BANGALORE, INDIA: LSI Corporation announced the LSI Engenio 7900 Storage System, the latest edition of Engenio line of modular storage systems.

The 7900 system provides midrange customers scalability, adaptability and availability features that they need to support large-scale consolidation projects and ever-changing requirements.

Addressing customer needs for rapid application recovery, data migration, centralised management and affordable remote backup, the new system also supports advanced replication and management services, including thin provisioning, based on fifth-generation LSI StoreAge SVM (Storage Virtualization Manager) software, also announced today.

Phil Bullinger, executive vice president and general manager, Engenio Storage Group, LSI, said: "The new economics of storage require large-scale consolidation of data. Effective consolidation isn't just an issue of bigger and faster. Storage systems must also offer users the ability to manage a wide variety of concurrent applications under unpredictable load conditions. The 7900 storage system delivers on these requirements by putting enterprise performance and features into the hands of midrange users."

Based on LSI seventh-generation XBB2 architecture, the new system provides industry-leading bandwidth to meet the real-world challenges of large-scale consolidation. The system delivers 6.4 GB/s on sustained reads from disk, a 4X performance improvement over the previous generation. It also provides the balanced performance and massive throughput necessary to support the concurrent, mixed application workloads typical of today's virtual server environments.

To demonstrate the 7900 system's mixed workload performance capabilities, LSI, in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) Labs and industry leaders IBM and VMware, developed the industry's first concurrent mixed workload benchmark to be focused on storage performance.

Brian Garrett, technical director of the ESG Lab, said: "Our research shows that performance issues are the number one concern for users when deploying networked storage into a virtualised server environment. To address these concerns, ESG ran a mixed workload benchmark to assess the performance of the new system in precisely such a consolidated, virtualized server environment. The system achieved extremely impressive performance results for a dual controller modular storage system."

The benchmark demonstrated concurrent delivery of 1.6 GB/s of aggregate throughput and over 38,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second). Response times of less than 20 milliseconds for more than 17,000 e-mail users and less than five milliseconds for more than 9,000 small database IOPS were also achieved.