LSI Nytro™ WarpDrive® Flash Acceleration Cards Maximize Density and Performance for VMware Horizon View™

 LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) today announced that it is working closely with VMware to deliver breakthrough virtual desktop density for VMware Horizon View™ deployments. Collaborative testing with VMware Horizon View using a single LSI® Nytro™ WarpDrive® application acceleration card achieved concurrent support for 200 active virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads on a two-node cluster with no storage latency.

“Our testing of the LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards confirms Nytro technology can support demanding VDI workload environments with simplified management and increasing security and control,” said Mason Uyeda, senior director of technical marketing, End-User Computing, VMware. “LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards will help enable our customers to overcome the latency demands of VDI-intensive workloads to deliver high performance and return on investment.”

VDI environments generate I/O-intensive workloads that cannot always be adequately addressed by traditional hard disk drives. Typical VDI workloads generate small, random write-intensive bursts of I/O during peak periods, forcing IT organizations to over-provision expensive storage resources to meet that peak demand. The Nytro WarpDrive card helps to eliminate infrastructure guesswork and improve storage utilization by providing a flash-based solution with both predictable and reduced application response times.

Testing Details

To demonstrate the benefits of deploying the Nytro WarpDrive card in a VDI implementation, LSI and VMware emulated demanding, real-world end user workloads using Login VSI version 4.02 and View Planner 3 to drive 200 active desktops. The LSI Nytro WarpDrive card comfortably supported the 200 active desktop workloads, achieving a VSImax rating of 280 before exhausting CPU resources. The demonstration also showed that at 150 desktops per ESXi node, eight hosts can easily scale to 1,000 concurrent desktops at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional storage area network deployments with similar performance characteristics.

“Working closely with VMware, we’re able to confirm through this real-world application that IT organizations can comfortably deploy 150 desktops per node with 75 to 80 percent concurrency and a VMware Horizon View clone deployment time of under 13 minutes,” said Robin Wagner, senior director of marketing, Datacenter Solutions Group, LSI. “We’re excited to collaborate with VMware to provide native VMware drivers in VMware vSphere® and help bring this breakthrough VDI density and performance to our mutual customers.”

The LSI Nytro WarpDrive card is a part of the comprehensive LSI Nytro product portfolio of application acceleration cards combining PCIe® flash technology with intelligent caching and management software. Nytro WarpDrive cards are designed to deliver high performance, reduced latency and a low CPU burden for the most demanding database applications and I/O-intensive workloads.

More information on the LSI Nytro application acceleration product portfolio is available at www.lsi.com/acceleration.


About LSI

LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters, mobile networks and client computing. Our technology is the intelligence critical to enhanced application performance, and is applied in solutions created in collaboration with our partners. More information is available at www.lsi.com. Connect with LSI via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

LSI, the LSI & Design logo, Storage.Networking.Accelerated., Nytro and WarpDrive are trademarks or registered trademarks of LSI Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

VMware, VMware vSphere and VMware Horizon View are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

All other brand or product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

LSI Syncro™ High Availability Storage Solution Adds Linux Support

LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) today introduced the Syncro™ CS high availability storage solution, now with Linux support. Syncro CS makes high availability storage cost-effective and easy to deploy for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) and remote and branch offices (ROBO).

With added Linux support, Syncro CS now serves an even larger customer base. Syncro CS supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and provides the OS flexibility needed to easily integrate high availability storage into the datacenter.

Traditional high availability solutions are designed for large enterprise IT, private and public cloud, and Web 2.0, but are too complex and costly to deploy for SMBs and ROBO environments where high availability is also critical. Syncro CS brings shared storage and storage controller failover into direct-attached storage (DAS) environments at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional high availability solutions.

“With a substantial Linux user base in SMB and ROBO, LSI is pleased to now offer Syncro CS to meet their storage sharing and failover needs for business-critical data,” said Jas Tremblay, vice president of marketing, Datacenter Solutions Group, LSI. “High availability storage systems will become an important asset for businesses of all sizes as the value of data continues to grow.”

