Orange Silicon Valley and Hyve Solutions Attain 1.8 Million IOPS Benchmark with Components from LSI and Kingston

Extreme compute becomes cost-effective - now widely available for datacenter applications

FREMONT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Hyve Solutions, a division of SYNNEX Corporation (NYSE: SNX) and a leader in purpose-built, datacenter server and storage solutions, is now offering an appliance-like system that consistently achieved a high benchmark of over 1.8 million I/O transactions per second (IOPS) using commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) components from LSI and Kingston. The achievement was attained on advanced prototypes built in collaboration with Orange Silicon Valley, a fully owned innovation and research subsidiary of telecom giant Orange. Already widely available, customers can now source this open specification, high performance computing system at a lower cost through Hyve Solutions.

“Kingston is committed to working closely with the industry to help move new technology into mainstream IT to solve complex business problems at an affordable price point.”

Hyve Solutions brought to the partnership with Orange Silicon Valley its technological expertise and the resources to provide additional support during the evaluation and prototyping phases. The goal was to deliver a cost-effective appliance-like system that is capable of processing one million or more I/O transactions per second. Additionally, Orange Silicon Valley was exploring alternatives to database platforms comprised of JBOD-based storage systems with direct attach storage (DAS) using Solid State Drives (SSD) and considered building one with COTS components instead of the more expensive bundled solutions.

With a clear but challenging set of prototype design specifications from Orange Silicon Valley, Hyve Solutions concluded that LSI® was the logical choice for Orange Silicon Valley’s storage controller performance targets due to the range of the LSI’s product portfolio, field-tested reliability, maturity of designs and organizational depth. Hyve’s recommendations included a 1600MHz Sandy Bridge-based platform with eight of the new PCIe 3.0 slots, 128GB of Kingston DDR III, three LSI MegaRAID® SATA SAS 9265-8i RAID controllers and 24 400GB Kingston E100 SSDs to meet Orange Silicon Valley’s requirement for performance, data protection, scalability and cost, all while using the latest, commercially proven technologies.

According to Senior Vice President and General Manager of Hyve Solutions, Steve Ichinaga, “Orange Silicon Valley thought through their technical and business requirements in great detail. We got to work and got creative so we could provide a higher level of consultancy to solve their tough technical problems and exceed their goals.”

In the Hyve Solutions Proof-of-Concept lab, very close to a million IOPS was reached on the first test run. The system was tuned up until 1.8 million IOPS was reached consistently, as measured with IOMeter. System-wide cost savings have been estimated by Orange Silicon Valley to be between 50% and 75%, excluding any benefits that may accrue as a result of the smaller system footprint or lower power and cooling expenses.

“We have exceeded our preconceived notion of a scalability barrier of 1.0 million IOPS – akin to Chuck Yeager’s crossing the sound barrier in 1947. Extreme Computing is now a commodity. Now that we have shown that it can be done, anybody else can build this,” said Christian Eychene, Vice President IT Infrastructure Technologies & Engineering at Orange. “From here, we intend to expand our testing to a more real-world, very high I/O system demanding OLTP use cases. We are benefitting from vastly improved performance as well as considerable cost savings compared to other system configurations,” he concluded.

Users can deploy the MegaRAID SAS 9265-8i in existing HDD-based server environments for significant performance gains. Alternatively, for users implementing hybrid server platforms based on SSD, the next-generation MegaRAID controllers exploit the potential of SSDs for unsurpassed performance and enterprise-class reliability. By using advanced MegaRAID Fast Path software, RAID performance can be boosted further by up to three times.

“Reaching the milestone of over 1.8 million IOPS is a powerful achievement that will vastly improve the user’s experience and ability to access information,” said Charlie Kawwas, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales at LSI. “LSI is committed to delivering industry-leading technology that can accelerate storage applications, from databases to enterprise systems that power the Cloud. LSI is proud to have collaborated with Hyve and Kingston to help achieve this impressive goal.”

"Working with Orange Silicon Valley, LSI and Hyve Solutions to take commercially available off-the-shelf components to achieve this milestone in IOPS delivery was an exciting opportunity,” said Ariel Perez, SSD Business Manager, Kingston. “Kingston is committed to working closely with the industry to help move new technology into mainstream IT to solve complex business problems at an affordable price point."

Visit www.hyvesolutions.com for more information about the same LSI RAID technology as Orange Silicon Valley for your company’s high performance requirements.

About Hyve Solutions

Hyve Solutions, a division of SYNNEX Corporation (NYSE: SNX), is a leader in providing customers with better, purpose-built datacenter servers and storage that are cost effective and built to be specific to actual workloads and datacenter environments. The Company offers highly energy-efficient solutions via its unique role in the Open Compute Project. For more information about Hyve Solutions, visit http://www.hyvesolutions.com, email [e-mail] or call [phone].

About SYNNEX Corporation

SYNNEX Corporation (NYSE: SNX), a Fortune 500 corporation, is a leading business process services company, servicing resellers, retailers and original equipment manufacturers in multiple regions around the world. The Company provides services in IT distribution, supply chain management, contract assembly and business process outsourcing. Founded in 1980, SYNNEX employs over 10,000 full-time and part-time associates worldwide. Additional information about SYNNEX may be found online at www.synnex.com.

Safe Harbor Statement

Statements in this release that are forward-looking, such as product features and capability, product reliability, cost savings, product compatibility, and the success of the collaboration, involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which may cause the Company's actual results in future periods to be materially different from any future performance that may be suggested in this release. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this release.

Copyright 2012 SYNNEX Corporation. All rights reserved. SYNNEX, the SYNNEX Logo, HYVE SOLUTIONS, and all other SYNNEX company, product and services names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of SYNNEX Corporation. SYNNEX and the SYNNEX Logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. Other names and marks are the property of their respective owners.

About Orange

France Telecom-Orange is one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators with sales of 45.3 billion euros for 2011 and has 170,000 employees worldwide at 30 June 2012, including 105,000 employees in France. Present in 33 countries, the Group has a total customer base of 224 million customers at 30 June 2012, including 166 million mobile customers and 15 million broadband internet (ADSL, fibre) customers worldwide. Orange is one of the main European operators for mobile and broadband internet services and, under the brand Orange Business Services, is one of the world leaders in providing telecommunication services to multinational companies.

France Telecom (NYSE:FTE) is listed on NYSE Euronext Paris (compartment A) and on the New York Stock Exchange.

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