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LSI is shipping to the channel its second-generation 6Gbps SAS/SATA MegaRAID controllers. The controllers include dual-core LSISAS2208 RAID-On-Chip (ROC) devices, which are based on two 800MHz PowerPC processors and 1GB of DDRIII cache.
Versus its competitors, LSI is emphasizing performance, claiming as many as 465,000 IOPS. However, those performance figures come from a configuration consisting of an internal MegaRAID controller connected to eight solid state disks (SSDs) and running LSI’s FastPath SSD accelerator software with RAID-5 random I/Os. Without FastPath and SSDs, LSI claims 200,000 IOPS, which is three times the performance of LSI’s previous generation RAID controllers.
LSI specs throughput of 2.7GBps with sequential reads and 3.2GBps with sequential writes, and sustained bandwidth of 2,600MBps on RAID-5 writes, which represents a 67 percent increase over LSI’s previous generation RAID controllers.
“We’re targeting applications that need very high levels of I/O, such as databases and financial apps, digital video broadcast, medical imaging, Web 2.0 and cloud computing,” said Suresh Paniker, LSI’s senior manager of worldwide channel marketing. “The goal is to close the gap between CPU and storage performance, and to get the full performance benefits from SSDs.”
The new MegaRAID cards support as many as 240 SAS, SATA or SSD drives.
The RAID controllers are compatible with LSI technologies such as Dimmer Switch, SSD Guard, SafeStore and CacheCade software for SSD caching and tiering.
The MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i ($780) and 9265-8i kit version ($835) are available now and have eight internal ports. A card with eight external ports – the MegaRAID SAS 9285-8e – will ship by the end of the month, and is expected to be priced at $995. All of the RAID controllers support the x8 PCIe 2.0 interface.
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