Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

Data is Business opportunity-the theme of LSI's first accelerated technological Innovation (AIS) Summit held outside the United States shows the value of big data. Big data, who has a high demand for real-time processing capabilities, requires that storage must also be changed, which is why flash storage in data centers is becoming more and more popular.

Coexist with hard disk

When SSD first entered the data center field, many people believed that SSD would completely replace traditional hard drives in the near future. But as the unique advantages of SSD become increasingly prominent and the application scene becomes more and more clear, more and more people begin to believe that SSD and hard disk will coexist peacefully for a long time.

Tom Swinford, senior vice president and general manager of data center solutions at LSI, believes that hard drives and SSD will co-exist: "in addition to the high performance that we have always been proud of, people pay more attention to the reliability and availability of SSD in enterprise applications. From the current situation, SSD has some application scenarios that it is good at, such as applications with special requirements for low latency and high IOPS." In addition to enterprise database applications, big data applications are also more inclined to use SSD. In addition, with the popularity of server virtualization technology, flash memory technology will have a greater opportunity to show its ability in order to break through the bottleneck of Imp O. "

Since LSI launched the Nytro series of flash cards in April 2012, its total global shipments have exceeded 100000. According to Tom Swinford, some super-large Internet enterprises, cloud data centers, financial services institutions and large enterprises have fully affirmed SSD's ability to accelerate application performance, improve data center efficiency and reduce IT costs.

Software is more important.

To optimize for flash applications is not just to use SSD or flash cards, but to make comprehensive changes in storage controller, firmware, operating system, application software and so on.

"it is becoming more and more difficult to manage flash memory from the bottom." "therefore, we have to solve this problem in a very intelligent and programmable way," Tom Swinford admits. "while we strengthen the management of flash memory, we can not affect the performance of flash memory. In addition, to understand the location of flash memory, reasonable deployment and optimization also need the help of software. Software management is critical to improve the durability and speed of flash products." Tom Swinford also found that in some large data centers, users have begun to optimize their applications in order to take full advantage of flash memory.

In order to improve the adaptability of flash memory and applications, LSI is also strengthening its collaboration with partners. For example, LSI's flash memory can better support EMC ScaleIO, speed up the Oracle all-in-one machine, and actively interact with Openstack open source organizations. "our only goal is to enable users to quickly deploy applications on our flash platform." Tom Swinford said.

Optimize for application

Recently, LSI and partners including EMC, Mellanox, Supermicro and other partners launched a super-integrated VDI device to support the rapid deployment of VMware Horizon View. The LSI Nytro 3.2TB PCIe flash accelerator card is used in this joint solution.

"different types of applications require flash memory with different characteristics, such as databases, transactional applications, or high-performance computing." "We know very well that LSI alone will not be able to meet the different needs of users," Tom Swinford said. "on the one hand, LSI will continue to enrich its flash product line; on the other hand, we are strengthening our cooperation with other manufacturers to provide integrated solutions, such as the introduction of super-integrated VDI devices."

A few years ago, LSI felt that a class of PCIe flash cards could meet the needs of users, but now there are many types of flash cards, and different solutions have different requirements for flash cards. For example, ExaData all-in-one machines emphasize high availability and high reliability, but do not require too high latency, while EMC ScaleIO is mainly used for hot data and metadata, so it requires very low latency. Therefore, LSI should provide different flash solutions according to the needs of different users. However, Tom Swinford also said that LSI will not dabble in all-flash arrays at this time.

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