SGI to leverage SSDs

"Every one of our customers is looking for higher performance from their storage. However, adding IOPS isn't enough -- the drive must be able to withstand enterprise workloads without burning out before the warranty is up," said Jose Reinoso, vice president of storage engineering at SGI. "The CloudSpeed SSDs not only bring great performance to our storage appliances, but also bring high reliability and the ability to withstand common enterprise workloads, giving our customers what they require to drive their businesses further."

To address growing data sets, many enterprise organizations are seeking the improved throughput that SSDs provide. Trying to maximize their storage budget, many organizations unknowingly deploy low-cost, client-class SSDs that are not designed for the write-intensive and mixed workloads typical of enterprise applications. Over time, the performance and latency of these drives is significantly impacted as the controller works harder to correct errors. Furthermore, because client-class drives do not have enterprise reliability features, and leverage standard MLC Flash, they quickly burnout under enterprise workloads which can severely impact the business as data is corrupted.

Certified for use across numerous SGI storage appliance platforms, the CloudSpeed 500 is a Serial ATA (SATA) 6GB/s SSD that delivers consistent performance of up to 500/500MB/s sustained read/write performance and up to 60K/20K random IOPS for the entirety of the five year warranty period. Leveraging the Guardian Technology Platform, a proprietary suite of enterprise features and enterprise-class endurance enhancement technologies, the CloudSpeed 500 SSD delivers industry-leading endurance reaching up to 1,024TBW. The result is the lowest cost per TBW in the industry, and the ability for organizations to avoid the need to constantly rip-and-replace SSDs. In addition, the CloudSpeed 500 SSDs come equipped with a full line of enterprise features, including SMART Storage Systems' third generation backup power circuitry technology, full data path protection, data fail recovery, thermal monitoring and AES 256-bit encryption.

"Far too often, we meet with organizations that have already deployed client-class SSDs in their data centre, and are seeing their storage TCO skyrocket," said John Scaramuzzo, president of SMART Storage Systems. "The CloudSpeed SSD gives the enterprise the best of all worlds, industry-leading performance and reliability at the lowest cost per TBW in the market. Our relationship with SGI will allow us to expand our reach within the enterprise storage market, and help organizations of all sizes meet their storage needs and keep their costs in check."