OCF has signed an agreement with Texas Memory Systems  (TMS) to accelerate uptake of Solid State Disk (SSD) drives in high performance computing and academia.

Recent research from analysts IHS iSuppli, shows sales for SSD doubled in 2010 to $4.4 billion, with growth being attributed to the enterprise. However, SSD unit sales in comparison to hard disk drives are still small – 15 million versus 161 million.

TMS’ award winning range of SSD products are breaking down the entry barriers to wider SSD adoption, bringing SSDs more in line with hard disk drive costs, whilst delivering significant performance benefits.

In the UK, TMS will appoint a select number of trusted value add partners to help their clients take advantage of SSD’s price/performance, reliability and green credentials. According to TMS the latest SPC-1 benchmark (below) illustrates the way SSD is starting to seriously challenge the 55 year old HDD paradigm. The full life cost of SSD is now at the price and performance point where it can be considered competitive on a £/TB basis against Tier One HDD.

David Lawrence, Sales Director, TMS UK, comments: “We are building a very specialised channel in the UK and appointing only a few, selected partners.”

One key area for us is high performance computing and academia. OCF has delivered and continues to deliver innovative HPC solutions across the UK and they came highly recommended by vendors, peers and colleagues alike. I am a strong believer that academia leads use of the commercial products of tomorrow and I am sure OCF will help TMS achieve its aim of increasing the wider adoption of SDD.”

TMS’ latest SSD, RamSan 630, recently set the Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 world record of 400,503.26 SPC-1 IOPs, combining performance and value at 5 per cent of the previous titleholder’s SPC-1 Price-Performance cost per SPC-1 IOPS. Additionally, it was more than 25 per cent less expensive than the previous titleholder’s cost per gigabyte and its new 900GB PCIe card with performance of 330,000 (4k) Read IOPS and 2GB/s bandwidth is unprecedented in the industry.

Julian Fielden, Managing Director at OCF comments: “TMS is rewriting the SSD rule book.

In the high performance world, reliability, speed, energy and space are paramount.  A typical HPC’s storage element might require hundreds of ‘spinning disks’, putting pressure on the actual space available, and on energy costs. If greater performance can be achieved with less than 50 per cent of the footprint  - potentially using 50 per cent less energy - and at a price closer to that of HDD then it is logical for organisations to consider SSD as their storage solution"