Intel Targets New SSDs for Mainstream Datacenter Storage
Intel believes its latest solid-state drives are ready for conventional use in datacenters. The company yesterday took the wraps off its S3500 Series SSDs, which it says can be used for apps that require high-read performance.
"Our third generation of products we believe has the right features, the right cost points, the right capability to unleash SSDs into the mainstream of the datacenter," said Rob Crooke, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, speaking at a press conference in New York. "We're getting increasingly broad capability in our solid-state drive product family both in the breadth of the products as well as in features within those products."
Intel's new S3500 Series drives can run in servers and storage racks, and are available in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch configurations, ranging in capacity from 80 GB to 800 GB. Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM have said they will offer the new drives as options for their server lines, Crooke said, adding that Intel worked closely with HP on the design of the new SSDs. Intel's suggested pricing is $115 for a 1.8-inch 80 GB drive and $979 for a 2.5-inch 800 GB SSD.
This third generation of SSDs from Intel is the first based on its 20-nanometer NAND technology and boasts 75k read, 11.5k write IOPS. Crooke said the drives have a maximum read latency of 500 microseconds 99.9 percent of the time, are rated at 2 million hours mean time between failure and include built-in 256-bit encryption.
While Crooke said the SSDs lend themselves well to systems running big data applications as well as for cloud operations, they're also well-suited to everyday systems where IO performance is critical. Crooke said by replacing the direct attached storage in a server running Microsoft's Exchange with traditional SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and SATA hard drives with SSDs, the mail server can go down in size from 6U to 2U with 6x improved responsiveness, while reducing the amount of datacenter space needed by 60 percent and requiring 80 percent less power.
"We actually improve the performance and lower the overall TCO of something as simple as the mail server," Crooke said.
So Intel says SSDs have arrived for the datacenter. Are you ready to opt for SSDs over hard disk drives for your everyday Windows Server-based systems?
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/12/2013 at 1:15 PM