High availability is considered a universal business need regardless of business size or industry. When business-critical data is not accessible, the results can be lost revenue, lost productivity and reduced customer satisfaction. LSI® Syncro CS is designed to reduce downtime for critical applications, making failover latency transparent to the application or user. Syncro CS with Linux brings the robust data protection, high performance, low cost and low complexity found in DAS solutions and adds the additional benefits of shared storage and high availability.

“Linux has penetrated into all areas of IT infrastructures, and it has a growing share of datacenters, making this announcement on Syncro CS compelling,” said Doug Williams, senior director, Strategic Initiatives, Office of the CTO, Red Hat. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux has demonstrated industry-leading quality, stability and reliability, and the availability of Syncro CS running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux brings high availability for DAS environments to the datacenter in a new way, giving customers access to a promising technology that can significantly reduce the cost of many different architectures and workloads. Additionally, LSI Syncro combined with the software-defined storage and volume economics of Red Hat Storage creates valuable new use cases, especially around long-term storage repositories.”

Built on LSI MegaRAID® technology, Syncro CS solutions use two controller cards to allow system administrators to build a high availability, shared DAS solution. Syncro CS supports two deployment models:

·         Syncro CS 9286-8e: Provides shared storage clustering using two volume servers and an off-the-shelf JBOD. This affordable high availability solution brings shared storage and controller failover to DAS environments.

·         Syncro CS 9271-8i: Enables OEMs and system builders to use Syncro CS controllers to build cost-effective two-node Cluster-in-a-Box systems and deliver high availability in a single self-contained unit.


A Syncro CS demonstration this week highlights transparent failover at LinuxCon in New Orleans, in LSI booth #29. In addition, Gerry Smith, vice president of architecture, LSI, will present a session today at 10:35 a.m. titled “Shouldn’t all your storage be highly available?”

Red Hat discusses the Syncro CS solution for Linux in this video.

Syncro CS is currently shipping to the LSI worldwide distribution network and OEM customers. Visit www.TheSmarterWayToOn.com for more information.


About LSI

LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters, mobile networks and client computing. Our technology is the intelligence critical to enhanced application performance, and is applied in solutions created in collaboration with our partners. More information is available at www.lsi.com

LSI Demonstrates 12Gb/s SAS MegaRAID® Performance at Intel Developer Forum 2013

LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) today announced it is demonstrating 12Gb/s SAS performance at this year’s Intel Developer Forum. Using an LSI® 12Gb/s MegaRAID® controller, an Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v2 processor-based server and eight HGST 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, the 12Gb/s system delivers a throughput increase of over 50 percent compared to a 6Gb/s SAS system.

“As storage needs grow, 12Gb/s SAS provides the performance gains necessary to help end customers optimize bandwidth-intensive applications including those for cloud and big data,” said Kelly Bryant, vice president of marketing, RAID Storage Division, LSI. “Working closely with the storage ecosystem including Intel and HGST, LSI is committed to providing customers with 12Gb/s SAS solutions with leading performance and interoperability.”

The demonstration is featured at the LSI booth #614. LSI technology will also be on display at other locations during IDF including:

·         Supermicro showcasing 12Gb/s system performance with 6Gb/s drives using an LSI 12Gb/s SAS MegaRAID adapter and LSI SAS 3x48 12Gb/s SAS expander with DataBolt™ bandwidth optimization feature at booth #500.

·         Xyratex revealing its first-to-market modular storage enclosures using LSI SAS 3008 12Gb/s SAS I/O controller at booth #833.

·         SCSI Trade Association (STA) showing 12Gb/s SAS interoperability using an LSI SAS 9300-8e 12Gb/s SAS HBA demonstration at booth #617.

·         LSI will also be demonstrating its NVM Express solution for next-generation LSI SandForce® flash controllers in booth #731 in the NVMe Community.


