ion SR-71mach6 adds Enthusiast-series Optane™ drive options

ion has added a new option to its SR-71mach6 SpeedServer™ Configurator to allow the selection of Intel® Optane™ SSDs from the 905P Enthusiast series. Compared to Intel’s Optane DC P4800X series, this family continues to deliver an Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate (UBER) of 1 sector per 10^17 bits read but the endurance drops from an astounding 60 full drive writes per day to only Continue reading ion SR-71mach6 adds Enthusiast-series Optane™ drive options

ion miniSERVER

Most “server” deployments deserve a rich, robust server platform with redundant power, redundant cooling, redundant storage, multiple network paths and error-correcting memory, but many servers already have redundant applications and redundant data.  In some of these deployments it then becomes reasonable to consider a small, cool, low-power alternative approach with redundant storage and two network interfaces for redundant communications. ion calls that a miniSERVER. Continue reading ion miniSERVER

ion P-series Servers with Intel Xeon Scalable Processors

Servers based on Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, the proccesor architecture known as “Skylake”, have arrived! ion is producing 1U and 2U rackmount servers along with pedestal/4U servers and high density half-U compute nodes. These servers feature much improved capability for NVMe SSDs and significantly higher memory bandwidth, along with options for more cores and higher clock speeds. Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors include a number Continue reading ion P-series Servers with Intel Xeon Scalable Processors

Observations on NVMe SSDs in Server Applications

2019 Update: Intel Xeon Scalable Processors have added significant support for NVMe SSDs.  We believe that these improvements make NVMe SSDs the high performance storage approach of choice, but have not yet been able to complete testing of that theory.  Our recommendations at this point are to use NVMe where performance matters.  And where the highest level of performance with the lowest possible latency Continue reading Observations on NVMe SSDs in Server Applications