ion‘s SR-71mach6 SpeedServer™ is the sixth generation of the SR-71 platform, ion Computer Systems’ optimized SSD RAID server and represents more than eight years of experience optimizing SSD RAID in servers.
This totally updated product builds on the experience and expertise developed through extensive testing through earlier models while incorporating the latest technological innovations. The “mach6” platform is based on the Intel® S2600WF serverboard with the recently introduced Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the latest Intel Tri-Mode RAID controllers and Intel’s new DC S4500 and S4600 series SSDs. Keeping with the tradition of earlier generations, the base mach6 system is a fully-manageable 2U rack-mount server that consumes less than 500 Watts in the most demanding situations.
The hardware updates in the mach6 server have been combined with new optimization techniques developed by ion to improve the performance of random writes to the all-SSD RAID. The ability to support up to (28) SATA SSDs in larger capacities triples usable, over-provisioned capacity to 81 TiB, assuming 2 RAID 5 arrays each with a hot spare SSD. Alternatively, the “mach6” supports up to (24) P4500 and P4600 NVMe SSDs for extremely low-latency storage while still delivering up to 68TiB RAID 5 capacity. For the ultimate SpeedServer, Intel Optane NVMe SSDs deliver very high performance and very low latency.
Designing an SR-71mach6 SpeedServer with all-SSD storage using SATA and/or NVMe SSDs is facilitated by the SR-71 Configurator. This tool allows the interested server engineer to design an optimized all-SSD server to meet the needs of their application and email themselves a quotation. The Configurator provides the ability to easily configure and price a wide range of SSD RAID capacity with all of the performance benefits of ion‘s SR-71mach6 platform.
There are a wide range of applications that can benefit from performance that would have required thousands of disks but is available in a small, low-power server at the price of storage with tens of disks. Database and transaction processing applications are always among the first to seek a platform capable of more IOPS with lower latency. Static content servers and streaming media servers both deliver sequential data, but many clients randomly accessing those resources stresses a disk-based server just as much as a truly random workload. With no seek latency and no rotational latency, the only limit the SR-71machs SpeedServer has is the amount of network bandwidth available to it.
The SR-71mach6 SpeedServer running Windows Server 2016 and configured with the SSD RAID volumes as standard file shares delivers truly amazing performance, with 64kB random reads delivered at over 10GB per second, 8kB random reads at almost 1,000,000 IOPS and 8kB OLTP (random read/write) performance of 250,000 IOPS. Traditional storage systems delivering even some of those performance metrics cost as much as 50 times the price of the standard SR-71mach6 SpeedServer, occupy multiple data center racks and consume tens of kilowatts.
ion’s SR-71mach5 SpeedServer was named “Winner” for Enterprise Storage in CRN Test Center’s 2015 Products of the Year list. The SR-71mach5 SpeedServer also earned ion the title of 2015 Partner of the Year in the Server Platform Category at Intel Solutions Summit in March 2016.
See the blog pages for more detail on SR-71 server performance and SSD RAID. And visit https://www.ioncomputer.com/ for configurations, pricing and more.