Designed to enable a new class of high-performance solutions that spans the enterprise, 12Gb/s SAS maximizes storage performance for I/O-intensive applications, web cloud datacenters and virtualized server environments. With a history of SAS leadership, LSI delivered the industry’s first 12Gb/s SAS host bus adapters earlier this year.

More information on the complete LSI SAS portfolio is available at www.lsi.com/sas.

About LSI
LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters, mobile networks and client computing. Our technology is the intelligence critical to enhanced application performance, and is applied in solutions created in collaboration with our partners. More information is available at www.lsi.com. Connect with LSI via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

LSI, the LSI & Design logo, Storage.Networking.Accelerated., MegaRAID, DataBolt and SandForce are trademarks or registered trademarks of LSI Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

LSI Delivers Axxia® 5500 Communication Processor for Faster, More Power-Efficient Networks

LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) today announced it has started delivering the Axxia® 5500 communication processor family to key OEM customers. The Axxia 5500 with 16 ARM cores is designed to meet the performance, integration, cost and power demands of mobile and fixed networks.

“The delivery of Axxia 5500 means that our customers are now building Axxia processor performance and efficiency into systems that will represent over half of the mobile base station market,” said Jim Anderson, senior vice president and general manager, Networking Solutions Group, LSI. “The versatile Axxia processor family is also being applied in many other applications, such as datacenters and enterprise networking, and we are excited to be shipping this powerful new processor.”

The Axxia 5500 family of communication processors offers a number of benefits to datacenter operators, enterprise network managers and network service providers, including:

·         Outstanding performance efficiency through a flexible combination of general-purpose processors and specialized acceleration engines

·         High-capacity Ethernet switching to drive significant reductions in power, board space and bill of material cost

·         Increased network performance through a unique combination of power-efficient ARM Cortex™-A15 processors and CoreLink™ CCN-504 Cache Coherent Network interconnect

·         Flexible connectivity provided through the 16 10GbE interfaces, which allows the AXM5500 product to support a variety of network configurations with a single SoC

·         Comprehensive tool suite and production-quality protocol processing software modules for wireless infrastructure applications



“With AXM5500 in hand, our customers are developing next-generation networking systems with the performance, intelligence and scalability to keep pace with the unprecedented growth in network traffic,” said Gene Scuteri, vice president of engineering, Networking Solutions Group, LSI. “The Axxia 5500 multicore family, with its unmatched, highly integrated design and broad features, is an ideal platform on which to build high-performance systems.”


About LSI

LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters, mobile networks and client computing. Our technology is the intelligence critical to enhanced application performance, and is applied in solutions created in collaboration with our partners. More information is available at www.lsi.com

LSI Demonstrates New SandForce® Flash Controller Technologies Critical to Improving Flash Reliability, Endurance and Cost

LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) is demonstrating its latest LSI® SandForce® flash controller technology innovations at the Flash Memory Summit, taking place this week at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Greg Huff, LSI senior vice president and chief technology officer, will deliver a keynote presentation, and additional LSI flash experts will present and participate in forum sessions to provide their insight and perspective into the latest flash memory-based technologies and trends and how they are changing the IT landscape.

LSI demonstrations include LSI SHIELD™ technology, an advanced error-correction method designed to deliver enterprise-class SSD endurance and data integrity, even while using less expensive flash memory that typically has higher error rates. SHIELD technology is a unique implementation of low-density parity-check (LDPC) code and digital signal processing (DSP) that will be available in next-generation SandForce flash controllers. The technology combines hard-decision, soft-decision and DSP to provide a comprehensive error correction code (ECC) solution that is optimized for flash memory.

