk drives would require over 400 drives, 36U of rack space and consume more than 300 times the power, claims LSI. LSI says WarpDrive card delivers the I/O performance of hundreds of hard disk drives while consuming less than 25 watts of power.

"The LSI WarpDrive card sets a new standard for data center efficiency by providing IT administrators with previously unattainable levels of performance while helping to reduce operational and capital expenditures," said Brent Blanchard, director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI. "The WarpDrive card complements the LSI CacheCade and FastPath solid-state storage acceleration solutions, providing our channel partners with a one-stop shop to address the performance, deployment and integration requirements that high-performance applications and dense computing demand."

The low-profile, half-length WarpDrive card plugs into a standard 8 lane PCIe Gen 2.0 server slot and can sustain up to 1,400MB/s of throughput.

"The LSI PCIe-based WarpDrive card offers simple, effective, and affordable application acceleration for enterprise servers," said Bob Farkaly, director of marketing, Storage System products for Exar. "Utilizing two WarpDrive cards combined with Exar's BitWackr solution, we measured an aggregate performance of 1,028 MB/second, which is almost twice the speed we were able to achieve with other PCIe-based flash products."

"Schooner's MySQL and NoSQL solutions combined with the LSI WarpDrive card provide industry-leading performance for database and key-value stores, delivering over 9x performance throughput increase relative to hard drive configurations and over 3x performance throughput increase relative to alternative PCIe flash-based solutions," said Dr. John Busch, founder and CTO, Schooner Information Technologies. "Beyond raw IOPS and latency performance, we are very impressed with the LSI WarpDrive card's performance stability, observing negligible performance variance over time. Also, the LSI WarpDrive card's very low overhead consumption of server processor and DRAM memory resources enables even higher performance by leaving these resources available for useful application processing and data caching."

The WarpDrive card features the LSISAS2008 6Gb/s SAS I/O controller and is based on the enterprise-proven LSI Fusion-MPT architecture. The WarpDrive card is bootable, has no external power requirement and installs as a single drive with no user configuration required.

Price: LSI WarpDrive SLP-300: US$11,500