LSI Nytro™ WarpDrive® Flash Acceleration Cards Maximize Density and Performance for VMware Horizon View™

SAN JOSE, Calif. - LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) today announced that it is working closely with VMware to deliver breakthrough virtual desktop density for VMware Horizon View™ deployments. Collaborative testing with VMware Horizon View using a single LSI® Nytro™ WarpDrive® application acceleration card achieved concurrent support for 200 active virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads on a two-node cluster with no storage latency.

“Our testing of the LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards confirms Nytro technology can support demanding VDI workload environments with simplified management and increasing security and control,” said Mason Uyeda, senior director of technical marketing, End-User Computing, VMware. “LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards will help enable our customers to overcome the latency demands of VDI-intensive workloads to deliver high performance and return on investment.”

VDI environments generate I/O-intensive workloads that cannot always be adequately addressed by traditional hard disk drives. Typical VDI workloads generate small, random write-intensive bursts of I/O during peak periods, forcing IT organizations to over-provision expensive storage resources to meet that peak demand. The Nytro WarpDrive card helps to eliminate infrastructure guesswork and improve storage utilization by providing a flash-based solution with both predictable and reduced application response times.

Testing Details
To demonstrate the benefits of deploying the Nytro WarpDrive card in a VDI implementation, LSI and VMware emulated demanding, real-world end user workloads using Login VSI version 4.02 and View Planner 3 to drive 200 active desktops. The LSI Nytro WarpDrive card comfortably supported the 200 active desktop workloads, achieving a VSImax rating of 280 before exhausting CPU resources. The demonstration also showed that at 150 desktops per ESXi node, eight hosts can easily scale to 1,000 concurrent desktops at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional storage area network deployments with similar performance characteristics.

“Working closely with VMware, we’re able to confirm through this real-world application that IT organizations can comfortably deploy 150 desktops per node with 75 to 80 percent concurrency and a VMware Horizon View clone deployment time of under 13 minutes,” said Robin Wagner, senior director of marketing, Datacenter Solutions Group, LSI. “We’re excited to collaborate with VMware to provide native VMware drivers in VMware vSphere® and help bring this breakthrough VDI density and performance to our mutual customers.”

The LSI Nytro WarpDrive card is a part of the comprehensive LSI Nytro product portfolio of application acceleration cards combining PCIe® flash technology with intelligent caching and management software. Nytro WarpDrive cards are designed to deliver high performance, reduced latency and a low CPU burden for the most demanding database applications and I/O-intensive workloads.

More information on the LSI Nytro application acceleration product portfolio is available at www.lsi.com/acceleration.

About LSI
LSI Corporation (NASDAQ: LSI) designs semiconductors and software that accelerate storage and networking in datacenters, mobile networks and client computing. Our technology is the intelligence critical to enhanced application performance, and is applied in solutions created in collaboration with our partners. More information is available at www.lsi.com. Connect with LSI via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

LSI, the LSI & Design logo, Storage.Networking.Accelerated., Nytro and WarpDrive are trademarks or registered trademarks of LSI Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

VMware, VMware vSphere and VMware Horizon View are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

All other brand or product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.