Seagate Expands Broad PCIe Portfolio With Two New Flash Accelerator Cards


Latest Nytro PCIe Flash Products Designed for Adoption by 1U Server Market and for Thermally Challenging Environments

Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ:STX), a world leader in storage solutions, today announced the expansion of its Seagate® Nytro® XP6000 product family with the introduction of two new PCIe flash accelerator cards— the Nytro XP6302 and XP6209 cards. The new cards are designed to address market demands both for high performance and high capacity in a smaller form factor and for thermally challenging environments, such as low-profile servers with lower airflows.

The new Nytro XP6302 card delivers high PCIe flash capacity with competitive performance characteristics in a half-height form factor. The Nytro XP6302 card is designed for optimal density and for graceful performance scaling for high thread count and queue depth workloads. The second expansion to the Nytro portfolio, the XP6209 card adds a new 1.86TB capacity point doubling the capacity.  The new 1.86TB SKU addresses customers’ needs for increased capacity density in low-profile and thermally optimised hyper-converged designs.  

These new PCIe flash cards are members of the third generation of Nytro® solutions that expand its broad portfolio of PCIe-based flash accelerator products. This broad range of products enables data center architects to select the right solution for their unique requirements to support everything from hyperscale cloud and enterprise data centers, to big data, virtual desktops and varying server workloads.

“Our ongoing innovation in the Nytro product line continues to propel our leadership in PCIe flash acceleration solutions,” said Manish Muthal, Seagate, vice president of marketing, planning, architecture and PCIe flash solutions. “Given the migration towards hyper-converged infrastructure and the vast computing and storage resources needed to churn through massive amounts of information emanating from the cloud, big data, and hyperscale datacenters, high-performance and high capacity solutions in small footprint are a necessity. The addition of the Nytro XP6302 and the 1.86TB XP6209 cards meet these requirements head on.”  

Nytro XP6302:  Maximising Capacity and Bandwidth

As a low profile, high bandwidth application acceleration solution designed to address massive data loads while reducing complexity, cost and datacenter space requirements, the Nytro XP6302 card doubles the bandwidth commonly found with most low profile cards.  This is due to its multi-planar design that delivers high PCIe flash capacity per slot— up to 1.75 TB of usable capacity is provided.

Featuring the latest enhancements in PCIe 3.0 and eMLC flash technology, it can achieve more than twice the bandwidth of competitive offerings (3.5 GB/s vs. 1.5 GB/s) within a comparable footprint. This enables datacenter architects to more effectively run server-based PCIe flash in their datacenters.

Nytro XP6209 (1.86 TB):  Reducing the Barriers to PCIe Flash Adoption

The relatively higher cost per GB of PCIe flash has often slowed organisations’ adoption of PCIe-based flash. The XP6209 card removes this inhibitor through combining the high performance of PCIe flash with lower upfront costs and a low TCO. The 1.86TB version of the Nytro XP6209 card doubles the usable capacity of the currently shipping low-profile and thermally-optimised XP6209. With a focus on aligning the XP6209 card’s endurance with read-intensive applications, the card is able to reduce the cost per user GB. Additionally, as a third generation product, users can expect a highly reliable and robust solution while keeping maintenance costs low.

“It is essential that enterprise datacenters accelerate applications to meet today’s demanding business requirements by increasing storage performance and reducing latency,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research director for Solid State Drives and Enabling Technologies at IDC. “To address these requirements, customers are increasingly looking to PCIe flash solutions, such as Seagate’s latest Nytro flash accelerator cards, that are performance-optimised for mixed workload environments.”

The comprehensive Nytro product portfolio of PCIe flash accelerators are designed to deliver high performance and a low CPU burden for the most demanding database applications and I/O-intensive workloads. In addition to these enhancements, the Nytro XP6302 and XP6209 cards feature sophisticated algorithms and dedicated hardware resources to handle complex flash management tasks like garbage collection and wear-leveling.

The products are available from select Seagate original equipment manufacturers and through the Seagate worldwide network of distributors, integrators and VARs.

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©2014 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Seagate, Seagate Technology, Nytro and the Wave logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in t he United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. When referring to drive capacity, one terabyte, or TB, equals one thousand billion bytes. Your computer’s operating system may use a different standard of measurement and report a lower capacity. In addition, some of the listed capacity is used for formatting and other functions and will not be available for data storage. Actual data rates may vary depending on operating environment and other factors. Seagate reserves the right to change, without notice, product offerings or specifications.