SCIENCE

LSI has announced that the LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 PCI Express solid-state storage card has won Electronic Design's Best Electronic Design award for 2010 in the Computers – Solid State Storage category.

The LSI WarpDrive card was selected for the award by the editorial staff of Electronic Design based on the card's ability to push the boundaries of application performance and storage density by delivering the I/O performance of hundreds of hard disk drives while consuming less than 25 watts of power.

"In today's enterprise storage environments, the importance of high performance, capacity and energy efficiency cannot be overstated, which is why the LSI WarpDrive card was a natural selection for a 2010 Best Electronic Design award," said Bill Wong, technology editor, Electronic Design. "The WarpDrive card combines these attributes in a plug and play design to offer customers an innovative solution to accelerate a broad scope of applications. The product is an example of LSI's engineering excellence and we congratulate them on winning the award."

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. It offers system builders, system integrators and 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 WarpDrive card represents the next evolution in storage architectures for market segments requiring extreme performance," said Steve Fingerhut, senior director of marketing, Storage Components Division, LSI. "The WarpDrive card delivers exceptional performance, enhanced reliability and ease of use while helping to reduce customers' operational and capital expenditures. We're honored that the product has been recognized with a Best Electronic Design award for 2010."

The WarpDrive acceleration card is the latest addition to the comprehensive LSI portfolio of storage building block solutions available in the channel, including MegaRAID and 3ware RAID controllers, host bus adapters, SAS switches, JBOD enclosures, the CTS2600 family of configurable storage components and advanced software options.