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SSD news - February 2012 - 2nd week

OCZ ships 16TB CloudServ auto caching PCIe SSD

Editor:- February 14, 2012 - OCZ today announced imminent shipments of new high capacity PCIe SSDs optimized for cloud apps.

The Z-Drive R4 CloudServ (which uses 16x SandForce 2581 SSD processors) has up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single full height card and is supported by auto-caching functionality (based on the acquisition of SANRAD's VXL) and OCZ's VCA 2.0 which together enable host migrations without loss of performance or interruption of service.


Tegile enters the SSD ASAP market

Editor:- February 14, 2012 - Tegile announced general availability of its Zebi hybrid storage arrays - which are rackmount SSD ASAPs with internal hard drives and integrated dedupe, compression and snapshot.


Virident and NEC publish new Oracle IOPS benchmark

Editor:- February 14, 2012 - Virident Systems recently published some benchmark results related to the Oracle application accelerator market.

The system was a single Intel Xeon family based (8x 10-core CPU) NEC Express5800/A1080a "GX" server - which had 8x 1.4TB FlashMAX PCIe SSDs installed - (11TB total) . The integrated solution delivered 1.2 million random IOPS and a bandwidth of 9.4 GB/s in real-world Oracle 8k block-size workloads.

Brian Garrett, VP at ESG Lab - the company which did the testing for NEC and Virident said - "Our evaluations of (the products in this system) have revealed that they can eliminate the performance issues common to real-world workloads and deliver extremely high levels of sustained and predictable performance for mixed-application workloads. Virident has addressed the challenges associated with many first-generation PCIe flash devices with the multi-dimensional performance capabilities of its FlashMAX SCM. Most notably, the Virident solution delivers extremely high levels of performance for reads, writes, and a mix of reads and writes."

Editor's comments:- the PCIe SSD market has become the incubator and market proving ground for nearly all the major new advances in high performance SSD architecture and associated memory management. And from time to time all the leading vendors publish new benchmarks to demonstrate just what you can achieve with their products. Although I've warned before about placing too much reliance on any single set of benchmark results - it's interesting to see who is doing how many IOPS with whom and in what context.


NEVEX CacheWorks supports RamSan flash

Editor:- February 8, 2012 - NEVEX today announced that its CacheWorks for Windows Server has been tested and optimized for performance with the new generation of flash SSDs from Texas Memory Systems - in particular the RamSan-70 (a PCIe SSD) and the RamSan-810 (a 1U rackmount SSD).

Dan Scheel, President of TMS said - "By combining our high-bandwidth, low-latency enterprise data storage systems with NEVEX's application optimisation cache software, we provide I/O acceleration for virtualised applications that blows the others out of the water."

Editor's comments:- In 2010 I wrote about the sometimes confusing brand stretch of "RamSan" - as even back then 70% of the SSDs that TMS sold were flash rather RAM - and PCIe was a sizable chunk of the product line mix too.

This software support from NEVEX fills a key functional gap (SSD ASAP) in the TMS route to market. Unlike some other PCIe SSD companies (Fusion-io, OCZ, STEC and Micron) which have acquired SSD software companies in the past year - TMS is still focusing its design efforts on hardware and controller chips - while also grooming itself to look as good as possible for a suitable acquirer.
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