Flash Solid State Disks: A New Breed of Enterprise-Class Storage
By Jun Alejo, BiTMICRO Networks

Performance Trends

Strong demand for streaming multimedia content and the escalating amount of data being stored and used by businesses are pushing network storage performance to the limit. In response to these issues, BiTMICRO launched the E-Disk Fibre Channel and Ultra320 SCSI series featuring burst R/W rates of up to 320 MBytes/sec and up to 12,300 random IOPS. In comparison, the fastest 3.5-inch mechanical HDD spinning at 15,000 RPM can only deliver up to 600 random IOPS.

Figure 7 reveals that within an 18-year period, BiTMICRO 3.5-inch solid state flash disks will post more than 20x improvement in sustained random R/W rates peaking at 1.6 GBytes/sec by 2008. In terms of IOPS, flash solid state disks are projected to reach a peak of 240,000 random IOPS (for a 3.5-inch E-Disk 10 Gbits/sec Fibre Channel) by 2008, a 24x improvement within the same time frame.

Similarly, solid state flash disk innovations will also be deployed in 2U rackmount subsystems, providing impressive throughput for enterprise-class applications. Engineering trends strongly indicate the possibility of packing at least 24 (double than current drive densities) 2.5-inch drives by the year 2007, with performance expected again to increase at least threefold in 2008 as the 2nd generation SAS (6 Gbits/sec) SSDs are utilized.

Sustained R/W rates for 2U rackmount systems are expected to improve by a factor of 30, reaching 20 GBytes/sec in 2008. Likewise, random IOPS performance is projected to ramp up drastically, rising from 110,000 in 2004 to 2,000,000 in 2008.

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