User guide

LSI Corporation
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LSI Nytro MegaRAID Application Acceleration Card User Guide
August 2012
Overview of the LSI Nytro MegaRAID Card
Overview
Chapter 1: Overview of the LSI Nytro MegaRAID Card
1.1 Overview
This document is the primary reference and user’s guide for the LSI® Nytro™ MegaRAID® Application Acceleration Card
based on the LSI 6Gb/s SAS/SATA RAID On-a-Chip device. This document contains complete installation instructions
for the Nytro MegaRAID card and includes the cards specifications.
The LSI Nytro MegaRAID Application Acceleration Card is a combination of LSI proven MegaRAID controller coupled
with built-in Flash modules to be used as data cache devices with the help of LSI CacheCade software. The Nytro
MegaRAID card for direct-attached storage (DAS) is designed to accelerate applications with RAID performance from
DAS combined with intelligent caching using Nytro Flash modules. The Nytro MegaRAID card increases the storage
performance up to 30x, but retains the current investment in DAS. Using intelligent caching algorithms to help
identify application hot data, the frequently accessed data is stored and accessed from Flash enabling the lowest
possible latency. The following figure illustrates the flow of data on the Nytro MegaRAID card.
Figure 1 Data Flow on a Nytro MegaRAID Card
LSI offers a family of Nytro MegaRAID cards that provides enterprise proven performance acceleration and data
protection for direct attach storage (DAS). The differences between the Nytro MegaRAID cards are the amount of Flash
memory as shown in the following table.
ATTENTION Convention of usage of important terms:
Nytro Cache: This term refers to the Nytro Flash module is used for user data cache, called Nytro Cache.
SSD: This term refers to external SSDs.
Table 1 Nytro MegaRAID Board Sizes
Nytro MegaRAID Card Flash Capacity
Nytro MegaRAID8100-4i 128 GB
Nytro MegaRAID8110-4i 256 GB
Nytro MegaRAID8120-4i 1 TB