Samsung announced that its 32 gigabyte (GB) and 64 GB solid state drives (SSDs) have been selected for use in the HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade server. This represents the first time that an SSD has been qualified for use in a server optimized for virtualization. The server blade is designed specifically to host virtual machines, and is designed for use in virtualized environments that require significant memory, data storage and network connections to optimize server performance.

By using SSDs instead of hard disk drives, HP is able to free up a significant amount of physical space which can then be allocated for additional DRAM capacity--further improving system performance. The BL495c has 16 DRAM sockets.

"SSDs used as the primary storage medium in server blades provide a much better value proposition than hard drives for the server marketplace, with their added reliability, low-power requirements and high performance," said Jim Elliott, vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor.

"Customers looking to maximize the performance of their virtualized infrastructure have the answer with the BL495c. The use of two ports for SSDs to serve as local booting devices and general configuration storage is one of many features that help customers better manage virtual machines," said Jim Ganthier, director, marketing and solutions, BladeSystem, HP. "With its storage, memory and I/O capabilities, the BL495c is unmatched in redefining server blades for virtualization."

The HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade eliminates performance bottlenecks in virtual machine hosts. Engineered with more memory and I/O than any other two-processor blade server, the new server has a maximum processor speed of 2.3 GHz and a maximum front-side bus speed of 1 GHz, according to HP, and comes with the option of two SATA SSD storage drives (either 32 or 64 GBs).

The Samsung single-level-cell (SLC) SSD has a (sequential) read speed of 100 megabytes per second (MB/s) and a (sequential) write speed of 80 MB/s. The SLC SSD's power consumption is as little as a miniscule 0.5 watt (one-twentieth that of a conventional 15K enterprise rpm hard drive) in active mode and 0.1 watt in sleep mode.