IBM pushes solid state drives to Power servers

Customers will rely on hybrid storage environments using both SSDs and traditional disks

IBM has announced new solid state drive (SSD) products, designed to help firms reduce costs and improve memory response times across its Power hardware platforms.

The firm said that, based on its own testing, it expected to see huge performance boosts in user systems, while the drives would also have a dramatic impact on the physical footprint of storage facilities.

"The new offerings can improve performance by up to 800 per cent, while also reducing the physical footprint of the amount of storage needed by approximately 80 per cent, and energy consumption by up to 90 per cent," IBM said in a statement.

"As it has no moving parts, or spinning disks, such as used in traditional storage, solid-state storage technology can conduct up to 20,000 transfers per second compared to one hard drive disk at approximately 200 data transfers per second.

"IBM is unveiling a more targeted approach than other SSD hardware vendors to implement Flash technology by leveraging and integrating IBM's hardware, software and research expertise."

As well as giving users the option to run SSDs on Power systems, the vendor announced software management tools for the technology. These included the IBM Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem and SSD Data Balancer, which it said would let administrators back up and save data to drives on IBM zSeries and DS8000 servers with ease.

IBM said it does not expect SSDs to completely replace other more conventional storage methods, adding that customers would favour hybrid environments using both SSDs and traditional disks.