Company introduces enterprise SSDs, challenges STEC
A start-up in Silicon Valley, Pliant Technology took the wraps off a family of flash storage devices last week and officially entered the solid state drive (SSDs) space.
Pliant’s Lightning Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) are two to four times faster and 10x more reliable than other SSDs on the market, according to company claims. They use a proprietary ASIC to improve performance and reliability, while reducing cost and energy consumption.
Designed for use in enterprise data centers, financial services and high-performance computing, the Lightning EFDs feature a cache-less design in two form factors: 2.5-inch and 3.5 inch Serial Attached SCSI.
According to company claims the 2.5-inch LS has IOPs of 160,000; the 3.5-inch LB has 120,000 IOPs. They have data throughput of 525MB/sec. for the LS and 420MB/sec for the LB. The LS has capacities of 300GB and 150GB; the LB has a 150GB capacity. The are single-level NAND devices.
Pliant’s EFDs are expected to put pressure on STEC, the company that supplies SSDs to EMC, IBM and HP. STEC’s ZeusIOPS drives are also available in Serial Attached SCSI versions, as well as Fibre Channel.
The Pliant Lightning LS300, Lightning LS150 and Lightning LB150 are at present being evaluated at OEMs and are available this month.
Further last week OCZ also released solid state drives for the enterprise. OCZ introduced the Z-Drive PCI-Express solid state drive. The Z-Drive is bootable and employs a four-way RAID 0 configuration. It is available either as single- or multi-level cell. The e84 multi-level cell drive has an 800MBps maximum read throughput, 750MBps on maximum writes and 16,000 IOPs on 4KB random writes. The Z-Drive is available in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities.
