SGI and Virident Achieve One Million IO/s in 1U Server

SGI announced a relationship with Virident Systems that delivers breakthrough IOPS performance in an ultra-dense, low-power configuration.

Combining two Virident tachIOn PCIe cards with the SGI Rackable C1103 server, customers can achieve 1 million IOPS, a new level of performance and efficiency for data-intensive workloads such as databases, business analytics, simulation, and visualization.

With a list price of less than $.05 per IOPS, SGI and Virident provide a solution with a form factor that offers greater capacity at one quarter the size of other PCIe-based products in the market, addressing escalating cost and complexity in data centers.
 
The compact design of tachIOn enables customers to pack more performance into less space with a half-length, half-height 25 watt PCIe form factor. A single PCIe x8 Gen1 or 2 slot in a 1U or 2U server is sufficient to deliver performance while reducing power, cooling and datacenter real estate over competing offerings.
 
"Technical computing needs to achieve the highest levels of performance, but also needs to do so in an affordable package that can be managed within the limited space available in most datacenters," said Bill Mannell, VP of product marketing at SGI. "With the combination of SGI servers and the Virident tachIOn SSD, we can achieve both of these goals to provide the most cost-effective and high-performance SSD solution for our customers."
 
This solution enables sustained performance faster than other products on the market such as the Fusion-io ioDrive Octal for random access patterns, lower power, and field Flash upgradability, and is the densest high-performance SLC Flash-based PCIe SSD in the market. it also needs only 800 Gb of operating storage to achieve 1 Million IOPS, versus more than 5 Tb in the Octal, requiring eight drive devices. Enterprise-class reliability is designed in via on-card hardware Flash-aware RAID capability that is implemented across replaceable Flash modules, a feature not available on the Octal.
 
"SGI has always been a world leader in high performance computing with a reputation for immense technical strength. SGI’s endorsement of tachIOn is an important vote of confidence in Virident’s technology strategy and execution," said Kumar Ganapathy, CEO of Virident. "As part of the SGI portfolio, the proven reliability, modularity, ruggedness, and performance of the tachIOn SSD helps customers stay ahead with a solution that eliminates I/O bottlenecks and reduces costs."
 
The tachIOn SSD cards come in usable capacities of 300, 400, 600 and 800 GB, each in a single-slot PCIe Gen 1 or Gen 2, 25 watt card in a low-profile, half-height and half-length form factor. Only two cards were required to achieve 1 million IOPS performance levels in a 1 U server.

The tachIOn SSD is available from SGI, either in stand-alone configurations for existing SGI servers or bundled with new systems.