Items tagged with LSI
A little bit of celebrating is in order for Avago Technologies, which said it signed a definitive agreement to sell LSI's Axxia Networking Business to Intel, the world's larger supplier of semiconductors, for $650 million in cash. The boards of directors for both Avago and Intel have already approved the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2014, barring any regulatory snags along the way. Avago owns an extensive portfolio of intellectual property serving markets in wireless communications, wired infrastructure, enterprise storage, and industrial. The Axxia business, which Avago came to own when it acquired LSI at the end of last year for $6.6 billion, is mostly involved...
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Seagate announced that it has acquired LSI’s Accelerated Solutions Division (ASD) and Flash Components Division (FCD) from parent Avago for $450 million in cash. What Seagate is getting is a nice big pile of enterprise PCIe-based flash and SSD controller technologies that will allow it to push harder into the enterprise storage space. “Seagate is committed to providing our customers with a complete range of storage solutions, and this acquisition will significantly enhance our flash storage offerings to supplement our existing portfolio,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman and CEO in a press release, touting LSI’s broad PCIe flash portfolio and “best-in-class”...
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OCZ's RevoDrive series has been a popular enthusiast and workstation-class storage product family for years now. The last time we looked at an OCZ RevoDrive, the RevoDrive 3 X2 offered smoking-fast performance and bandwidth of up to 1.5GB/sec for reads and 1.25GB/sec for writes, thanks to its PCI Express-based design, which basically comprises four Sandforce-based SSDs on a single card... Since then, OCZ was acquired by Toshiba and has been going through its product stack, revamping their SSD portfolio with fresh re-designs based on Toshiba NAND Flash memory... Blinding Speed - OCZ's RevoDrive 350 PCIe SSD Reviewed OCZ has now replaced the RevoDrive 3 series with an almost completely...
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OCZ's RevoDrive series has been a popular enthusiast and workstation-class storage product family for years now. The last time we looked at an OCZ RevoDrive, the RevoDrive 3 X2 offered smoking-fast performance and bandwidth of up to 1.5GB/sec for reads and 1.25GB/sec for writes thanks to its PCI Express-based design, which basically comprises four Sandforce-based SSDs on a single card, alleviating the 6Gbps SATA bottleneck. Since then, OCZ was acquired by Toshiba and has been going through its product stack, revamping its SSD portfolio with fresh re-designs based on Toshiba NAND Flash memory for not only increased performance but better cost structure as well. OCZ has now replaced the RevoDrive...
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Hot on the heels of OCZ’s Z-Drive 4500 PCIe SSD series launch comes another spate of PCIe drives from the Toshiba-owned company. OCZ’s new RevoDrive 350 PCIe SSDs are built for workstations and high-performance gaming, boasting triple the performance of SATA SSDs. OCZ says that the RevoDrive 350s offer up to 1.8GBps sequential speeds with up to 140,000 4K random write IOPS on a PCIe Gen 2 x8 interface. The drives features up to four LSI SF-2282 processors and features Toshiba flash. “The new RevoDrive 350 is built using proven technology with the added benefit of utilizing in-house premium Toshiba flash and OCZ’s proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0...
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In November last year, we gave you a first look at LSI's forthcoming SandForce SF3700 PCI Express SSD Flash controller. It's an impressive silicon integration of both a native PCI Express x4 interface and SandForce's excellent SSD controller technologies, along with some refinements and advancements baked in. At the time, LSI mentioned a few OEM partners they were aligning with for manufacturing of their various reference designs and form-factors and Kingston, as well as ADATA and AVANT were on that short list. At CES 2014 last week, however, it was Kingston that stepped out with the first incarnation of a PCI Express SSD card based on the technology and targeted at the enthusiast...
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Big things are brewing in the land of solid state storage, and if you thought today's SSDs were fast, then prepare to be blown away by what's in store for tomorrow. Keeping the momentum going, LSI Corporation today unveiled its SandForce SF3700 controller family, representing the third generation of the popular SandForce series and by far the most impressive set of updates yet. Among other things, the SF3700 family is the industry's first flash controller to support both native PCI-E Gen2 x4 and SATA 6Gbps host interfaces in a single ASIC design. The upshot of integrating support for both interfaces in a single ASIC is that it simplifies the SSD design process and significantly reduces the development...
