Blocks & Files Feature: Graid enhances RAID card speed with software update

“Gone are the days of IO bottlenecks… [SupremeRAID™ is] the perfect platform for AI/ML, IoT, video processing, and other performance-hungry business applications.”

Blocks & Files | Chris Mellor | August 23, 2023: Graid Technology Inc., the GPU-powered RAID card startup, says it has accelerated its RAID card speed following a software update.

The company’s SupremeRAID™ card utilizes on-board GPUs for RAID parity calculations and interfaces with a host server through the PCIe bus. The SR1010 model employs a PCIe Gen 4 connection to a host. As the PCIe bus’s link bandwidth expands – moving from Gen 3’s 8Gbps to Gen 4’s 16Gbps, and further to Gen 5’s 32Gbps – the RAID card’s IO speed correspondingly rises. The latest v1.5 software update from Graid introduces support for PCIe 5.

Leander Yu, Graid Technology CEO and president, said: ”Gone are the days of IO bottlenecks … Customers investing in NVMe along with PCIe gen 5 infrastructure will experience unparalleled performance when deploying SupremeRAID to protect their data, giving customers the perfect platform for AI/ML, IoT, video processing, and other performance-hungry business applications.”

The software supports RAID levels 0/1/10/5/6/JBOD while the core software license supports up to 32 native NVMe drives. v1.5 adds support for 8 drive groups, up from 4, better random IO on AMD servers, and support for Oracle Linux.

The updated software enables the card to deliver up to 28 million random read IOPS and a two-fold increase in sequential read bandwidth when attached to a host with dual 96-core AMD EPYC 9654 CPUs, 384GB of memory, and 24 x Kioxia CM7 NVMe SSDs, in RAID 5 and 6 configurations. A full performance spec table shows this and previous speed results:

Alternative RAID hardware cards have lower performance. Broadcom’s MegaRAID 9600 achieves up to 6.4 million random read IOPS in comparison.

At present, Graid offers support for both Linux and Windows hosts. However, current data indicates Windows performance lags behind Linux when deploying the SupremeRAID card. This disparity is expected to decrease as Graid promises enhanced functionality for Linux and improved performance for Windows server hosts in an upcoming software release.

SupremeRAID software v1.5 supports both the SR1010 and SR1000 cards. This update will be accessible to all Graid customers as a complimentary upgrade, irrespective of their procurement channel.

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