Astute Networks Blade SSD

Astute Networks, Inc. will be featuring its Caspian Edge Storage Blade SSD product integrated with the Sun Netra CT900 ATCA Blade Server at the GSMA Mobile World Congress exhibition in Barcelona, Spain, Feb. 16-19, 2009. The Caspian will be displayed in Sun Microsystems’ booth.

The Astute Networks Caspian Edge Storage Blade has been qualified to operate with solid state drives (SSD) which dramatically increase performance and substantially decrease power consumption over conventional drive technologies. Solid state storage solutions are especially beneficial for telecommunications applications such as wireless data services, video streaming and content delivery where real-time data delivery is required.

Solid state drive technology can dramatically enhance application performance and a user’s quality of experience by eliminating the latency bottlenecks most often associated with standard disk drives. The full capabilities of modern multi-core processors can be obtained without using the traditional remedy of sprawling memory within the servers. Solid state drives have no mechanics and incorporate advanced wear-leveling algorithms, cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and bad-block mapping. Further, they operate at extremely low power, thus contributing to increased mean time before failure (MTBF). The exceptional performance per watt and market-leading reliability of SSD is game-changing technology for the communications industry.

"The ATCA standard is ideally suited for telecommunications environments – specifically wireless infrastructure – and companies like Sun and Astute Networks are at the forefront of implementing solutions to address these specific needs," said Mark Butler, Netra product line director at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The utilization of solid state storage further enhances the performance of the Sun Netra ATCA blade portfolio and allows for hybrid storage pools to be created using the Solaris ZFS file system."

Astute Networks’ Caspian Edge Storage Blade family recently achieved NEBS Level 3 and ETSI certifications and was tested in a standard telecommunications rack mount configuration with the Sun Netra CT900 ATCA Blade Server.

"The business case for the adoption of solid state storage has become stronger as capacity has increased and the cost per gigabyte has diminished," said Mike Heumann, vice president, sales and marketing at Astute Networks, Inc. "In addition to solid state, Astute Networks’ Caspian products support SAS and SATA environments which address the myriad of ATCA applications within our customer base."