Solid state drive technology for ProLiant servers

9
SAS channels and no Smart Array controller front end, the only physical restraint to throughput is the
bandwidth of the PCIe bus.
HP PCIe IO Accelerator models
HP delivers the PCIe IO Accelerator in two different product configurations – the ioDrive and the
ioDrive Duo. The ioDrive is a low-profile PCIe x4 device available with either 160 GB of SLC NAND
memory or 320 GB of MLC NAND.
The ioDrive Duo, at the hardware level, consists of two separate NAND storage devices. The device
driver presents a single storage volume to the operating system and applications. This architecture,
combined with the wider PCIe x8 interconnect, allow the ioDrive Duo to deliver still better I/O
performance that the ioDrive. The 320 GB ioDrive Duo delivers the best performance of all models
since it uses SLC NAND combined with the wider bandwidth of the ioDrive Duo architecture.
HP PCIe IO Accelerator performance
The HP PCIe IO Accelerator products provide extremely fast block storage performance for those
application environments that can benefit from extremely high IOPs and throughput performance
combined with very low latencies. These include, but are not limited to, the following:
 Database and Database acceleration
 Web servers
 Video, rendering, animation
Table 6 provides a look at the key performance characteristics of these devices.
Table 6. IoDrive performance
HP 160 GB ioDrive HP 320 GB ioDrive Duo HP 640 GB ioDrive Duo
NAND Type
SLC SLC MLC
Seque
ntial write throughput
(32k blocks)
670 MB/s 1.4 GB/s 1.0 GB/s
Sequential read throughput
(32k blocks)
750 MB/s 1.5 GB/s 1.4 GB/s
IOPs
(4k random reads)
116,000 185,000 122,000
Read access latency 26 microseconds 50 microseconds 80 microseconds
Summary
Solid state storage products that use NAND flash memory are a new, rapidly evolving class of
products for ProLiant servers. Today, the primary use for solid state storage products is in application
environments with significantly greater random IOPs performance requirements than traditional
spinning media can deliver. HP solid state drives are capable of delivering significantly improved I/O
performance while seamlessly integrating with the Smart Array storage environment and all of its
features, including hardware-based RAID and the ability to hot-plug drives. HP IO Accelerators are a
new class of block storage devices designed to provide the maximum possible storage I/O
throughput by operating directly across the PCIe bus.