LSI SHIELD technology offers advantages over existing LDPC implementations by uniquely combining several features:
§  Adaptive code rate: dynamically balances performance and reliability over the life of the SSD

§  Smart handling of transient noise: reduces overall LDPC latency for improved ECC efficiency

§  Multi-level ECC schema: judiciously applies stronger levels of ECC to minimize latency while maintaining optimal flash performance

 
“While the value proposition of NAND flash memory grows and is driving the adoption of flash-based storage solutions, the tradeoff is that today’s smaller fabrication geometries come with lower reliability and a shorter lifespan,” said Huibert Verhoeven, vice president and general manager, Flash Components Division, LSI Corporation. “LSI SHIELD technology helps solve these challenges with advanced error correction that is optimized for SSDs and transforms the latest NAND flash memory into a more robust storage solution.”

LSI Demonstrations
§  SHIELD technology: the demo will showcase the error-correction advantages of SHIELD technology versus existing LDPC and Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) code methods through a comparison of the three technologies based on various raw bit-error rates (RBER) from the flash.


§  DuraWrite™ Virtual Capacity (DVC): a unique SandForce flash controller feature that extends the available storage capacity for typical data beyond the physical capacity of the underlying flash memory. By increasing storage capacity for the same physical flash memory, DVC helps to reduce the cost per gigabyte of delivered capacity to the user. With typical database applications, LSI internal testing has shown that DVC can be used to more than triple the capacity for storing user data. The DVC feature will be demonstrated showing various applications of the technology.



§  Toshiba advanced 19nm flash: LSI SandForce SF-2000 flash controllers now support Toshiba’s second generation advanced 19 nanometer (nm) NAND flash memory (A19nm), enabling SSD manufacturers to produce more affordable SSD products. The demo will showcase an SSD with Toshiba A19nm flash technology set up as a secondary drive to show typical file-transfer operations.



Supporting Quotes
§  "Kingston is very excited to offer the new LSI SandForce DuraWrite Virtual Capacity technology to our key customers with known, lower-entropy workloads," said Ariel Perez, SSD business manager, Kingston. "By working closely with the storage engineers at these accounts, we are able to identify specific implementations where we can dramatically decrease the customer's cost per GB of usable capacity. DVC will enable more of our enterprise customers to make the switch from traditional hard disk drives to flash memory-based SSDs to take advantage of the many performance benefits."



§  “We have worked closely with LSI to enable this first public demonstration of Toshiba second generation advanced 19nm (A19nm) NAND in a solid state drive,” said Scott Nelson, senior vice president of the memory business unit of TAEC (Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc.). “The LSI SandForce flash controller design provides the flexibility to integrate our A19nm NAND flash technology which is sure to play a prominent role in the solid-state storage market.”




LSI Presentations
§  Thursday, August 15, 11:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. (Keynote 9): Greg Huff, SVP and CTO, will present “Generation Flash: Challenges and Solutions.”


§  Tuesday, August 13, 8:30-11:20 a.m. (Forum D-11): Kent Smith, senior director of marketing, will present “Don’t Let Your Favorite Benchmarks Lie to You” in the Flash in Datacenters session.



§  Tuesday, August 13, 3:15-5:25 p.m. (Forum B-12): Earl Cohen, chief architect, will present “The Nibbles and Bits of SSD Data Integrity” in the Flash-Memory Based Architectures technical session.



§  Tuesday, August 13, 7:00-8:30 p.m. (Chat with the Experts): LSI flash experts will participate in table sessions on controllers, PCIe flash and flash markets, to discuss frequently asked questions, best practices, and key products and standards.


IT Brand Pulse, an independent market research and validation lab, will present LSI with an “Innovation Leader” award for SSD Controller Chips at Flash Memory Summit on Wednesday, August 14, at 1:00 p.m. in Exhibitor Hall A-B; #108. In a recent survey conducted by IT Brand Pulse, LSI SandForce flash controllers were selected by IT professionals as the 2013 Market, Price, Performance, Reliability, Service and Support, and Innovation leader for SSD Controller Chips.



LSI is located in booth #402. For more information on LSI SandForce flash controllers, visit www.lsi.com/sandforce.



About LSI

LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters, mobile networks and client computing. Our technology is the intelligence critical to enhanced application performance, and is applied in solutions created in collaboration with our partners. More information is available at www.lsi.com. Connect with LSI via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.