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LSI Corporation is a leading provider of innovative silicon,
systems and software technologies that enable products which seamlessly bring
people, information and digital content together. The company offers a broad
portfolio of capabilities and services including custom and standard product
ICs, adapters, systems and software that are trusted by the world's best known
brands to power leading solutions in the Storage, Networking and Mobility
markets. More information is available at www.lsi.com.
See also:-
LSI
- editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com and
LSI's
SSD page
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In March 2009 -
LSI announced better
support for flash SSDs
in the latest update to its
MegaRAID
SAS adapters. LSI calls this new feature SSD Guard - which can anticipate
some types of flash SSD failures in
RAID 0 configurations
and starts rebuilding data on a spare unit.
In December 2009 - LSI announced it is
sampling
the LSISAS2208 dual-core 6Gb/s
SAS
RAID-on-Chip
IC to OEM customers. It's
intended to support the forthcoming PCIe 3.0 specification, currently under
development and provide performance levels that meet the needs of
next-generation server platforms based on
flash SSD storage.
The new LSI SAS ROC will deliver performance levels of up to 600,000 IOPS.
In January 2010 -
LSI and
Seagate
announced
they have collaborated on designing
PCIe SSDs for the
enterprise accelerator market - which started sampling in March 2010.
At that time - LSI was approximately the 163rd
company to enter the
SSD market (not counting
SSD SoC makers - which
would push the score to about 185).
in November, 2010 -
Demartek
published a sponsored
test
report (pdf) which compares the performance of
SSDs and
HDDs in a simulated
web server environment when managed by LSI's
CacheCade
software - which provides
SSD ASAP
functionality.
Editor's commnents:- The report shows that
throughput and access times were improved by at least 3x using a single
SSD cache compared to the HDD only situation.
However - it's
disappointing that the sizing of the test was not best chosen to draw
meaningful conclusions. Because the web content was only 25% larger than
the SSD capacity! It would have been more helpful to design a simulated case in
which there was at least a 10x or 100x size difference. Because if you
can fit all the web content onto an SSD then you don't need the burden of the
"cache" software at all - and might get better results by switching it
off.
There are case studies going back nearly 10 years which show that
SSDs can provide big speedups in web servers. The exact speedup depends on how
fast the SSD is. This test report doesn't answer the question - is LSI's
CacheCade useful in a realistically scaled environment?
In March
2011 - LSI finally spun off the
Engenio systems
business - selling it for $480 million to
Network Appliance.
In June 2011 -
LSI was one of
several compatible companies named in
FlashSoft's launch of
its auto tiering SSD
software.
In October 2011 -
LSI
announced
a definitive agreement to acquire
SandForce for
approximately $322 million. The transaction is expected to close early in the
first quarter of 2012. SandForce president and CEO, Michael Raam will
become General Manager of LSI's newly formed Flash Components Division.
In
January 2012 - LSI
announced
it has completed the acquisition of
SandForce. And LSI
also announced
that its PCIe SSD product - the
WarpDrive
- will be oemed by EMC.
In April 2012 - LSI
announced
details of its new
Nytro
family of SSD technologies - which integrate and join up several previously
standalone elements in its product line in a new unified marketing roadmap. |
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| How big was the
thinking in this SSD's design? |
Does size really does matter in SSD
design?
By that I mean how big was the mental map? - not how many
inches wide is the SSD.
The novel and the short story both have their
place in literature and the pages look exactly the same. But you know from
experience which works best in different situations and why.
When
it comes to SSDs - Big versus Small SSD architecture - is something which was
in the designer's mind. Even if they didn't think about it that way at the time.
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For designers, integrators,
end users and investors alike - understanding what follows from these simple
choices predicts a lot of important consequences. ...read the article | | | |
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| LSI
announces a new technology roadmap for SSD accelerator components |
Editor:- April 2, 2012 - LSI today
announced
details of its new
Nytro
family of SSD technologies - which integrate and join up several previously
standalone elements in its product line in a new unified marketing direction.
