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SandForce makes SSDs cheaper, faster, more reliable -- just how IBM likes it
We've been covering the progression of SandForce for over a year now, creator of smart SSD processors that extend the life of flash storage by better spreading writes across them, boosting performance and reliability along the way. This, according to the company, makes them reliable enough for enterprise use, and IBM has added its vote of support, configuring a 9189 Power 780 server with 56 177GB SSDs (10.5TB in all) sitting behind SandForce's SF-1500 processor. That combination, when running the TPC-C benchmark, delivered a performance of 150,000 transactions per minute per CPU core. That's 50 percent higher (per-core) than other entries in the TPC-C benchmark -- and considerably cheaper, too. IBM's configuration is set to be available around October of this year, perhaps ushering in a new era of the platter-free enterprise.
OCZ Vertex 2 Pro SSD previewed: awesome, and could do with some 6Gbps SATA love
Speedy SSDs might still be a pipe dream for most of us, but at least picking a top brand isn't a challenge. OCZ would no doubt be a popular choice, and SandForce has just made it easier with its debut SSD controller, SF-1500, to be featured on the forthcoming Vertex 2 Pro SSD. Our friends at AnandTech managed to harvest some jaw-dropping results out of their 100GB prototype -- most notably, the drive topped the charts with 2MB sequential performances at around 260MB/s (which is "virtually bound by 3Gbps SATA"), as well as a 50.9MB/s 4KB random write rate. SandForce dubs the magic behind these results DuraWrite, which is likened to real-time compression on the drive thus saving a significant number of write cycles. No prices announced yet, but hey, do we even care any more?
