LSI MegaRAID Controller Cards

By James E. Bagley, senior analyst
Deni Connor, founding analyst

Second-generation 6Gb/s SATA+SAS controllers achieve over 465,000 IOPS

LSI MegaRAID controllers based on SAS technology have established a high standard for performance since their first SAS RAID card introduction in 2005. Now it looks like LSI may be changing the game in host-based RAID. LSI appears to have rewritten the performance equation, not just for storage, but for the entire system with its recently announced MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i and 9285-8e 6Gbs/s controllers, and based on the company’s performance numbers, the IT community around the world should take note.

The performance numbers

According to the company, either of these second-generation 6Gb/sec. controllers can deliver a staggering 465,000 random IOPS from a single controller with LSI MegaRAID Fast Path software enabled and connected to eight solid state drives (SSDs). Fast Path is an advanced software option for MegaRAID controllers designed to unlock the full performance benefits of SSDs.

How did LSI pull this off?

LSI’s second-generation SAS RAID controllers are built on a hardware foundation featuring the LSISAS2208 SAS RAID-on-Chip IC with its two embedded 800MHz PowerPC processor cores and a 72bit DDRIII interface that drives 1GB of L2 controller cache. Previously announced LSI advanced software options, MegaRAID CacheCade and Fast Path software, are both supported on the 9265-8i and 9285-8e controllers, which helps explain, at least in part, the exceptional performance LSI is claiming. The rest of the ‘secret sauce’ comes from years of experience developing leading edge hardware, firmware and software for some of the toughest storage applications and many of the world’s largest server and storage OEMs, as well as longstanding relationships with other leading technology providers across the storage ecosystem.

Applications that will benefit

Generally, we expect to see IT professionals and end-users enthusiastic about this announcement since, all other things being equal, data access – application performance – could be three to ten times faster on an IOPS performance basis, according to LSI. The controllers are ideally suited for database designers responsible for Seibel Suite, Oracle CRM or Hyperion instances on Oracle, as well as administrators running SharePoint on Microsoft SQL, or social media sites running WordPress, Drupal or Joomla on MySQL. Where it used to take days to build indices and load tables, they can now be built in minutes.

Higher performance in reduced space with lower power consumption

Data center managers with budgetary responsibility will also benefit.  To achieve equivalent IOPS performance levels with competing 6Gb/s SAS RAID controllers could require as many as three additional RAID cards, 24 additional SSDs and three external 12-drive JBOD enclosures.  More performance from less hardware means less power, cooling and rack space consumed in the data center.

Going back to the MySQL reference above, an online transaction processing set of four database servers can be reduced to three machines while preserving the I/O performance.  In such cases we estimated $15,000 can be saved in hardware and software capital expense, plus another $1,000 per year in operating expenses such as maintenance, power and cooling.

In the context of end-user experience and productivity, consider an electronic design automation example where three designers could be able to do the work of four individuals due to faster reads and writes of the large data sets that need to be streamed through the design tool. We estimate that translates to roughly $100,000 per year in personnel costs saved.

Configurations

Two versions of the controller, the MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i, with eight internal ports, and the MegaRAID SAS 9285-8e, with eight external ports, provide configuration scaling for drives internal to the server or drives accessed externally. Both models are low profile (6.6” X 2.536”) PCIe 2.0 eight-lane devices. Each port supports sustained data transfer rates of 6Gb/s per second. The 9265-8i can support up to 128 physical devices, while the 9285-8e can support up to 240 devices in any combination of SAS, SATA, or SSD.

Implications

LSI may have shifted the balance of power between high speed, multi-core server CPUs and the data I/O path. For some time it appeared that storage I/O was throttling system level performance. Now there may be an I/O data path, built around the MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i and 9285-8e controllers, using Fast Path software and solid state devices that puts the performance bottleneck back on the server chipset. The combination of multicore CPUs, MegaRAID controllers, Fast Path software and SSDs are enabling balanced, system-level order-of-magnitude performance gains over older technologies.

From another perspective, LSI could achieve marketing success at the end-user level, just because the solution, MegaRAID and Fast Path software combined with SSDs, is so fast that people are going to ask their compute resource providers, ‘What happened? What’s changed? Why is my system so much faster?’ Wouldn’t we all like to face that problem?

SSG-NOW Assessment

With the low entry cost – the 9265-8i controller lists at under $800, integrators can build storage systems with performance that outperforms systems costing an order of magnitude more. LSI has packaged unique value into the MegaRAID controllers, starting with the most advanced RAID-on-Chip (ROC) processor available and coupled with control and management software that has been developed over many years. With the new MegaRAID controllers and accompanying devices like Solid state storage and SAS Switches, LSI not only demonstrates its leadership in the RAID controller space, but lays out an extremely viable and growing one stop shop for an array of storage components.