IBM says it has "changed the game" when it comes to disk storage
performance.
Engineers and researchers at the IBM Hursley development lab in
England and the Almaden Research Center in California, have
demonstrated
"
groundbreaking performance results that outperform the world's
fastest disk storage solution by over 250%", says IBM.
IBM says it has demonstrated the "game-changing impact
solid-state technologies can have on how businesses and
individuals manage and access information".
The results were achieved using Flash solid-state technology
coupled with IBM's scalable storage virtualisation technology.
Under the codename "Project Quicksilver," IBM achieved
impressive results in transferring data at a sustained rate of over
one million Input/Output (I/O) per second, with a response time of
under one millisecond (ms).
Compared to its IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller, which
uses traditional disk storage devices, Quicksilver improved
performance by 250% at less than 1/20th the response time, took up
one-fifth the floor space, and required only 55% of the power and
cooling.
Performance improvements of this magnitude, said Big Blue, can
have profound implications for business, allowing two to three
times the work to complete in a given time frame for classic
workloads, such as reservations systems, financial program trading
systems and analytic solutions.
Solid state storage is an emerging enterprise technology which
uses no moving parts, thus eliminating many of the access delays
associated with electro-mechanical disks.