In
particular LSI is saying that its legacy MegaRAID controllers and software stack
can be used as reliable proven launch pads for its
SSD ASAP /
acceleration software - which is being integrated in new upcoming generations of
PCIe SSD cards (now called Nytro WarpDrives) which use
LSI/SandForce controllers.
Editor's
comments:- in a 2009
storage market forecast I said - "the high end of the
RAID controller market
is going to disappear" - and I explained why companies in that market -
like LSI had to migrate to PCIe SSDs and SSD systems array technology such as
SSD ASAPs to satisfy the emerging needs of their oem customers - which in
previous decades had been met by RAID adapters and controller chips.
What
LSI has done in the past few years is acquire or develop individual pieces of
the technology puzzle - and selling their storage systems business
Engenio 12 months ago
so that they didn't compete with their storage oem customers - was just as
important as acquiring SandForce.
I
spoke to LSI about the new Nytro technology last week. From the sales point of
view they see this as offering affordable SSD acceleration for the masses. So
you're going to see low price point fast-enough SSD ASAPs - rather than the
fastest.
Other common features in the product line are that the
products are bootable, work with legacy
SAS software and
have minimal load on the server CPU.
LSI will also work to get better
integration between the functionality of its SSD controllers and the host cards
and caching software. That should lead to better latency and reliability in the
future.
difference between LSI and FIO?
What's the single
biggest difference you may ask - between LSI and some of the other companies in
this part of the PCIe SSD ASAP market? And in particular a company like
Fusion-io?
The
technical ingredients above are very different - and I could summarize that by
saying LSI is at heart an SSD hardware company with most of its IP in chips
- whereas FIO is at heart an SSD software company which uses chips as
deliverables - but nearly all FIO's IP is in software. That's one way of
looking at it - but the clearest difference I see between LSI and FIO is where
they are in the philosophy of their thinking re the SSD market adoption
model.
All the Nytro marketing orientation materials I saw
still talked a lot about how SSDs would fit into an HDD world. When I questioned
that - I got the impression that LSI's corporate marketing hasn't gone much
beyond that stage. LSI is still at the "SSDs help HDDs point" whereas
FIO and many other SSD makers - and this publication - and many of you too are
beyond that and know that the
future
of all enterprise storage is solid state. The tricky part is navigating
safely from here to there.
Finally - Nytro sounds like a good name for
an SSD brand - but it's not entirely original. |
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| SandForce
joins LSI's new Flash Components Division |
Editor:- January 4, 2012 - LSI today
announced
it has completed the acquisition of SandForce.
"Customer
response to the announcement has been very positive and we are pleased to now be
able to fully demonstrate the benefits of the combined technology capabilities
of LSI and SandForce," said Jeff Richardson,
executive VP and COO. "Together, we offer the broadest storage technology
portfolio in the industry, and are well positioned to help customers manage
their growth and the explosive growth in data across enterprises and the cloud."
Editor's
comments:- most of the leading companies in the earth shaking
PCIe SSD market use
large
architecture controllers or software - which provides cost and efficiency
advantages when you compare
usable
capacities with maximun fault protection enabled.
That puts
competitors who use small SSD architecture (such as
OCZ and
LSI - who use
SandForce's controller
- and STEC which has yet
to establish a stronghold in this market with its own ASIC) at a potential
disadvantage as capacities scale up.
One of the design challenges for
LSI will be to see if they can extract the proven flash management features in
past SandForce controllers and scale them up to support bigger capacities and
faster throughput without adding latency penalties (which currently accrue with
arrays of SFPs) or which uses a new processor core or split controller
architecture to better support larger flash chip populations.
Make no
mistake about it. This acquisition is about developing better tools for the
enterprise SSD goldrush. |
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And the truest seams that vendors are
looking for are the user server caverns that will be stuffed with
PCIe SSDs. Billions
of dollars of revenue will be the prizes for the lucky strikers. | | | |
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| SSD sudden power
loss vulnerability guide |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
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