LSI Bringing Out Syncro MX-B Rack Boot Appliance

LSI Corporation introduced the Syncro MX-B Rack Boot Appliance.

It is a system to serve as a standalone, pre-configured, 1U form factor rack boot device for as many as 48 servers. By eliminating boot drives and associated failures, the appliance can increase reliability while reducing overall system and maintenance costs for the largest cloud and mega-datacenter environments.

The high failure rate of traditional boot drives used in today’s data centers, along with the maintenance required to repair and replace them, are expensive problems. The Syncro MX-B Rack Boot Appliance is a solution that can increase reliability by up to 100x by replacing the individual server boot drives in data centers. It is transparent to the host system and provides a unique boot image for each attached server, making system management simple while increasing reliability and power savings up to 60%.

"The LSI Syncro MX-B Rack Boot Appliance is an innovative and easy-to-deploy solution that dramatically reduces a common failure point in rack-based servers," said Mike Yang, GM and VP of Quanta QCT. "By providing increased reliability, accessibility and serviceability (RAS), as well as a power-saving alternative to traditional SATA boot drives, the Syncro MX-B will deliver high value and peace of mind for datacenter customers."

Available in 24-port and 48-port configurations, the appliance offers scaling and configuration flexibility. It delivers boot images on RAID volumes with hot-swappable internal HDDs. Additional RAS is achieved through the use of both redundant fans and power supplies. This can result in lower server failure rates and a reduced TCO.

"This exciting first product in our Syncro family was created to address customer needs for delivering higher reliability as well as lowering power consumption, issues that have grown more acute in massive cloud and mega-datacenters," said Bill Wuertz, SVP and GM, RAID Storage Division, LSI. "With our full line of acceleration and performance solutions and by resolving these critical datacenter issues, we are enabling our customers to scale and build a better cloud."

The Syncro MX-B Rack Boot Appliance is based on the new Syncro architecture that serves as the foundation for new products that solve challenges in many applications and verticals. Syncro is a shared-DAS architecture that delivers multi-server solutions.

The Syncro MX-B Rack Boot Appliance is available and shipping to manufacturers