Virident Doubles Capacity of SSD at 800GB

Virident Systems, Inc. announced that the tachIOn Solid State Disk (SSD) is now available with 800 GBs of usable capacity. This increased capacity doubles the previous maximum capacity in its existing low-profile, half-length form factor.

tachIOn delivers an advantage to customers:

• rated usable capacity without the need to reserve additional memory to cater to heavy write workloads;
• sustained performance (2-10x for random access patterns);
• low power; compact form factor; field upgradability;
• multi-year durability; and
• lower total cost of ownership.

The 800 GB tachIOn SSD comes in the same low-profile (half-height, half-length) PCIe form factor as existing tachIOn configurations that provide 300, 400, and 600 GB of usable capacity. The compact size of tachIOn allows it to take a single slot in existing 1U or 2U servers.

On-card Flash-aware RAID capability extends reliability to the next level for Enterprise SSDs. This capability is implemented across the replaceable Flash modules, with hardware support, for additional data protection and recovery. It augments tachIOn’s advanced end-to-end error correction capabilities and methods for global and local wear leveling.

"With 800 GB of usable capacity and unsurpassed reliability in a compact design, you can imagine a 2U system with 3.2 TB of fast reliable SSDs using only four tachIOn devices in four PCIe slots," said Jan Silverman, vice president and general manager of tachIOn Products at Virident Systems. "Virident is making reliable, scalable SSD storage for enterprise-wide deployment a viable and desirable option."

"Flash is a disruptive technology poised to change the way we tackle scientific problems using computing," says Shane Canon, group lead for NERSC’s Technology Integration Group. "Some of the early potential we see comes from database-driven explorations, such as genomics and astronomical sky surveys."

Magellan’s cloud computing infrastructure is split between NERSC and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Lab. As part of the Magellan at NERSC project, Canon’s group tested the I/O performance of several different solid state memory products, using a standard industry benchmarks.

"In our testing we found Virident’s tachIOn delivered the highest sustained bandwidth compared to the two other enterprise-class flash cards we evaluated," said Canon.

NERSC purchased 20 of the 400GB cards, a total of 8 TB, and is in the process of installing them and making them available to the center’s 3,000-plus researchers.