Server manufacturers are rushing to incorporate solid state drive technology into their servers. Sun led the way by announcing that they would add SSDs into their x64-based Galaxy servers, its Sparc T servers and into its Sun Blade servers. At the moment, Sun is using Intel’s X-25E Serial ATA with 32GB capacity, the same SSD that EqualLogic, Pillar Data and Panasas have added to their storage systems.
All these SSDs are single level cell – they have 250MBps read performance and 170MBps write performance. And they deliver 3,500 IOPs on reads and 3,300 IOPs on writes, according to the Intel specs.
Sun has also tweaked its Zettabyte File System to accept the added performance of SSDs.
HP to its own benefit is adding SSDs to its HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade server. The company is using Samsung’s 32G and 64GB Serial ATA SSDs, which show 100MBps read performance and 80MBps write performance. They also deliver 25,000 IOPS on reads and 6,000 IOPS on writes.
In the HP ProLiant BL495c, the SSDs function as boot drives.
Both HP and IBM have partnered with Fusion-IO, which makes an add-in adapter equipped with SSD. IBM is also adding the STEC Zeus IOPs SAS interface SSD into its Power Series servers.
Dell has also jumped on the SSD bandwagon with its PowerEdge M600 and M605 blade servers.
