What is a Solid State Disk?

For the last 30 years computer systems and networks are becoming faster and faster by orders of magnitude as time goes on. In terms of processor clock rates, this is largely true. Storage device performance, however, is relatively stagnant. Storage speed- measured by seek time, operations per second, total bandwidth, and other measurements- has increased at a snail's pace compared to other aspects of computing.

This difference has created a considerably large performance gap over the years, and more often than not computer systems experience some kind of substantial performance bottleneck due to storage devices. In high performance systems, the performance gap is painfully obvious. All the fast servers in the world are wasted if storage can't carry out its orders fast enough. And in situations where "hot-files" and databases are constantly read from or written to by multiple sources across a network, this bottleneck creates a serious emergency for the entire network infrastructure.

Storage speeds lag behind processors because most storage is constrained by physical considerations. A magnetic, spinning disk must be written to or read from by a physical arm traveling across the disk. Precious milliseconds go by as one part starts to spin up, then another moves to the appropriate area.

Enter solid state disks. Solid state disks solve the problem of physical constraints by replacing hard disk drives with high speed circuitry. Instead of a rotating disk, a solid state disk uses memory chips (typically DDRRAM) to read and write data. Solid state disks allow storage to catch up with the rest of the computing world. Power-All Networks uses DDR RAM but in a multi-channel configuration to effectively read and write to memory chips in parallel. This parallel access enables a multi-fold increase in performance over regular DDR RAM. Power-All Networks Solid State Storage (PAN SSS) has a transfer rate of 6400 Megabytes per second (over 138 times faster than a hard drive). The result is full utilization of existing processors. In fact, the Power-All Networks larger SSS called the Clustered SSS is faster than the main memory of any single server. Instead of allowing expensive servers to constantly sit and wait for hard disk drives your servers are busy increasing performance and operations per second. When servers are doing more transactions every day, the bottom line is directly improved.

The immediate concern voiced about solid state disks regards data persistence and volatility. Unlike magnetic disk drives, SDRAM-based disks require power to maintain their data. The solution to this is surprisingly simple: solid state disks includes backup batteries and backup hard disk drives so that any data written to the SDRAM can be mirrored to or backed-up onto these drives. Power-All Networks Solid State Storage (SSS) are designed to perfectly full-fill this need. Power-All Networks SSS is the highest performance storage and does not only outperform the fastest conventional drives hundreds of times over, but are many times faster than the closest competitor. For larger size requirements, Power-All Networks Clustered Solid State Storage (CSSS) provides a linear and massively scalable approach. Starting with 5 nodes (80 Gigabytes) and 32,000 Megabyte per second throughput, the CSSS can increase in size by adding additional nodes (32 GB each). Up to 1000 nodes may be used in the CSSS. Furthermore, the addition of each node increases throughput by another 6,400 Megabytes per second. Power-All networks SSS outperforms all other brands of solid state disks while remaining affordable and scalable.

Power-All Networks SSS is the highest performance storage. No other storage unit can match the raw performance or provide the massive scalability.

*Note:
- Hard Drive: Seagate 37GB Cheetah ST336607LW 10,000RPM
- RAID 5: Adaptec Ultra 320 SCSI RAID-5 Card 39320D-R , 4 x Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 Ultra320 SCSI Hard Drives
- Power-All SSS: Power-All Networks Solid State Storage
- Power-All CSSS: Power-All Networks Clustered Solid State Storage (5 nodes)