LSI and NetApp Announce Collaboration on Server-Based Flash Acceleration

LSI announced that its Nytro WarpDrive cards have been validated for use with NetApp Flash Accel software, making them amongst the first PCIe flash devices to have been qualified for Flash Accel use. Together with NetApp Flash Accel software, LSI’s Nytro WarpDrive family of cards speed application performance by converting server-based flash into data cache critical for enterprise applications. That "hot" data is the most frequently accessed data which is then transported to the PCIe flash for its low latency and performance ability. Utilizing the cache yields significant results; throughput increases up to 80% while application and server latency decreases up to 90%.

LSI announced that its Nytro WarpDrive cards have been validated for use with NetApp Flash Accel software, making them amongst the first PCIe flash devices to have been qualified for Flash Accel use. Together with NetApp Flash Accel software, LSI’s Nytro WarpDrive family of cards speed application performance by converting server-based flash into data cache critical for enterprise applications. That "hot" data is the most frequently accessed data which is then transported to the PCIe flash for its low latency and performance ability. Utilizing the cache yields significant results; throughput increases up to 80% while application and server latency decreases up to 90%.

Economic gain for the enterprise will also drive adoption. Provided the improved capacity to mix flash and HDD storage, the enterprise can decrease the per gigabyte and per IOPS cost of their storage. There are several other cost benefits such as data center footprint reduction, energy savings gained by significantly reducing the number of necessary HDDs, and minimized IOPS between servers and back-end storage systems frees up resources to handle additional workloads.

The timing of this announcement is somewhat intriguing. EMC and LSI appear to have split ways on their cache collaboration, now LSI has joined up with NetApp on this partnership. This announcement is certainly not a response to EMC’s yesterday, qualification of this nature takes months, but there are some obvious synergies if LSI can only partner with NetApp or EMC. Cisco is NetApp’s main compute server partner and LSI already makes a special Nytro mezz card for Cisco’s UCS blade servers. NetApp certification of Nytro WarpDrive for their caching solution neatly ties all three together as NetApp expands their server-side caching options. 

Availability

LSI’s Nytro WarpDrive PCIe application accelerators are currently available from the channel ranging in capacity from 200GB to 1.6TB capacities and available with MLC or SLC NAND.

NetApp Flash Accel Page

NetApp Flash Storage

Discuss This Story