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The Intel SSD 335 is the company’s first solid state drive to ship with NAND flash memory produced using a 20nm process. Intel claims the drive “uses the smallest, most efficient multi-level cell NAND flash on the market”. The flash memory used on the Intel SSD 335 was jointly developed my Intel’s and Micron’s IM Flash Technologies (IMFT) and was announced last April, but is now ready for prime time in a drive targeting the sweet spot of the enthusiast and DIY market… Intel Solid State Drive 335 Series SSD Review...
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The solid state storage market has rapidly evolved over the last four years or so. Whereas early drives were relatively slow and offered inconsistent performance, current high-end drives routinely approach the limits of the SATA interface and off much better performance, both in terms of sequential and random IO operations. Over the same time period, solid state drives have also gotten significantly more affordable. It wasn’t that long ago that sought-after SSDs were commanding $3-4 a gigabyte. Now though, a quality, brand name, high performance SSD can be had for less than $1 a gigabyte. Much of the price reduction in the SSD market is due to fierce competition among companies vying for...
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Solid state storage is no doubt in many of our futures, but the pricing right now means that it's almost exclusively used in enterprise or high-end workstation applications. And that's exactly who LSI is targeting with its new Nytro application acceleration portfolio. It's a solution that combines PCIe flash technology with intelligent caching and management software, in order to increase application performance in datacenters / cloud environments. Nytro solutions allow datacenters to contend with massive data growth and speed the ability of databases and other applications to be accessed exponentially faster... “The integration of flash technology in enterprise system architectures is...
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Intel is launching a brand new line of solid state drives today, built around SandForce’s popular SF-2200 family of storage processors. The new SSD 520 Series solid state drives, as they are known, will supplant the Marvell-based 510 series at the top of Intel’s consumer-targeted SSD lineup and be offered in capacities ranging from 60GB to 480GB. Like other SandForce SF-2200-based drives, the new Intel SSD 520 series is outfitted with a SATA III interface with sequential reads and writes speeds in the 550MB/s to 520MB/s ranges, respectively. According to their specifications, 4K random reads peak at around 50K IOPS (QD32), with 4K random writes hovering around 80K IOPS for the 240GB...
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Intel is launching a brand new line of solid state drives today, built around SandForce’s popular SF-2200 family of storage processors. The new SSD 520 Series solid state drives, as they are known, will supplant the Marvell-based 510 series at the top of Intel’s consumer-targeted SSD lineup and be offered in capacities ranging from 60GB to 480GB. Like other SandForce SF-2200-based drives, the new Intel SSD 520 series is outfitted with a SATA III interface with sequential reads and writes speeds in the 550MB/s to 520MB/s ranges, respectively. According to their specifications, 4K random reads peak at around 50K IOPS (QD32), with 4K random writes hovering around 80K IOPS for the 240GB...
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Yesterday’s announcement that LSI had entered into an agreement to acquire SandForce was interesting to say the least. The two companies have obvious synergy and should be able to leverage each other's resources to produce some powerful and innovative storage products. However, due to LSI’s strong position in the enterprise space and SandForce’s more consumer oriented position, along with the announcement’s minimal discussion of mainstream or desktop-targeted products, some questions lingered as to how LSI planned to market SandForce products moving forward. After all, dozens of manufacturers that specifically target enthusiasts and desktop users offer products built around...
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Update 10/27 - 2:30 PM: We just had a conference call and interview with LSI VP and GM, Gary Smerdon on this announcement and what it means to SandForce customers and LSI moving forward. More details are available in that coverage. News broke earlier today that LSI Corporation, maker of enterprise-class storage solutions, has entered an agreement to acquire solid state storage processor manufacturer SandForce. According to the terms of the agreement, LSI will pony up approximately $322 million in cash, net of cash assumed, and assume approximately $48 million of unvested stock options and restricted shares held by SandForce employees. SandForce’s storage processors have...
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Need to add some serious speed and flexibility to your desktop or workstation? If you have a spare PCIe slot, LSI has the tool for you. It's the second-generation MegaRAID SATA+SAS RAID controller card, based on 6Gbps SAS technology. The new line of controllers include the MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i, featuring eight internal ports, and the MegaRAID SAS 9285-8e, with eight external ports. The controllers deliver performance levels greater than 200,000 RAID 5 random I/Os per second (IOPS), a 3x improvement compared to the previous-generation products. Users can boost IOPS performance to 465,000 RAID 5 random IOPS utilizing a single controller, enabled with LSI MegaRAID FastPath software, connected to...
