Many applications in today’s data center are constrained by their ability to access data stored on mechanical disk drives. With fast multicore processors and high speed networks, the common bottleneck is the latency and throughput limitations of disk-based storage. Even the fastest drives available deliver less than 250 IOPS with latency greater than 5 msec. System administrators and IT architects often find themselves over-provisioning disk drives and endlessly tuning to squeeze out incremental performance gains.

Relief has arrived in the form of flash Memory Arrays. A single 10TB array can deliver 250,000 IOPS with latency under 0.1 msec (100 µsec) boosting application performance by a factor of 10 or more. This benefits a wide range of data intensive applications including databases, data warehousing, analytics, messaging, and content management. Commercial high performance computing (HPC) applications seen in industries such as energy exploration and rendering for computer generated imaging (CGI) are constantly looking for higher performance. Large scale file systems like IBM GPFS can see a significant performance increase from speeding up metadata access.

As the data center transforms with increased adoption of virtualization, cloud computing, and the management of big data, storage is increasingly becoming a roadblock. Here are a few examples of how flash Memory Arrays eliminate roadblocks and improve application performance.

Reporting and query acceleration for Oracle Analytics

• Queries complete 90% faster
• Simultaneous queries allowed
• CPU utilization increased by 10x

MySQL Server Consolidation for Social Networking

• Consolidated DB servers 16:1; eliminated 40 DB licenses
• Reduced power and other OPEX by 80%
• Invested cost savings in DR facility development

Metadata Server Acceleration – Perforce

• Operates at >10x client capacity
• 50% lower developer response time
• Dramatically lower operating costs; increased developer productivity

Performance Acceleration for SQL Server Data Warehouse

• Processing time 6x faster
• Consolidated 13 servers to 2
• Eliminated 40 DB licenses

Please see our Customers page for additional case study information. We have also achieved record performance on TPC-C and TPC-E benchmarks. Please visit the Benchmarks page for details.