Solid State Disk Solutions


Virident tachIOn™ Solid State Disk

The widening speed gap between servers and storage hinders application scalability and lowers data center efficiency, slowing down key initiatives such as dynamic cloud computing deployments. This has led to a growing requirement for Tier-0 storage solutions: fast storage that occupies the space between servers and traditional hard-drive storage solutions on the server-side and/or the storage-side. Flash-based SSDs have emerged as a preferred path to address this problem, but until now such SSDs have lacked high or predictable performance and suffered from low reliability, which forces customers to replace their SSDs frequently.

The tachIOn SSD delivers high predictable performance as well as high reliability. It is a revolutionary solid-state disk product that utilizes the industry-standard PCI Express interface and employs an innovative hardware and software architecture for high performance and sustained random IOPS. tachIOn delivers best-in-class performance and enterprise reliability, low power, and plug-and-play ease-of-use for data-intensive workloads such as databases, business analytics, simulation, visualization and high-performance computing.

Combining just two Virident tachIOn PCIe cards with the SGI® Rackable™ C1103 server, customers can achieve 1 million IOPS, a new level of performance and efficiency for data-intensive workloads such as databases, business analytics, simulation, and visualization. With a list price of less than $.05 per IOPS, SGI and Virident can now offer a solution with a form factor that offers greater capacity at one quarter the size of other products in the market, successfully addressing escalating cost and complexity in data centers with leading price and performance.

The compact design of tachIOn enables customers to pack more performance into less space with a half-length, half-height 25 watt PCIe form factor. A single PCIe x8 Gen1 or 2 slot in a 1U or 2U server is sufficient to deliver industry-leading performance while reducing power, cooling and datacenter real estate over competing offerings, contributing to the solution's price/performance leadership.

tachIOn Key Features:

  • PCIe interface to reduce latencies and eliminate I/O bottleneck
  • Sustained, predictable random IOPS – Best in the Industry; 100x faster than Enterprise HDDs
  • Enterprise-grade reliability – Advanced ECC; Dynamic global wear leveling; Hardware Flash-aware RAID
  • Field Serviceability, upgrade path – Replaceable flash modules
  • Industry-leading lifetimes – 24 years at 5TB writes/day; Extend investment with replaceable modules
  • HDD-like capacities – 300GB – 800GB of enterprise-class SSD (SLC); Field upgrade option
  • Support for leading NAND Flash vendors – Samsung, Micron, Toshiba
  • Configurable platform to support OEM channel strategy
  • Easy to deploy and use

With a peak read performance of 1.44 GB/s and a sustained read/write performance of 300K IOPS (1.2 GB/s), the tachIOn SSD leads the market in high performance. Its ability to sustain that performance over time is especially attractive for customers who have prior experience with Flash-based technologies and have seen wide fluctuations in performance over time or based on complex attributes such as the number of active threads in an application, the extent to which an application performs random I/O, or the amount of free space on a particular SSD.

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