STEC Unveils Industrial-Strength SSD

Solid-state storage drive maker STEC on 20 September introduced a new industrial-strength SSD aimed at enterprises deploying fast and/or continuous read/write workloads that include metadata logging, journaling, and database indexing applications.

The announcement was made at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco at the Moscone Centre.

Ultra-low latency

STEC’s ZeusRAM, which is currently being tested by several high-performance OEMs, will be launched later this fall in a 3.5-inch standard form factor using a native 6Gb SAS interface, said chairman and chief executive Manouch Moshayedi.

In testing, STEC’s new ZeusRAM SSDs have been benchmarked at speeds often below 23 microseconds, Moshayedi said. This ultra-low latency enables the new SSDs to provide network-attached and unified storage appliances high-speed access to both data and metadata, Moshayedi said.

ZeusRAM’s design utilises not only NAND flash but also DRAM to provide power backup in the event of a host system’s power loss, Moshayedi said.

“Conventional storage systems relying solely on DRAM and hard disk drives have been inadequate in handling the explosive growth of data and sophisticated file systems,” Moshayedi said.

STEC is demonstrating the new drive at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 through 24 September.