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If we consider companies like LSI and their competitors, like Adaptec and AMCC (3Ware), you'll note that they're in a unique position in this storage technology migration, in that they can almost take an agnostic stance, in terms of which media type and market opportunity they decide to resource development efforts in. For players like LSI, with a wealth of HBA controller IP at their disposal, they can relatively easily adapt and re-tool their technologies to service NAND Flash SSD memory structures and bring compelling solutions to market as market demand develops. The LSI WarpDrive that we have on hand for you here is representative of LSI's efforts to capitalize on the company's strong...
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When we sit back and look at the evolving storage market and SSD technologies, there are a couple of competitive camps that are trying to gain traction, in what is without question one of the largest growth areas in storage. The major players in solid state storage solutions have emerged from old-line, incumbents in hard disk media and then also a new breed, specializing exclusively in SSD technology. Major memory manufacturers like Intel, Micron and Samsung, along with specialty shops like OCZ and Corsair, are making a push with their expertise in memory, whereas players like Western Digital and Seagate also have skin in the game, but are walking the line carefully, as the migration...
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In this episode of Two and A Half Geeks, Iyaz, Dave and Marco take a look at the new LSI WarpDrive PCI Express SSD, discuss HotHardware’s overclocked AMD Radeon HD 6870/6850 round-up, talk about why the CEO of AMD was just sent out behind the woodshed for a whacking and how the HTC HD2 Windows Mobile 6.x-based smartphone was recently hacked to run Windows Phone 7. Show Notes: 00:45 – LSI WarpDrive PCI Express SSD Sneak Peek 03:36 – Overclocked Radeon HD 6800 Series Round-Up 05:50 – New Details Emerge on AMD’s CEO Dismissal 08:36 - HTC's HD2 Hacked To Run Windows Phone 7 11:26 – Hints Regarding HotHardware’s Next Sweepstakes...
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We're sure you realize we have an affinity for all things SSD around these parts. And you have to admit, any self-respecting computer geek can appreciate the blazing fast response times of the latest generation of SATA-based Solid State Drives. However, as we've said before, we think SATA some day will be a Dinosaur of sorts that we all remember and love but moved on from long ago in a galaxy far away. Still, we're not there yet obviously. There have been some interesting products to come to market based on native, system-level interfaces like PCI Express but we're just getting warmed up it seems. That said, it's exciting to see where things are headed and the multitude...
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Let's go ahead and deal with the 900-pound gorilla in the room. LSI's new WarpDrive SLP-300 acceleration card is freaking expensive, as in the thing costs $11,500. Yeah, it's like that. But it's also intended for a different kind of audience than your typical home enthusiast. This low-profile solid state storage card is aimed at companies hoping to reduce storage rack clutter without sacrificing performance, and towards that end, this pricey drive purportedly delivers the I/O performance of hundreds of hard drives, all the while consuming less than 25W of power, LSI claims. "The LSI WarpDrive card sets a new standard for data center efficiency by providing IT administrators with previously unattainable...
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The solid state storage market is still in a growth period, with prices slowly falling and mainstream users warming to the idea of using them in place of the hard drives that have been so prominent the past decade. The PCI Express SSD market is just now catching on, but Seagate is hoping to get an early leg-up on the competition by partnering with LSI.The two companies have announced today that they will be collaborating to deliver PCIe-based solid-state storage solutions for data center and cloud computing environments. Fusion-io has already launched PCIe-based SSD devices, but few others are widely available. SSDs have largely been used in notebook scenarios, but the PCIe scheme enables desktops...
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IBM announced its new 476FP system-on-chip (SoC) processor today, and claims the new design will offer more than twice the processing power of its predecessor (in theory). The company is presumably referring to the PPC 464FP-HP90; the 476FP improves on the older design in several notable ways. According to IBM, the 476FP will be capable of clockspeeds "in excess of 1.6GHz", and draw just 1.6W when configured in that mode. IBM hasn't released the full details of the new core's architecture, but additional key features of the design include support for an L2 cache designed by LSI, (256K/512K/1MB), an AltiVec SIMD unit, and SMP (symmetric multi-processing) support. "We are pleased to announce this...
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