WarpDrive SSD Card Launched By LSI For $11,500

Quite the dollar amount. This is the new LSI SLP-300 acceleration card, intended for a different set of purchasers that me and... well probably you too. It's a low-profile solid state storage card aimed directly at big companies hoping to keep performance but reduce clutter. This bad boy delivers data efficiency to the tune of hundreds of hard drives while consuming less than 25W of power, claims LSI. That sounds quite amazing, says we. Sounds quite amazing indeed.

By the numbers, you'd need 400+ mechanical hard drives and 36U of rack space, PLUS more than 300 times the power you'd usually use to achieve the same result. If you happen to get your hands on one of these, you can bet you'll get up to 240,000 sustained IOPS and 300GB of SLC solid state storage capacity, all of this in a teeny tiny card (the one you see above.) You can plug it directly into your standard 8 lane PCI-Express Generation 2 server slot. Once plugged in, it can take up to 1,400MB/s of throughput with access latency of under 50 microseconds. That rocks. That rocks so very much. Read the entire press release below:

LSI Bolsters Channel Portfolio with PCI Express Solid-State Storage Card for Application Acceleration

New LSI™ WarpDrive™ plug-and-play I/O acceleration card dramatically improves application performance while reducing rack space, power and cooling costs

MILPITAS, Calif., November 16, 2010 – LSI Corporation (NYSE: LSI) today introduced in the channel the LSI WarpDrive™ SLP-300 acceleration card, a PCI Express (PCIe®) card offering performance up to 240,000 sustained IOPS and 300GB of SLC solid-state storage capacity within a low profile form factor. The WarpDrive card can help customers accelerate application performance, reduce energy costs and eliminate racks of storage by delivering the I/O performance of hundreds of hard disk drives while consuming less than 25 watts of power.

"The LSI WarpDrive card sets a new standard for data center efficiency by providing IT administrators with previously unattainable levels of performance while helping to reduce operational and capital expenditures," said Brent Blanchard, director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI. "The WarpDrive card complements the LSI CacheCade™ and FastPath™ solid-state storage acceleration solutions, providing our channel partners with a one-stop shop to address the performance, deployment and integration requirements that high-performance applications and dense computing demand."

The low-profile, half-length WarpDrive card plugs into a standard 8 lane PCIe Gen 2.0 server slot and is designed to deliver high performance with low latency and a low CPU burden independent of main memory size. It offers system builders, system integrators and their end customers a cost-effective, plug-and-play solution for maximizing the transactional I/O performance of applications such as Web serving, data warehousing, data mining, professional video and high-performance computing.

A WarpDrive card can sustain up to 1,400MB/s of throughput, with reliable and consistent performance across both sequential and random reads and writes. It delivers up to 240,000 4K read IOPS and up to 200,000 4K write IOPS, with access latency of less than 50 microseconds. To achieve equal performance on a write IOPS basis utilizing hard disk drives would require over 400 drives, 36U of rack space and consume more than 300 times the power.

"The LSI PCIe-based WarpDrive card offers simple, effective, and affordable application acceleration for enterprise servers," said Bob Farkaly, director of marketing, Storage System products for Exar. "Utilizing two WarpDrive cards combined with Exar's BitWackr ™solution, we measured an aggregate performance of 1,028 MB/second, which is almost twice the speed we were able to achieve with other PCIe-based flash products."

"Schooner's MySQL and NoSQL solutions combined with the LSI WarpDrive card provide industry-leading performance for database and key-value stores, delivering over 9x performance throughput increase relative to hard drive configurations and over 3x performance throughput increase relative to alternative PCIe flash-based solutions," said Dr. John Busch, founder and CTO, Schooner Information Technologies. "Beyond raw IOPS and latency performance, we are very impressed with the LSI WarpDrive card's performance stability, observing negligible performance variance over time. Also, the LSI WarpDrive card's very low overhead consumption of server processor and DRAM memory resources enables even higher performance by leaving these resources available for useful application processing and data caching."

The WarpDrive card utilizes industry-standard and widely deployed LSI SAS software drivers to provide channel partners with simple integration and management using existing SAS infrastructure. It features the LSISAS2008 6Gb/s SAS I/O controller and is based on the enterprise-proven LSI Fusion-MPT™ architecture. The WarpDrive card is bootable, has no external power requirement and installs as a single drive with no user configuration required. The WarpDrive card helps to ensure high reliability with a management infrastructure offering extensive monitoring, including health, error rate and drive failure.

The WarpDrive card builds upon LSI enterprise-level experience in the design, manufacture and support of advanced server and storage solutions. The WarpDrive card is designed to provide system integrators and system builders with a robust and stable solution with assured interoperability and a low-risk path to market. The WarpDrive card also helps to minimize hardware requirements, reducing initial investment costs and eliminating points of failure for greater overall system reliability.