Startup releases uber-fast, efficient enterprise-class SSDs
Pliant Technology claims that its solid-state drives offer more than twice the input/output operations per second as rival drives
Pliant Technology today released its first series of enterprise-class solid-state disk (SSD) drives based on a proprietary ASIC design that the company claims can handle -- without using any cache -- more than twice the input/output operations per second (IOPS) as the top competitive drives.
The first two two enterprise flash drive (EFDs), the EFD LS and EFD LB models, are 3.5- and 2.5-inch drives that can produce up to 180,000 IOPS and 140,000 IOPS respectively. The 3.5-inch drive can produce up to to 500MBps sustained read or 320MBps write rates and the 2.5-inch up to 420MBps read and 220MBps write rates, Pliant said.
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"Put it on a log application and write to it as hard as you want for five years -- it will run 24/7 for at least that long," said Greg Goelz, vice president of marketing at the three-year-old startup.
Pliant also claims there is no limit to the number of writes that can be performed to the drive and that it will work without slowdown for at least five years. The drives are aimed at equipment manufacturers such as EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, and Sun Microsystems, the company said.
"They're able to claim some pretty solid performance numbers on read and writes and they're also able to claim unlimited program and erase [write/erase] cycles," said Joseph Unsworth, research director for NAND flash semi-conductors at Gartner Inc. "That's big. In an enterprise environment, that's one of the major concerns: The wear out of the SSD."
Most enterprise-class SSD companies today use Fibre Channel connectivity. Pliant's first products use serial-attached SCSI (SAS), which most industry observers believe is the interconnect of the future for servers and storage arrays. "You don't want to saturate your [server] CPU cores and then find out we have this great SSD but the bottleneck is now the interface," Unsworth said. "It's all about speed."
SAS currently supports 6Gbps data transfer speeds and its road map indicates 12Gbps rate by by 2012. Fibre Channel drives are currently capable of 4Gbps data transfer speeds, and while Fibre Channel switches and interface cards are now emerging with 8Gbps speeds. SAS is eclipsing those speeds at the device level.
"Six gigabit SAS in terms of data throughput is going to be the performance leader," said Jeff Janukowicz, a flash memory analyst with IDC in Framingham, Mass. STEC, the top provider today of enterprise-class SSDs, recently announced its own SAS model. But even that next-generation product produces a maximum of 80,000 IOPS compared with Pliant's 180,000 IOPS.
Pliant's SSD controller architecture is not vastly different from those of other high-end SSD manufacturers. It has 12 independent I/O channels to interleaved single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash chips from Samsung Corp. The drives are configured as RAID 0 for increased performance and the controller.
Most enterprise-class SSDs today also use a general purpose field programmable gate array (FPGA) controllers as opposed to Pliant's custom controller, which is programmed specifically to address SSD issues, such as wear leveling (spreading writes more evenly throughout the memory) and write amplification (reducing the number of operations required for a write), according to analysts.
