Solid Access Sold its Universal SSD to Investment Bank Samsung Securities

Solid Access Technologies, a provider of I/O acceleration appliances, announced the sale of its Universal Solid State Disk storage device to SAMSUNG Securities Co., Ltd, a full-service investment bank with a focus on wealth management and investment banking. Solid Access earned SAMSUNG Securities’ business after an exhaustive six-month evaluation in competition with other DRAM-based solid state disk vendors and an incumbent Tier 1 RAID supplier. Additionally, Solid Access will be exhibiting the USSD 200 at 2008 High Performance on Wall Street, Monday, September 22nd.

For use within SAMSUNG Securities’ market data processing activities, 28 USSD 200 devices are being integrated with 28 IBM POWER6 570 servers running the IBM AIX operating system. With a 10 microsecond, almost RAM-speed access time, Solid Access provides superior IOPS and data bandwidth performance to tackle the demanding tasks of this critical business function, which requires low latency and high reliability. Meeting these benchmarks plus a track record of zero field failures after two years of 24×7 customer production usage, the USSD 200 met all the requirements of SAMSUNG Securities.

"This sale by Solid Access Technologies of a DRAM SSD solution into the financial space is testimony to the imminent, and significant market presence that SSD is going to have within users and applications that demand the highest performing possible storage systems," said Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "This presence will not be measured in terms of capacity, which is how we’ve traditionally measured storage devices, but will be in terms of raw throughput, delivering truly impressive I/O per $$ and per KW."

The USSD 200 employs the ultra-fast SSD category’s first open architecture design, using only proven industry-standard components in the product’s assembly — allowing Solid Access to rapidly adopt new features and industry advancements. Utilizing DRAM modules as its permanent storage medium and with no moving parts in the data path, a single Solid Access 2U rack mount device requires virtually zero maintenance, far less rack space and only a fraction of typical power and cooling requirements — while delivering the performance of approximately 300 HDDs at a significantly lower cost.

Solid Access partner, NEOframe Inc., Seoul, Korea, was the main driver behind this successful SSD adoption. President Sung Kim stated, "NEOframe’s knowledge of SAMSUNG Securities’ storage requirements led us to believe Solid Access would be a superior solution, which under strenuous testing proved to be true."

The DRAM Solid State Disk category continues to grow as organizations realize the increased performance and TCO savings that can be attained by integrating DRAM SSD with traditional magnetic storage media. "We believe the SAMSUNG Securities – Solid Access transaction may be the single largest private sector adoption of this technology category yet," stated Tomas Havrda, Solid Access Managing Partner.