LSI is shipping to its channel partners a PCIe 2.0 accelerator card based on solid-state disk (SSD) drive technology.

In addition to low power consumption of less than 25 watts, LSI is emphasizing the performance of the WarpDrive SPL-300 card, which comes in a low-profile, half-length form factor. The company claims 240,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) on sequential reads, and 200,000 IOPS on random reads, with 4KB block sizes, according to Suresh Panikar, LSI’s senior manager of worldwide marketing. In terms of throughput, the company claims 1.5GBps, with average latency of less than 50 microseconds.

The 300GB acceleration card can be used with LSI’s MegaRAID CacheCade data tiering software and MegaRAID FastPath I/O accelerator software.

The 300GB of capacity is implemented on six SSD modules with single-level cell (SLC) NAND technology.

In terms of endurance, LSI claims a mean time between failure (MTBF) of two million hours, or the ability to write 18TB per day over the card’s three-year warranty.

LSI plans to begin shipments of the WarpDrive SPL-300 at the end of this month at an MSRP of $11,500, or $38.33 per GB.

LSI technologies integrated with the WarpDrive include the LSISAS2008 6Gbps SAS I/O controller, SAS software drivers and Fusion-MPT architecture.

“[WarpDrive SPL-300] is a good solution that fits well between the direct PCIe-to-NAND designs like Fusion-io’s and the simpler SATA-SSDs-on-an-HBA-card solutions available from others,” says Jim Handy, director of the Object Analysis research firm.

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