(Source: MARKETWIRE)SMART Modular Technologies (WWH), Inc. ("SMART" or the "Company") (NASDAQ: SMOD), a leading independent manufacturer of memory modules, solid-state drives, embedded computing subsystems, and TFT-LCD display products, has collaborated with Marvell(R) (NASDAQ: MRVL), a leader in storage, communications, and consumer silicon solutions, to develop SMART's XceedIOPS PCIe solid-state storage solution, the first in a line of products that targets the growing storage market for enterprise applications.

Addressing the top two concerns in enterprise storage today, power and performance, the solid-state design of SMART's XceedIOPS PCIe reduces overall data-center power loading while eliminating the bottlenecks created by differences between the processor bandwidth and performances in rotating storage devices. Featuring a full-height, half-length PCI card form factor, the XceedIOPS PCIe connects directly to any computer platform equipped with an eight-lane or higher PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 slot.

Performance, Reliability, and Flexibility

The XceedIOPS PCIe product achieves fast, reliable performance through industry-standard Flash and DRAM combined with Marvell's PCIe controller devices. SMART's innovative packaging, manufacturing, design, and test capabilities provide a highly reliable, cost-effective, and efficient solution. The new product exploits the 32Gb/s bandwidth of the PCIe interface (8x faster than 4Gb Fiber Channel and 5x faster than SATA 3.0) to deliver industry-leading 140,000 random small block IOPS performance. Offering up to 400GB of single-level cell (SLC) Flash-based solid-state storage, the new solution features exceptional reliability due to state-of-the-art Flash management algorithms and advanced wear-leveling techniques. OEMs that require more flexibility can take advantage of the fine granularity configurability of the XceedIOPS PCIe, which can be populated with two, four, or eight storage nodes with 24GB or 50GB addressable capacity per storage node. This flexibility allows OEMs to configure the optimal storage solution, trading off performance and cost in order to best satisfy the needs of a particular application.

In today's market, enterprise and server-class data center applications that require more than 100,000 IOPS, such as multi-million record databases, social network services, and search engines, are becoming very common. In order to satisfy the operational requirements of these applications, hundreds of short-stroked, enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDDs) are often assembled in an expensive and power-hungry rack-based storage node. Now, the same workload can be fulfilled by a single SMART 400GB XceedIOPS PCIe with the additional benefits of reduced power consumption and higher reliability. For instance, to achieve 140,000 IOPS, a traditional design would require 466 HDDs.