Nytro MegaRAID Revision 1.7 Overview

Nytro MegaRAID Revision 1.7 Overview

This document describes how to configure, monitor, and maintain the Nytro™ MegaRAID® Application Acceleration Card, using the MegaRAID Storage Manager™, WebBIOS™ configuration utility (CU), Human Interface Infrastructure (HII) configuration utility, and Storage Command utility (StorCLI). The Nytro controller is based on LSISAS2208 RAID On-a-Chip (ROC). This device is compliant with the Fusion-MPT™ architecture and provides a PCI Express® (PCIe®) 3.0 interface.

This document documents the SAS technology, Serial ATA (SATA) technology, Nytro Cache drive software, SSD Guard™, Dimmer Switch®, UEFI 2.0, configuration scenarios, and drive types. Other features such as Fast Path and SafeStore™ are described in other chapters of this guide.

The LSI® Nytro MegaRAID (this is a combination of the LSI proven MegaRAID controller tightly integrated with built-in Nytro Flash modules to be used as data cache devices with the help of LSI Nytro controller) Application Acceleration Card for DAS is designed to accelerate applications economically with a solution providing leading RAID performance from direct-attached storage combined with intelligent caching using on-board Flash storage.

The controller increases the storage performance by retaining the current investment in direct-attached storage (DAS). Flash technology has become almost synonymous with speed, but it comes at a price premium over hard disk drives (HDD). The controller combines Flash technology with LSI’s industry leading 6Gb/s SAS/SATA ROC device implementation. 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). By combining Flash and HDDs, this solution is designed to enable the lowest cost/GB at the lowest cost/transaction over products supporting only Flash memory.

The controller provides accelerated performance and improved manageability to MegaRAID with its two embedded solid state storage modules. The controller uses on-board solid state storage (SSD) in front of the connected hard disk drive (HDD) drives to create high-capacity and high-performance acceleration cache pools.

The controller provides enterprise class data protection and transparent performance acceleration to direct-attached SCSI storage volumes. The card provides reliability, high performance, and fault-tolerant drive subsystem management. Performance acceleration is powered by intelligent caching using the Nytro Flash storage.

The controller is easy to use with transparent access to applications. Not all of the solid-state disk (SSD) implementations work at enterprise levels. Performance might suddenly drop after only several hours of use. The controller provides more sustainable high performance by using its own on-board PCIe accessible Flash storage. This Flash storage is certified by LSI in internal testing for enterprise applications and offers more consistent latency performance over SAS-accessed Nytro Flash modules. This industry proven LSI software drivers permit many applications to enjoy the performance improvement seamlessly from the controller without any application or file system modifications.

The controller combines Nytro Flash modules with HDD Storage for Economy. In addition to providing caching intelligence and high performance Flash storage, the controller uses LSI’s latest ROC technology, which is PCIe 2.0 and PCIe 3.0 compliant. The intelligent caching implementation can provide high performance when using SAS or SATA hard drives. Another benefit is that caching lightens the HDD load, hence HDD RAID rebuilds complete faster and removes traditional HDD head wear from accessing small block requests typical in database environments.

Provides an economical solution for accelerating applications – by storing frequently accessed data on low-latency Nytro Flash modules while existing SAS or SATA connected hard drives to achieve a balance of performance and cost savings.

The following table provides the convention of usage of important terms throughout this document.

NOTE  All of the MegaRAID Storage Manager menu options can also be accessed by using the Go To menu or Right-click > Controller option.