STEC Solid State Drive technology is relieving storage I/O bottlenecks and reshaping the traditional storage paradigm, making storage system architects rethink the way enterprise storage systems are designed.

While server processor speeds have increased on a regular basis over the years, disk drive storage technology has not kept up. While enterprise class hard disk drive (HDD) densities and sequential throughput performance have improved, random access performance gains have been minimal from generation to generation. Storage system manufacturers must aggregate (RAID) hundreds, sometimes thousands of HDDs to achieve the performance requirements of a particular customer application. The typical storage paradigm leaves data starved servers and users waiting for data contained on rotating media hard disk drives. Access latency due to mechanical rotation is the reason most server processors today are underutilized. This is the I/O bottleneck in most configurations. Adding more servers and storage to the problem can help but at significant cost in the form of hardware, software, licensing, energy, cooling and maintenance costs.

In Zeus^IOPS, STEC has created the fastest NAND Flash solid state drive available today. Our advanced, proprietary architecture delivers industry-leading all-around performance but really stands-out in transactional applications. With near-zero access times and sustained random ^IOPS (Inputs/Output per second) at 52,000 for reads and 17,000 for writes, just one Zeus^IOPS drive can replace the transactional performance of more than two-hundred 15,000RPM enterprise class disk drives.

Each of the graphs below represents an application usage model or workload with the benchmarking utility IOMETER. We tested Zeus^IOPS against a leading NAND Flash solid state drive and also against the fastest 15,000 RPM enterprise class disk drive on the market. Each of these workloads is pre-configured to test the drive in a way that effectively simulates a "File Server" or "Web Server" application.