LSI LSISSS6200 PCIe Solid-State Storage Hits 1M IOPS

LSI PCIe Solid-State Storage Solution Achieves 1 Million I/Os per Second in High-Density, Low-Power Performance Demonstration

Demo showcases improved price-to-performance ratio, lower power consumption and reduced footprint compared to traditional storage solutions

LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) today announced it has achieved 1 million random read input/output operations per second (IOPS) using a 4K block size in a PCI Express (PCIe)-based solid-state storage (SSS) performance demonstration running in a single server. The demo showcases the improved price-to-performance ratio, lower power consumption and increased storage density offered by new LSI PCIe SSS cards compared to storage solutions utilizing hard disk drives (HDDs).

Offering high performance with low latency and a low CPU burden, the small form factor LSISSS6200 PCIe SSS cards are designed to maximize transactional I/O performance for applications such as Web serving, data warehousing, data mining, online transaction processing and high-performance computing. The cards utilize industry-standard and widely deployed LSI SAS software for easy system integration and management and a faster time to market.

"The demonstration of 1 million random IOPS with a low-profile, low-power PCIe-based solution is a significant performance milestone for solid-state storage technologies," said Jeff Janukowicz, research manager, Hard Disk Drive Components and Solid State Drives at IDC. "Achieving this level of performance in a single server will enable new and compelling system and application acceleration usage models for end users in environments where performance is the top priority."

One million IOPS was achieved using six LSISSS6200 PCIe SSS cards in a single white box server running two Intel Xeon 5590 processors. Each LSI small form factor card plugs into a single PCIe 2.0 slot with no additional power required. To achieve equal performance on an IOPS basis utilizing HDDs would require 2,500 drives, three racks of storage and consume nearly 320 times the power. In addition to significantly lower ongoing operational expenses, the reduced infrastructure requirements of the PCIe SSS-based example can translate to a 10X acquisition cost savings compared to the HDD-based example. SSS and HDD solutions are complementary, with each applicable to specific use cases.

"Card-based solid-state storage solutions enable very high performance for system and application acceleration," said Robin Wagner, senior director of outbound marketing, Storage Components Division, LSI. "By building the new LSISSS6200 cards upon the industry's most widely deployed SAS software stack, LSI will be able to offer OEM customers an enterprise-ready, plug-and-play storage solution for market segments requiring extreme performance."

LSI brings decades of experience in the design, manufacture and support of enterprise-level storage products for critical applications. Bringing the proven engineering capabilities and global scale of LSI to the development of PCIe SSS solutions will help pave the way to market segment maturity and broad enterprise adoption.

LSI will offer 1 million IOPS performance demonstrations utilizing PCIe SSS cards to press and industry analysts in a hosted suite at Storage Networking World Spring 2010 this week in Orlando, Fla.

LSI, along with experts from HP, IBM, NetApp and Seagate, will also participate in a solid-state storage panel discussion today at Storage Networking World. The panel will be moderated by industry analyst Jeff Janukowicz of IDC and examine solid-state deployment models and how the technology will fundamentally change enterprise IT architectures.

LSI is currently sampling the LSISSS6200 card to OEM customers. More information on the product is available at
https://www.lsi.com/DistributionSystem/AssetDocument/SSS_PB_LSI6200.pdf

About LSI

LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) 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 and Networking markets. More information is available at www.lsi.com.