ioDATA drive promises vastly superior enterprise level read and write performance at a hefty price

Most computer users want faster hard drives to aide in faster boot times and application loading. Solid state drives (SSDs) promised to improve our load times and they did to some degree.

If a measly 64GB solid state drive just doesn’t cut it for your needs, Fusion-io has a new 640GB flash based hard drive that slips into a PCI-Express x4 slot. Fusion-io promises some very swift speeds from the drive in the neighborhood of 600 Mbytes/sec sustained write speed (4000Mbytes/sec random) and 800 Mbytes/sec sustained read (8,000 Mbytes/sec random).

The ioDrive has no moving parts to increase the lifespan and reduce the risk of failure. If more capacity is needed scaling is possible by adding more ioDrive cards to the system. The sustained data transfer rates that Fusion-io promises (PDF) are vastly superior to other enterprise level storage devices on the market such as Ultra SCSI and SAS storage devices.

Supported operating systems include Linux Red Hat AS4.0, Windows Vista and Windows XP. The catch to go along with all of the performance the ioDrive promises is that the 640GB version costs a massive $19,000 USD. Gizmodo is reporting that when the 640GB drive is released in Q1 2008 80GB, 160GB, and 320GB versions will also be available.


Source from DailyTech

Sun Microsystems announced several new server products that offer better virtualization and energy efficiency capabilities, hoping the number of servers in data centers can be reduced.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers, announced today, are the first Sun products to utilize the UltraSPARC T2 processor and offer "record-breaking performance with the highest levels of space and energy efficiency." Though both products support up to 64GB of memory, the T5120 is a 1U product that can equip 64GB of memory; the T5220 is a 2U server designed for eight hard drives.

The T5120 and T5220 carry price tags of $13,995 and $14,995 respectively, with international availability now.

All three products ship with either 1.2GHz or 1.4GHz processors, though the 1.4GHz ships with eight cores while 1.2GHz comes with four or six cores, depending on consumer demands.

Sun recently announced the Sun Fire X4450 and X4150 servers, which use Intel Xeon quad-core processing technology. Both new products can run Solaris, Microsoft Windows, Linux or Vmware.

Virtualization and energy efficiency continue to help drive innovation at Sun Microsystems, with all three systems designed to help consumers provide better performance while using less watts.

“By utilizing virtualization technology and the Solaris OS, customers can consolidate workloads to fewer servers, thereby saving in hardware, management and energy costs,” a Sun spokesperson told DailyTech. “In addition, customers can use the virtualization feature within Solaris 10 (called Containers) for free once they have installed the operating systems for their hardware.”


Source from DailyTech