Seagate and Newisys Demo Flash Storage Architecture Capable of 1TBps

Seagate and Newisys issued a press release in which they indicate that Seagate Technology plc and Newisys have the industry's fastest flash storage design. 21 Newisys NSS-2601 with dual NSS-HWxEA Storage Server Modules deployed with Seagate's newest SAS 1200.2 SSD drives can be combined in a single 42U rack to achieve block I/O performance of 1TB/s with 5PB of storage.

Each Newisys 2U server with 60 Seagate SSDs is capable of achieving bandwidth of 49GB/s. Newisys is a division of Sanmina Corporation (NASDAQ: SANM) and a leading provider of data center products for enterprise and cloud applications.

"This is one of the highest storage densities ever achieved in the industry, and holds the potential for new breakthroughs in storage system performance," said Brett Pemble, VP and general manager of flash products, Seagate. "Our partnership with Newisys enables us to continue to innovate with how storage is architected." Applications that might benefit most from this flash solution include those where microseconds matter in processing massive amounts of data. These applications might include metadata caches for large data centers, as well as prediction models for financial markets, oil and gas, and weather that are constantly changing and in need of pushing the performance envelope in a constant race against time.

"This solution takes advantage of what high-performance SSDs can offer without sacrificing space, power, cooling or redundancy," said Eugene McCabe, EVP of the Newisys product division at Sanmina. "Crossing the 1TB/s threshold in a single rack while leveraging industry standard products is a major milestone."

The Newisys NSS-2601 enclosure supports 60 2.5" SAS drives and two NSS-HWxEA Storage Server Modules. Each NSS-HWxEA Storage Server Module is a high-performance enterprise class server covering a broad spectrum of cost-performance requirements. The high-availability, ultra-high density platform can be configured as a single socket (HW1EA) or dual socket (HW2EA) server supporting the Intel E5-2600 v3/4 family of Xeon processors. The modules enable 32 12Gb/s SAS lanes each, and the enclosure supports the 12Gb/s data path completely through to the end devices. The solution includes full server redundancy and data-loss protection capabilities.

The Seagate 1200.2 SAS SSD is the first 12Gb/s SAS device to optimize dual-channel throughput with up to 1900MB/s sequential reads and offers multiple endurance choices within a single hardware and firmware design. The 1200.2 SAS SSD protects data from undetected, unintentional corruption and prevents unauthorized access with three levels of security. For enterprise and cloud customers also requiring high data availability, this SSD drive delivers the data integrity required in the event of an unexpected power loss.