IBM revs up SSD performance for enterprise – yay?

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 25 May 2009 13:02

Opinion and Analysis

IBM says that enterprise customers using a combination of its SSDs, servers, hardware and software can bring massive performance boosts while dropping the physical footprint of storage and its energy usage – but how much better (and cheaper) will it be next year?

As the global economic downturn bites into corporate revenues (and those of everyone else), the big enterprise players have been coming out with announcements for new technologies that will save companies money, something that’s handy in these economic times – but only if they buy the latest and greatest.

At face value, it’s a compelling argument: spend some money now to save a lot more now and into the future – (but please, please spend some money now!)

It also sounds like the pitch you get from retailers: spend now… and save!

The entire notion of not spending to save money doesn’t seem to factor into the equation – but then companies are in business to sell things, not to have things sitting in storage and expensive R&D developments going to waste.

To benefit from IBM’s SSD speed-up, you’ll need to be an enterprise that is already using IBM technology – or you’ll need to upgrade/move over to IBM’s offerings.

Once you have all of IBM’s new stuff in place, IBM says that SSD performance can be improved by “up to 800%”, physical storage footprint needs can be reduced by “approximately 80%” and energy consumption can be reduced by “up to 90%”, too.

IBM also reminds us in its press release that its SSD technology is “similar to that used in MP3 players, but on a more advanced and larger scale”, noting that SSD’s can “conduct up to 20,000 transfers per second” compared with a hard drive which can perform “approximately 200 data transfers per second”.

Continued on page 2, please read on!