HURSLEY, ENGLAND and SAN JOSE, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 08/28/08 -- Engineers and researchers
at the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Hursley development lab in England and the Almaden
Research Center in California have demonstrated groundbreaking performance
results that outperform the world's fastest disk storage solution by over
250(1) percent. IBM has demonstrated, for the first time, the game-changing
impact solid-state technologies can have on how businesses and individuals
manage and access information.
The results were achieved using Flash solid-state technology coupled with
IBM's industry leading, highly scalable storage virtualization technology.
Under the codename "Project Quicksilver," IBM achieved groundbreaking
results in transferring data at a sustained rate of over one million
Input/Output (I/O) per second -- with a response time of under one
millisecond (ms). Compared to the fastest industry benchmarked disk
system(1) Quicksilver improved performance by 250 percent at less than
1/20th the response time, took up 1/5th the floor space and required only
55 percent of the power and cooling.
Performance improvements of this magnitude can have profound implications
for business, allowing 2-3 times the work to complete in a given timeframe
for classic workloads, enabling tremendous efficiency for time sensitive
applications like reservations systems, and financial program trading
systems, and creating opportunity for entirely new insights in information
warehouses and analytic solutions.
IBM is driving a comprehensive approach to leverage solid state storage,
which is an emerging enterprise technology that has no moving parts, thus
eliminating many of the access delays associated with electro-mechanical
disks. Technology leadership for IBM is rooted in 15 consecutive years of
U.S. patent leadership, unmatched by any competitor in the world today.
IBM continues to develop, integrate and optimize solid state storage into
the broad range of applications, middleware, operating systems and hardware
in their storage and server offerings, well beyond a simple replacement of
disk.
As an example, IBM's first to-market implementation of solid-state drives
for select IBM BladeCenter servers has been available since June of 2007,
enabling customers to experience enhanced reliability. The ongoing
cross-IBM initiative promises significant energy savings and dramatic I/O
performance improvements. Additionally, by deploying automated management
capabilities, IBM is creating fully integrated information infrastructures
that can deliver significant customer benefit.
"The ultimate benefits of solid state will require software, management and
systems capabilities -- with IBM being uniquely positioned, with its deep
research and development capabilities and broad product and services
experience, to unlock that potential," said Andy Monshaw, General Manager,
IBM System Storage. "IBM is integrating this technology with systems and
applications so that companies can achieve real business value from
solid-state disk. Quicksilver is a significant step forward in this
comprehensive systems strategy. This is not about replacing today's hard
disk drive with a new form factor, this is about having a complete,
end-to-end systems approach -- and that's not something EMC, HP or Sun can
match."
Research Innovation with Solid-State Technology
IBM has a decades-long proven track record in system innovation including
the memory chip, the hard disk drive and the relational database. As the
leader in solutions which blend tiers of storage, and 15 consecutive years
of U.S. patent leadership and innovation, IBM Research has developed
breakthrough data center provisioning technology that automatically
understands and balances the utilization of diverse storage components in
the information infrastructure, including solid-state storage.
Additionally, to get the most value from high performance system resources
in storage, IBM Research patented key technologies that help maintain
required quality-of-service for higher priority applications.
Quicksilver is part of IBM's focus on leveraging new and emerging systems
technologies to deliver advanced data center capabilities and business
value to customers. IBM is committed to develop solid state storage to
create real-world uses across a broad range of applications, middleware,
and systems offerings.
IBM, System Storage, and the IBM logo are trademarks or registered
trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. For a list of
additional IBM trademarks, see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
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