ACADEMIA

GridIron Systems announced a performance breakthrough that enables it to sustain data processing speeds past one million Input/Outputs per second (IOPS) for database workloads using affordable multi-level cell (MLC) Flash technology. To date, enterprises have had to look to devices using more expensive, lower capacity, single level cell (SLC) Flash memory to achieve this level of performance. Obtaining such high performance in products that incorporate MLC Flash 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 dramatically 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 very high performance computing systems that can access data rapidly without being constrained by storage, bandwidth or concurrency limitations.

GridIron's performance breakthrough relies on the firm's unique Set-Ranking™ silicon and software analytics technology to optimize MLC Flash media 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 -- problems faced by competing systems. This enables GridIron solutions to accelerate Big Data workloads while fully 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 high performance Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases and large-scale virtualized environments.