SMART's XceedIOPS SSDs Featured in IBM POWER7 Supercomputer

SMART Modular Technologies, Inc., an independent designer, manufacturer and supplier of electronic subsystems to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), has revealed that its XceedIOPS SAS (News - Alert) 2.5" solid state drive (SSD) will be deployed in the development of the IBM (News - Alert) POWER7 high-performance supercomputer.

Providing over 500 standard and customized products to OEMs in various sectors such as computer, enterprise, industrial, networking, gaming, aerospace, defense, embedded applications and telecommunications, the company offers a wide range of products including DRAM, SRAM and flash memory in various form factors.

Within the IBM supercomputer, these drives will offer much enhanced performance in comparison to hard disk drives, which will successfully meet the critical data management requirements of this system. For supercomputing applications, storage solutions offering longer lifetimes with high levels of reliability and data integrity under adverse operating environments are needed. The XceedIOPS SAS SSD by SMART leverages enhanced 34nm Enterprise-grade Multi-Level-Cell NAND flash technology that offers better endurance and a minimum operational life of five years. The drive is also equipped with advanced error-correction and detection features, multi-level data-path and code protection, data-loss recovery and active thermal management; which help in ensuring enhanced reliability and data integrity to the users. A few days back, the IBM POWER7 supercomputer featuring SMART’s XceedIOPS SAS SSDs had been displayed at the SC10 show in New Orleans.

“Products like the IBM POWER7 supercomputer are defining leading-edge computing and serve as an excellent example of how the combination of performance, price, reliability, and endurance in the XceedIOPS SAS SSD enables the development of an entirely new class of application platforms,” commented John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager of the Storage Business Unit of SMART. “The selection criterion for SSDs has moved beyond HDD replacement, as innovative designers such as those at IBM use the qualities of enterprise-grade SSDs to significantly enhance their products' performance, data integrity, and reliability.”

In October 2010, SMART Modular Technologies (News - Alert) announced it would begin production-quantity shipments of its 16GB very low-profile CoolFlex registered DIMM. The 16GB VLP CoolFlex RDIMM by SMART features a quad-rank configuration that uses mainstream 4Gb DDR3 DRAMs and is designed to support up to a 1600MHz data rate.