IBM, Violin Develop Storage System Capable of 5GB/s Transfer Rate

IBM may not be in the picture, but there’s definitely some development in the storage medium space. IBM has been working on some high-speed data storage systems. They along with Violin memory have run a test where a software has processed 10 billion files in a matter of 43 minutes. A similar test scenario with 1 billion files used to take three hours in a test done back in 2007. For the sake of the test IBM used a file system called GPFS (General Parallel File System). The hardware used had some 6.8 TB of Flash memory and a cluster containing 10, eight-core processor powered systems were used. The rigs were connected together by 10/20 Gbps network switches. The resulting performance was a mind-boggling 5 Gigabytes per second. 

Faster than most SSDs out there

To give you some perspective of how fast this is, fast desktop hard drives read data at a speed of a little more than 100 MB/s. One of the key highlights of this demonstration was using Flash memory instead of traditional hard drives, where there’s a longer delay in retrieving data as compared to Flash, which is almost instantaneous.