GridIron Pushes Performance of MLC Flash

GridIron Systems, Inc., in big data acceleration, announced a performance breakthrough that enables it to sustain data processing speeds past one million IOPS for database workloads using affordable MLC flash technology.

To date, enterprises have had to look to devices using more expensive, lower capacity, SLC flash memory to achieve this level of performance. Obtaining such performance in products that incorporate MLC will allow more organizations to capitalize on the big data promise of leveraging value from growing data stores. It also allows data center managers to consolidate their hardware footprint by up to 10X and reduce power by up to 60%, all while increasing the performance of databases and other enterprise applications.

Big data analysis allows organizations to identify hidden opportunities and trends by quickly analyzing large amounts of data from multiple sources. This analysis has the potential to drive better decisions and create new opportunities for businesses. However, analyzing the data requires high performance computing systems that can access data rapidly without being constrained by storage, bandwidth or concurrency limitations.

GridIron’s performance relies on the firm’s Set-Ranking silicon and software analytics technology to optimize MLC for rapid delivery of data. Rather than handling flash media as a substitute for hard disks, GridIron is designing solutions that are built around flash’s special characteristics and capabilities.

For instance, GridIron accesses and configures the flash media to maximize performance while minimizing or completely eliminating issues such as wear, performance degradation or the processing and bandwidth limitations of storage controllers. This enables solutions to accelerate big data workloads while leveraging an organization’s existing storage, servers, databases or applications.

GridIron plans to announce a new type of big data acceleration product that incorporates this MLC flash performance and value breakthrough in the first half of this year.

The new product family will complement the GridIron TurboCharger appliances that are currently deployed in enterprise environments across eight industries to transparently accelerate existing systems such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases and large-scale virtualized environments.