News

Solid Data DRAM SSD price drop

posted on 18 June 2008 10:52

Thirty percent cut

Flash solid state drives (SSD) are not the only place where the action is. At the extreme high performance end of the SSD market Solid Data has just cut its DRAM SSD prices by 30 percent.

The cut reflects lower memory chip component costs. It means financial firms, stock exchanges, telcos and media businesses with critical I/O-bound applications will find DRAM SSD accelerators more affordable. They replace hard disk drives and provide near instantaneous response - latencies of less than 10 microseconds - to application storage I/O requests. DRAM SSDs are also faster than flash memory SSDs.

Wade Tuma, CEO of Solid Data Systems, Inc., said: “Systems based around Solid Data SSDs improve efficiency and reduce energy costs in two ways. First, SSDs use significantly less power than rotating storage or in-memory databases. Second, SSDs improve server utilization, which allows for server consolidation, reduced power consumption and a smaller footprint in the data center.”

Tuma said that the traditional approach to increasing storage IOPS rates is by short-stroking drives - only putting data on the outer areas of the platter which the read/write head can reach in a shorter time. A business might buy 10TB of Fibre Channel drives to obtain 1TB of usable fast-access, short-stroked disk space. That would have been roughly equivalent in cost to 1TB of DRAM-based SSD which delivered far more I/Os per second (IOPS).

With the price cut about 5TB of Fibre Channel drives is now roughly equivalent to 1TB of Solid Data's SSD, costing under $500,000. The crossover point at which an amount of DRAM SSD capacity costs the same as that amount of short-stroked Fibre Channel drive capacity is coming down as DRAM prices fall.

Tuma said that his firm was competing against in-memory databases. As soon as these grow larger than a single server can handle than complicated multi-server setups are needed with lots of co-ordination and modified applications. By using a DRAM SSD the applications could be simplified and a single server used once more, reducing cost, complexity and energy costs.

Solid Data’s new pricing is available now.