OakGate Technology, Inc., supplier of testing tools for IT technology providers, announced that its independent benchmark testing of Pliant Technology's Lightning Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) confirmed significantly faster system I/O performance levels than previously achieved by any other I/O solution. Lightning EFDs are a new class of storage drives for data centers, enterprise IT and other HPC (high-performance computing) environments.



Based on the results of the OakGate benchmark testing, a configuration of 16 Lightning LS 300S EFDs achieved an unprecedented 1.1 million IOPS (Input/Output Per Second) performance in a real-world data center configuration, with a read/write ratio of 80 percent to 20 percent in 4KB blocks. The testing further revealed that the Lightning drive is capable of reaching 2.3 million IOPS and higher, based on 100-percent reads in 512B blocks. With this type of breakthrough in sustainable performance, Lightning EFDs provide an opportunity for data center IT infrastructure and system providers to do more for less - achieve significantly higher system performance with less power, lower cost and a smaller footprint.

OakGate Technology's CEO and founder, Bob Weisickle, produced a three-part online video detailing three different benchmarks he ran on the Lightning drives, and reviewing the testing process, methodology and results.

The videos can be viewed on YouTube:

• Benchmark 1: Real-world Workload
• Benchmark 2: Maximum I/O Rate
• Benchmark 3: Maximum Bandwidth
• Benchmarks 1-3 (complete version)

"OakGate's new FireOak System Validation Framework test environment was designed to accurately replicate a real-world enterprise IT infrastructure, measuring the I/O throughput levels required by today's most demanding applications," said Bob Weisickle, CEO and founder of OakGate. "With FireOak, we've created a must-have tool for IT system and storage vendors to validate their performance claims. We tested Lightning EFDs under conditions that closely mirrored the data throughput demands of today's mission-critical data centers, and found that the devices not only met Pliant's performance measurements, but well exceeded our own expectations."

"Even more impressive was the fact that these phenomenal performance numbers remained stable and consistent over time, which is a critical requirement for today's mission-critical 24x7 data centers," continued Weisickle. "I haven't seen this level of sustained performance from any other SSD device currently available."

The innovative design of Pliant's Lightning EFD improves performance and reliability of SAS storage and IT systems, while significantly reducing cost, space requirements and energy consumption. Lightning EFDs deliver the industry's highest sustained performance with the most predictable performance profile across a wide range of read/write workloads, and have been specifically designed for demanding 24x7 applications.

"OakGate's independent testing confirmed the game-changing performance and predictable performance profile of our Lightning EFDs," said Amyl Ahola, CEO of Pliant. "By achieving new levels of I/O performance, we're providing IT managers and system architects with tremendous new flexibility to develop dramatically faster, more reliable and more efficient storage and computing systems."

Testing Methodology
Two ZT Systems dual quad core Xeon Linux platforms were used in the Lightning EFD testing process, each running the OakGate FireOak test suite, which was controlled by Java-based GUI running on a Windows XP operating system. Each system included 4 Adaptec 1045 SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) HBAs (Host Bus Adapters), with each HBA connected to two Pliant 3.5-inch, 300GB Lightning LS 300S EFDs.