LSI has announced its membership in the Open Compute Project (OCP) and the contribution of two storage infrastructure  reference designs to the OCP global community.

LSI Chief Technology Officer Greg Huff will be a featured speaker at the OCP Summit taking place, January 28-29, in San Jose, Calif. Mr. Huff’s presentation titled, “The Datacentered Future,” will focus on the future vision for the datacenter and the valuable role of the OCP and vendor contributions. LSI will also showcase Open Compute technology demonstrations at its booth.

“Open Compute is about the ability to scale computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical way possible to achieve more work per dollar,” said Greg Huff, LSI CTO. “LSI storage solutions play an important role in the datacenter and our technology can be found in every current contribution to the Open Compute Project. We’re excited to formally join the OCP and look forward to continued contributions to the community.”     

LSI is contributing two storage infrastructure reference designs to the OCP. The first is a board design for a 12Gb/s SAS Open Vault storage enclosure. The Open Vault is a cost-effective storage solution with a modular I/O topology that’s built for the Open Rack. The storage solution is designed to enable Open Vault to optimize the performance 12Gb/s SAS infrastructure by utilizing LSI’s unique DataBolt bandwidth optimizer technology. DataBolt technology aggregates the performance of storage devices to enable 30-60 percent higher bandwidth from existing SATA drives in the Open Vault enclosure.  

LSI is also contributing a design from its Nytro XP6200 series of a PCIe flash accelerator cards, which are purpose-built to meet the requirements of Open Compute and other hyperscale servers. The Nytro XP6209 card is a 1TB flash card designed to provide hyperscale cloud datacenters with accelerated performance for read-intensive applications, optimized power and thermals, and an overall lower cost per gigabyte PCIe flash solution for server-based applications.

“Hybrid Cloud computing is reinventing the entire IT stack and enabling innovation in the datacenter,” said Aaron Sullivan, principal engineer, Rackspace. “Rackspace and LSI have a key role to play in the future of the cloud and we’re collaborating on a number of hybrid cloud and Open Compute projects using LSI flash and SAS controller solutions.”

Technology Demonstrations

At the OCP Summit, LSI is demonstrating a proof-of-concept Open Compute “ready” Rack Scale Storage Architecture with Nebula, Inc., aleading enterprise private cloud company enabling turnkey distributed computing infrastructures.  

The demonstration is designed to enable configurable and sharable resources that provide applications with consistent performance, even in the event of multiple disk failures. Utilizing the scale-out connectivity and performance of the LSI SAS 6160 6Gb/s SAS Switch, combined with the Nebula One Private Cloud, the storage solution can easily integrate into an Open Compute environment, allowing benefits such as point and click spawning and tear down of dynamically sized LUNs of different characteristics under the Cinder presentation layer, as well as deployment of tasks or VMs on them.

“Our continued collaboration with LSI helps address critical challenges in datacenters, mobile networks, and client computing by maximizing storage connectivity and performance for the Private Cloud,” said Devin Carlen, founder and chief architect at Nebula.