LSI PCIe Flash Caching to Power Cisco Servers

LSI Corporation is working with Cisco Systems, Inc. and EMC Corp. to bring application acceleration benefits of PCIe flash caching technology to the Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers.

The solution combines EMC VFCache intelligent caching software with the LSI Nytro WarpDrive card, LSI's second-generation family of PCIe flash adapters, to accelerate application performance and improve response time for Cisco servers in EMC storage environments.

Accelerating application performance without disrupting existing storage architectures has been a challenge as server processor performance improvements have outpaced storage performance gains. The combined VFCache and Nytro WarpDrive solution has shown up to 3X faster performance and 60% reduction in latency for mission-critical database environments such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server.

"Today's heavy application workloads demand more I/O performance than ever before," said David Yen, Senior VP and GM, Data Center Group, Cisco. "By integrating LSI flash technology into our UCS solution and optimising for EMC storage environments, we will deliver unparalleled application performance to our customers."

VFCache and Nytro WarpDrive technology benefits include:

• Application acceleration for Cisco blade servers
• Optimised data I/O rates for faster system and application performance
• Automated, intelligent caching of frequently accessed data while enabling the continued protection of the data
• Power, cooling and physical footprint savings, reducing total cost of ownership
• Ccompatibility with existing infrastructure through use of industry-standard drivers featuring extensive operating system and management support

"Integrating server-based flash technology with intelligent software in conjunction with enterprise storage arrays gives customers incredible performance while at the same time delivering the data protection they require," said Mark Sorenson, SVP and GM, EMC flash Products and Technologies. "This collaboration with Cisco and LSI will allow joint EMC and Cisco customers to gain the benefits of intelligent VFCache software for their mission-critical applications that run on Cisco blade servers."

"The deluge of data being stored and accessed worldwide is outpacing the ability of traditional storage architectures to keep up," said Abhi Talwalkar, LSI president and CEO. "The integration of LSI's latest generation of PCIe flash adapter technology with Cisco's popular UCS blade servers will allow datacentre managers to contend with massive data growth and speed the ability of databases and other applications to access and extract the full value from data."

VFCache
A server flash caching solution anchored in storage array protection that reduces latency and increases throughput to improve application performance. Intelligent caching software combined with PCIe flash adapter technology extends storage tiering to the server. It eliminates the need for hot data to travel through the network to the storage array, boosting throughput performance up to 3X and reducing latency by up to 60%.

Nytro WarpDrive Application Acceleration Cards
A second-generation family of PCIe flash adapters designed to offer performance with low latency, accelerating applications such as Web serving, data warehousing, online transaction processing and HPC. They combine enterprise flash performance and reliability from LSI SandForce flash storage processors with LSI SAS drivers for simplified integration into standard servers. In addition, the card's 'offload' architecture uses up to four times less CPU and memory resources than competing solutions.

Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers are expected to be available with custom form factor Nytro WarpDrive mezzanine cards beginning in the second half of 2012.