Solid Access Entering Into SSD NAS (With 10GbE, Up to 2.4GB)

Solid Access Technologies LLC announced its first offering in the Flash (NAND) Solid State Disk marketplace. The Universal Network-Attached Storage (UNAS) device builds on the company’s Universal Solid State Disk (USSD) DRAM SSD products to provide performance and reliability for Flash SSD implementations supporting NAS infrastructures.

Until now, organizations using NAS-based storage have been limited to ‘add in’ Flash drives to existing RAID enclosures or MLC-based offerings for their Ethernet-based infrastructure. Solid Access is changing the equation by offering a purpose-built 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) solution for truly high performance NAS-based application requirements. Providing 1.2 or 2.4 TB of available storage capacity in a 2U rack-mount enclosure, the Solid Access UNAS 100 Series storage solution provides up to 1,000 MB/s bandwidth performance.

"With the increasing adoption of 10GbE, the higher performance of SSD over traditional disk-based storage now provides practical relevance for IOPS and bandwidth-hungry applications for Ethernet-based networks," said Storage Strategies NOW, Senior Analyst James E. Bagley.

As an eight year provider of DRAM SSD technology, operating in demanding 24×7 installations worldwide, Solid Access UNAS devices employ SLC Flash storage modules for sustained, predictable throughput and superior reliability over MLC technology. In addition, each UNAS appliance comes standard with either 64 GB (1.2 TB capacity) or 96 GB (2.4 TB capacity) of DRAM cache, for additional performance in mixed Read/Write scenarios and added Flash drive Write protection. To best match workload requirements, UNAS appliances can be adjusted to the optimal Read/Write mix to most effectively utilize the on board DRAM Cache.

U.S. Patent Award
Solid Access Technologies has been awarded a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office covering its Universal Solid State Disk products. The patent on DRAM Solid State Disk technology recognizes its innovative use of standardized architecture and components.

Previous generations of DRAM SSD technology embrace proprietary architecture and hardware components, meaning R&D expenditures for on-going hardware and software integration efforts, and internal hardware itself, have added significant costs and, potentially, suspect reliability of custom engineered and manufactured internal components.

Solid Access’s breakthrough, beginning with initial design in 2002, and product introduction in 2003, has been to conceptualize, design, develop and revise an open architecture approach for DRAM SSD storage offerings, employing compact, flexible firmware to integrate commercially available hardware components into ultra high performance storage sub-systems tabbed I/O Accelerators.

This leap in DRAM SSD architecture
serves two key advantages:

1. Drive down the cost of the fastest storage technology currently in production worldwide;
2. Provide an architecture than can rapidly adapt to, and integrate with, technological changes in the overall market.

While other storage technologies have been receiving the lion’s share of publicity recently, no one is claiming any storage performance capabilities that can beat DRAM SSD in a head to head comparison. Additionally, customers have stated to Solid Access their USSD devices are faster than any other vendors’ products tested, using the same or different storage technology approaches, meaning Solid Access can lay claim to offering the fastest storage products in the world via customer benchmarks.

"Organizations are continuing to adopt or add additional capacity to their DRAM SSD investments for mission critical, ‘succeed or fail’ uses requiring sustained, predictable performance. In this way, DRAM SSD is still the king of performance for OLTP and other write-intensive workloads ingesting high data volumes," said Solid Access Managing Partner, Tomas Havrda.

Solid Access Technologies will exhibit at the upcoming SIFMA Financial Services Technology Expo, June 22-24, at the Hilton New York, New York City.