LSI has introduced Syncro, a storage architecture designed to deliver storage sharing and scaling capabilities for multi-server solutions.
The Syncro architecture takes direct-attached storage (DAS) out of the box and builds storage-sharing capabilities on top of MegaRAID technology, enabling business benefits including reduced cost, power and failure rates, while improving storage utilization and application uptime.
LSI plans to extend the Syncro architecture to Syncro CS and Syncro MX product families.The Syncro CS models are designed for SMEs and remote, departmental and branch offices. The Syncro MX targets large cloud and mega-datacenters with server solutions.
The first member of the Syncro product family, the Syncro MX-B Boot Appliance, is currently available to manufacturers. Other products in the Syncro product family are expected to ship during the first half of 2013.
The Syncro MX-B Rack Boot Appliance serves as a standalone, pre-configured, 1U form factor rack boot device for as many as 48 servers. This means that you will be able to remove the boot drives frpm a rack machine and replace it with a single 1U Syncro MX-B. Instead of having SATA drives on every machine, you have a single RAID array on the MX rack serving all that.
LSI claims that by eliminating boot drives and associated failures, the appliance can significantly increase reliability while reducing overall system and maintenance costs for the largest cloud and mega-datacenter environments. The Syncro MX-B Rack Boot Appliance can increase reliability by up to 100x by replacing the individual server boot drives in datacenters, according to the compamny.
The Syncro MX-B Rack Boot Appliance is transparent to the host system and provides a unique boot image for each attached server, making system management simple while increasing reliability and power savings up to 60 percent.
Available in 24-port and 48-port configurations, the new appliance delivers boot images on RAID volumes with hot-swappable internal hard drives. Additional RAS is achieved through the use of both redundant fans and power supplies.