LSI Sets Mark for RAID Adapter Performance With New Industry-Standard Benchmarks

LSI Corporation has established the first RAID adapter performance results for the Storage Performance Council’s (SPC) new component benchmarks using the LSI MegaRAID SAS 8888ELP adapter. The SPC-1C and SPC-2C are the first industry-standard benchmarks for measuring the performance of individual storage components during the execution of typical business-critical applications.

Using standardized SPC-1 and SPC-2 system-level workloads, the new component-level benchmarks provide end-users, vendors, resellers and integrators with the ability to evaluate and compare the performance of individual storage components such as server-based RAID and host bus adapters, intelligent enclosures, disk drives and storage software.

"Today’s storage solutions have become too large and too complex to measure and compare performance using existing system-level benchmarks alone," said Kelly Bryant, DAS RAID business line director, Engenio Storage Group, LSI. "With the new, fine-granularity SPC component-level benchmarks, we’re able to demonstrate the outstanding performance of our direct-attached storage solutions based on our RAID-on-Chip ICs and MegaRAID software."

The SPC-1C benchmark is designed to demonstrate the performance of a storage component while running applications requiring random I/O operations such as OLTP, database operations and mail server implementations. The LSI MegaRAID adapter achieved an SPC-1C performance result of 4,234.44 SPC-1C IOPS for a direct-attached storage subsystem configuration consisting of twenty-four Seagate Savvio 15K 3Gb/s SAS hard drives with RAID 5 data protection.

The SPC-2C benchmark consists of three distinct workloads intended to demonstrate the performance of a storage component during the execution of applications such as video-on-demand, file processing and database queries that require sequential transfer of large quantities of data. The MegaRAID adapter produced a result of 683.66 SPC-2C MBPSTM for a direct-attached storage subsystem consisting of twenty-four Seagate Savvio 3Gb/s SAS drives in RAID 5 configuration.

"The SPC component benchmarks establish a new standard for users seeking to compare the performance of single- and multi-vendor storage components," said Walter E. Baker, Administrator and Auditor for the Storage Performance Council. "With these results, LSI has achieved a significant industry milestone in demonstrating the performance of a single RAID adapter under typical end-user application scenarios."