STEC today announced that STEC's Enterprise-class ZeusIOPS Solid State Drives (SSDs) utilized in IBM's Power 595 with PowerVM has set a new record SPC-1 Result with unprecedented performance. The collaboration demonstrates how solid-state drive technology can obtain levels of performance that would otherwise be difficult to achieve without implementing hundreds of spinning drives. Using fewer SSDs significantly reduces the overall footprint of the system design and energy consumption, resulting in substantial benefits to the end-user.

The integration in IBM's Power 595 system, which deploys six STEC ZeusIOPS Solid State Drives (SSDs) within each expansion drawer, achieves an unprecedented 300,993.85 SPC-1 IOPS. While fully mirrored for added data protection, the configuration also utilizes virtualization to greatly reduce the overall footprint without sacrificing capacity (5.8TB raw). Performance of this degree will change the pace and improve the efficiency and costs at which high-transaction businesses such as financial institutions will operate.

"IBM and STEC share a commitment to delivering unrivaled performance to the storage community," said Andrew Walls, Distinguished Engineer, Systems Technology Group, IBM. "Solid-state drive technology can deliver improvements such as ultra-high IOPS, lower energy consumption, and smaller footprints. This is helping to usher in the next-generation of storage systems and we believe STEC has been able to effectively demonstrate the benefits of its ZeusIOPS technology."

"Achieving this level of performance is evidence that an overhaul of major systems or designing entirely new systems to reach world class performance is not necessary," said Manouch Moshayedi, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of STEC. "Together with IBM, we have demonstrated that record performance can be enabled by integrating our ZeusIOPS in existing high-end systems. Through our collaboration and close integration efforts, STEC and IBM have delivered what we believe to be a game-changing product. The legacy approach of building systems for ultra-high performance through conventional RAM technologies will find it difficult to compete as high-powered systems like IBM's Power Series adapt to using SSDs and achieve even better performance."

The ZeusIOPS SSD product family offers a comprehensive array of options for Enterprise system architects and is the world's most broadly deployed SSD technology. Qualified in nearly every major Enterprise OEM, the ZeusIOPS SSD product family provides the right mix of high-performance, quality and reliability that storage leaders require for their mission critical businesses. ZeusIOPS SSD provides a wide range of interface options, spanning SATA, Fibre Channel and SAS, as well as the widest range of capacity options, spanning 73GB to 750GB. Fundamental to the ZeusIOPS product family is the proprietary SSD architecture, which renders an Enterprise-optimized storage device with an unprecedented combination of performance and energy efficiency.