IBM is one of the biggest names in the high-performance server market and the Armonk, New York-based company continues to pave its way to new performance breakthroughs as it announced a new performance record for its recently released EXP12S System Storage, featuring Solid State Drive Technology. According to the company, the new storage solution has been designed to deliver an enhanced performance level, setting a new performance record based on the Storage Performance Council's new extension to SPC Benchmark 1C (SPC-1C).

The announcement further confirms IBM's commitment to adopt Solid State Drive technology for server systems, following the introduction of the BladeCenter family of x86 servers in 2007, the world's first blades with SSD options.

“IBM has achieved a significant milestone with its solid state drive technology,” said Walter E. Baker, administrator for the Storage Performance Council. “IBM's commitment to supporting independent industry benchmarks, including today's SPC-1C/E, is important to customers and businesses seeking objective and verified benchmark results to help them with their business and datacenter decisions.”

The EXP12S has been released by IBM back in January this year, providing customers with a high-density 2U, 19-inch rack-mountable drive enclosure that can support up to twelve 3.5-inch disk drives, now alternatively supporting up to eight SSDs. With the most recent announcement, the company has managed to set a new performance record of a throughput of 45,000.20 SPC-1C IOPS, with an efficiency level of 121.31 IOPS/watt. The fresh new results have been recorded with the help of the new industry-standard SPC-1C/E benchmark extension, released by SPC.

IBM's storage solution is set to provide customers with new levels of performance and energy efficiency in high-end data system and server solutions. The benchmark was run with the help of an IBM POWER6 server that included the PCI slots meant to support the 1.5GB cache SAS RAID adapter that controlled the SSD in the EXP12S.