14 DAY TRIAL // Supermicro, a company well renowned for its barebone systems and professional motherboards, has just announced that LSI's Warpdrive SLP-300 solid state PCI Express disk is now available with select Supermicro server solutions.
The low-profile, half-length WarpDrive card can be installed into an empty x8 PCI-E slot and packs 300GB of storage space.
At its heart, the add-on card is powered by an LSI SAS2008 controller that is connected to three SSD drives configured in RAID 0 in order to offer lower latencies and improved transfer speeds.
Thanks to this design and to the SLC NAND flash memory used, LSI claims that the WarpDrive can reach 1,400MB/s sustained throughput, while also offering up to 240,000 read and 200,000 write IO operations per second, when using a 4K block size, along with a sub-50 millisecond access latency.
As it is the case with most other PCI Express solid state drives available on the market, LSI's creation is bootable and consumes less than 25 watts of power when in use.
According to Supermicro, the WarpDrive-enabled servers are designed to maximize transactional I/O performance of data-intensive applications and workloads such as Web serving, data warehousing, data mining, professional video and high-performance computing.
"We've experienced great growth in our relationship with LSI over the past few years, and the ground-breaking LSI WarpDrive card is a powerful addition to our broad portfolio of server and storage solutions," said Charles Liang, CEO and president of Supermicro.
"The WarpDrive card will provide our enterprise server customers with simple, effective and affordable application acceleration while optimizing datacenter operational efficiencies," concluded the company's rep.
Sadly, we don't know exactly what server models will get LSI's solid state disk and for just how much these will retail when they become available.
When it launched the WarpDrive, LSI priced the SSD at $11,500 US.