LSI Corporation designs semiconductors storage and  networking in data centers pioneer in innovation, LSI’s experience a not only in building and sustaining l aggressively driving the development a generation technologies for customers.Santhanakrishnan Raman talks about how India is playing a key role in solving one of the greatest challenge facing businesses – “The Data Deluge Gap.” |
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| Can you highlight on the products and innovations LSI has done whole last year? In 2012, the India team has undertaken focused research activities across storage, networking and flash. In the flash space, the whole notion is about providing enhanced application performance that is enhanced while reconciling with the flash device characteristics that are going the other way. For example, one of the things with increasingly smaller geometries in flash is that there are more requirements for error correction. Our R&D teams are focused on developing solutions that address some of these challenges. Another big evolving trend is acceleration of application performance. The PCI-E (Peripheral Component InterconnectExpress) based flash adapter solution is being increasingly deployed. LSI’s solutions are leading in the market in terms of delivering those.How do you see the opportunities in India for new technology creations? We foresee tremendous opportunities across verticals like storage and networking markets and flash as a horizontal technology. Five major inflection points have been driving these tremendous opportunities:
What is your vision on ‘Deep personalization through mobile and social computing’? Mobile technology has enabled us to access In the internet savvy and growing computing world, can you overview the growing usage of data storage requirements? In 2013, big data will continue to be the primary storage will go through a major change as operational costs come down and capital costs begin to creep up. Usage of high-performance flash solid state drives (SSDs) in the enterprise has been slower so far, due to their high price and limited durability compared to hard disk drives. In both storage and networking, there are big |
What are the networking trends in the semiconductor space? For the semiconductor industry, video will drive growth both in the end consumer market (mobile platforms) and the enterprise space (networking industry). In many ways, the backbone to mobility is the cloud. With its network of servers and infrastructure, the cloud is what delivers much of the content and value to all of those mobile devices. Statistics show that we need one server for every 600 smart phones and one server for every 120 tablets. So there is a big need for data centers which can provide support for all the computing and back-end operations. The data network traffic has been growingexponentially at a rate of 30 – 35% annually. When the data grows so much, question on how to tackle this problem arises. The traditional thinking is investments in IT and Telecom but those budgets are only limited to 5 -7% even in a good economic year. So when data network is growing at 30 – 35% exponentially and investments are only growing at 5 – 7%, there is a big gap created. We at LSI call this as “The Data Deluge Gap”. We provide solutions that address this data deluge gap. Our solutions provide what we call “Acceleration through Intelligence”. With our rich portfolio of IP and strong collaboration with our customers, we are engaged right from product architecture stage to deployment. We bring our expertise in storage and networking and provide solutions that address this data deluge gap. Tell us about LSI R&D activities in I n d i a a n d h o w i t h a s b e e n pioneering innovation? LSI delivers a portfolio of storage technology solutions, including flash storage processors for enterprise, cloud, and client flash solutions and solid state drive (SSD) controllers. It also provides solutions for data-centers and mobile networks w h i c h i n c l u d e s a s y m m e t r i c m u l t i – c o r e communications processors, as well as network and media accelerators. LSI has it’s Indian R&D centers in Bangalore and Pune. We have a fairly large presence in India with over 1200 engineers. Being a highly technical company focused on very advanced and complex technologies, research and development is fundamental to our value proposition. Looking at our customer base, we work with the world’s leading OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer), both in storage and networking, who are pushing the emergence of new trends like cloud and mega data centers. Overall system footprint, low-power, storage and access of data, handling larger capacities, and network traffic are some critical pressures that are impinging upon both the data centers as well as the mobile networks. We provide technologies that solve these challenges and so R&D is a very significant aspect of how deliver that value to our customers. We work very closely with our customers from the architecture stage to all the way to the system deployment, and in this continuum there are numerous engineering challenges that one need to adress. That’s why research is very critical for us.Right from designing the semiconductor solution, including the silicon and the software, we always keep power requirements as a hard constraint. Today’s approach to product design is very different from the approach used 3-4 years ago. When we look at the system level requirements that our customers see, we start internalizing them to our deliverables to them and hence we are changing the way we design semi-conductors as well as software across all the products. How do you envision future storage requirements and LSI’s ways to achieve the goal?Flash technology is an exciting space for us. In the server connectivity space, Direct Attach Storage and newer technologies like High Availability solutions are emerging. In the networking space, we have seen the roll-out of 3G and 4G/LTE so we are working on those as well as the next generation technologies that we see would be emerging in the next few years.Our customers provide leading edge solutions whether in the form of servers, storage capacity, wireless infrastructure, enterprise data centers, and everything related to cloud. The approach they take to the market is by analysing how can they provide a better end user experience. As data grows, it is stored and accessed continuously, but the question arises if it can be stored and accessed in an intelligent way and if the application performance be enhanced. When customers have such requirements, they leverage a lot of our solutions to address those requirements. That’s why it is very important for us to emphasize that we are a leading provider of solutions in the storage and networking space and we provide acceleration through intelligence and hence the tagline. |
