14 DAY TRIAL // As social networks, mobile applications, web TV and online video services become far more important in our day to day life, the storage solutions used by large content providers and cloud-computing services need to move to faster performing drives such as SSDs, Hitachi just announcing the Ultrastar SSD400S family build with Intel NAND flash memory for this exact purpose.
Coming in 100GB, 200GB and 400GB capacities, these new enterprise SSDs feature both 2.5-inch 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 3.5-inch 4Gb/s Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces and are capable of achieving speeds of up to 535MB/s read and 500MB/s write when paired with an 6Gb/s SAS connection.
Going for a fiber channel interface will bring these numbers down, although these solutions can still go up to 390MB/s read and 340MB/s write throughput with 4Gb/s FC, an equally impressive result especially considering the high IOPS count claimed by Hitachi for the Ultrastar SSD400S family (up to 46,000 read and 13,000 sustained write IOPS).
But speed is only a small part of the equation, since enterprise drives also need to be dependable, Hitachi saying that thanks to its proprietary endurance firmware and power loss management techniques the 400GB SSD can endure up to 35 petabytes (1 PB equals 1000TB) of random writes over the life of the drive, which is the equivalent of writing 19.2TB/day for five years straight.
“Hitachi’s strategic investment and commitment in the enterprise market is evident with the new Ultrastar SSD family.
Our new SSD product family not only symbolizes our market opportunity to serve evolving cloud data center infrastructures, but also delivers value to our customers in terms of increasing data center performance and reducing total cost of ownership,” said Mike Cordano, executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing, Hitachi GST.
“We have a strong track record of working with global enterprise customers and are proud to report favorable responses to the Ultrastar SSD400S family.
With qualifications now underway, we anticipate volume shipments to commence in the first half of 2011,” concluded the company's rep.