Adaptec Adapts, Inovates Around SSDs

Way back in the twentieth century Adaptec was the dominant supplier ofparallel SCSI HBAs and chipsets for SCSI on motherboards. They thenbranched out into server RAID controllers that competed with somesuccess against AMI's MegaRAID and Mylex, both with OEMs and users.

But for a while, Adaptec seemed to have losttheir way. Even before the switchover to SAS/SATA on servermotherboards, most of the major OEMs shifted to LSI chipsets. As LSIbought up Mylex and the MegaRAID line, Adaptec took their eye off themarket that was paying their bills. They tried to move up the foodchain from component and card supplier by introducing iSCSI appliances andbuying subsystem vendors including Eurologic and the much traveled SnapServer group.

Now, not only has Adaptec decided to return to HBAsand RAID controllers, but starting in June, theybegan using flash and an ultra capacitors to protect the RAM cache ontheir new controllers. Adaptec has returned to leading the market rather thanfollowing. 

As a consultant, I've dealt with way too many panicked callsfrom system administrators when they have an Insight Manger orOpenManage message that the battery on their RAID controller  was dyingor needed reconditioning. I therefore love the idea of a long-lived ultra capacitor that provides enough juice to dump the cache to flashin the event of a power failure, rather than hoping the battery willlast until the power is restored. I was expecting a SAN array vendor toadd this feature, but Adaptec got there first.

Now  Adaptec'sMaxIQ , like Sun's OpenStorage's ReadZilla or NetApp's upcoming PAM II,uses flash as a huge read cache. A single Adaptec RAID controller withthe MaxIQ software upgrade can use up to 4 32GB Intel X-25E SLC flashdrives as a transparent cache.Data is written to cache anddisk in parallel, ensuring there's no additional risk to data. Unlike products that assign a LUN to a SSD that is used as a cache, system administrators don't have to identify their hotdata, move it to a separate LUN and then update their backup system toinclude the new data source. Caching can be enabled or disabled on alogical volume basis but there isn't much other opportunity to finetune.

Organizations using Windows or Linux servers as file orWeb 2.0 repositories should see a significant boost as frequentlyaccessed disk locations like the file system directories will be cachedleaving disk IOPS for data and reducing disk thrashing.

Fromwhere I sit, MaxIQ is a big step forward for the PCI controller market,and frankly I wasn't expecting anything like this from Adaptec or LSI,until 2011 or so. Hopefully we'll see more innovation in the months tocome so users can get the benefits of flash without a professionalservices engagement.