LSI WarpDrive SLP-300

Extreme performance - up to 240.000 IO/s with the LSI WarpDrive SLP-300.

LSI WarpDrive SLP-300

With  the WarpDrive SLP-300 LSI offers a PCIe card to speed up memory access. The WarpDrive is equipped with 6 flash modules, which together provide a total capacity of 300GB. The architecture of the card allows impressive performance: up to 240,000 IO/s and up to 1,400 MB/s.

The operating system can use the WarpDrive like a "normal" bootable disk. Drivers for different Windows versions and Linux distributions are already available.   

Recommended areas

The LSI WarpDrive can be used for all "classic" IO-intensive applications, for example:

• Data warehousing and data mining (e.g. SAP, Oracle)
• Web server (e.g. Apache Tomcat)
• High-Performance computing (e.g. Red Hat HPC)

In Addition, one potential application is to see in the desktop and server virtualization.

VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is regarded as particularly IO intensive. Otherwise the high IO requests can only be achieved with a large number of disks (= spindles).

Iometer with 4KB seq. 100% Read, 64 outstanding IOs; Test system with 1x Intel X5680 CPU, 24GB DDR3 RAM, Intel 5520 chipset; Microsoft Windows 2008 R2; LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 (FW 120.00.00.00, driver 2.10.42)

With VMware vSphere 5.0, LSI WarpDrive can also be used in a virtualized server environment. With the "SSD swap cache" feature you will have the possibility of swapping pages of the VMs so that in addition to the fast RAM, SSDs can be used directly, instead of common hard disks.

For storage issues mainly storage virtualization solutions like FalconStor or DataCore will benefit with tiered storage function of the extreme values of IO. The virtualization appliance can use WarpDrives as read or write cache.

Common solutions are:

• FalconStor Network Storage Server (used for HotZone/SafeCache)
• DataCore SANsymphony
• Nexenta NexentaStor (ZFS ZIL/L2ARC)

LSI WarpDrive SLP-300

Performance comparison

With up to 240,000 IO/s the WarpDrive achieved comparable transaction values in comparison with:

• 1.400x about 15k rpm / SAS hard drives (Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 450GB)
• 3.240x about 7.2k rpm / SATA hard drives (Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB)

If we add the costs for racks, storage systems, power consumption and maintenance, the use of WarpDrive amortizes quickly.

Download: Datasheet LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 (PDF)