Enterprise storage is computer storage designed for high-demand, high-performance and large scale enterprise companies. These environments are usually with-in industries that demands high standards such as the financial, medical, computing and military to name a few. These large-scale, high-technology environments of large OEMs require higher performance, higher scalability, reliability, endurance and a demand for “always-on” devices.
Mid to very large storage systems solutions; fast access, constant and frequent access with increase reliability
Off-line storage for data protection. Usually less expensive than online storage at the same time less demanding in terms of performance
Long term retention of data usually utilized on tape storage medium; cheapest in cost and lowest in performance demands
Data protect and recovery in case of disasters. These solutions are becoming more and more demanding of large scale enterprise as part of continuity plans
STEC Solid State Drives revolutionize the Enterprise storage industry by delivering to the users the ultimate level of performance, security and reliability in a fully integrated device. Known as a leader in flash technology, STEC pioneered the standards for what is a true Enterprise grade solid state drive; Delivering to the industry the first true Enterprise grade SSD, first Tier 0 performances SSD, first SAS enabled enterprise SSD, and many more firsts.
STEC’s SSD Technology is built on a solid foundation of nearly two decades of experience, knowledge, research and innovations. Built for reliability, enabled for performance and structured for quality, these are the attributes that propel every STEC solid state drive, its technology and its team. |
The speed of an Enterprise grade SSD varies from product to product, with our flag-ship ZeusIOPS SSD leading at 45K IOPS to our server enabling MACH8IOPS SSD at 10K+ IOPS. However, sheer speed of a drive is just one aspect of an Enterprise-grade SSD. The ability to perform tasks consistently and maintaining that speed without failure or lost of performance, 24 hrs – 7 days/wk – 365 days/yr is the mark of a true-enterprise ssd. This mentality of “always-on” is what top OEMs are in pursuit of.
STEC SSD is a proven technology with its design fully qualified in almost all major OEMs. The maturity of STEC’s flash technology has enabled SSD within the industry, finding homes in major OEMs such as EMC, SUN, Hitachi and many more. In addition, the reliability and stability of STEC drives are the key components of what OEMs are looking for in an Enterprise SSD. These aspects are perfected at STEC and then improved upon once again to further enable our customers and their solutions. These are the unique values that STEC brings with its solutions. |
Embedded systems can be defined as computer subsystems – e.g. computer mainboards with integrated logic and memory running smaller operating systems – that are integrated into a larger application. Examples include factory automation, kiosks, automotive, and digital signage. Embedded subsystems are typically unique and fairly specialized to the host application they are supporting and often run fairly specialized and compact operating systems including Windows XP Embedded, variations of Linux, or other real-time operating systems (RTOS) like VXWorks or ThreadX.
Embedded systems running these specialized operating systems are typically less sophisticated than standard PC or server architectures and therefore have unique needs, especially as it relates to embedded storage.
From a storage design perspective, STEC addresses many of the flash management challenges posed by NAND flash architecture including:
 Total Drive Wear-Leveling for maximum endurance
Advanced error correction (ECC) to improve data integrity
Power-down data protection to protect against data corruption in the event of an unexpected power loss
This leading flash management capability is enabled by STEC’s proprietary flash controller technology and in-house designs, which include both commercial temperature (0°C to 70°C) and industrial temperature (-40°C to 85°C) support. STEC also uniquely serves the needs of embedded system designers through its focus on industrial OEM customer needs where intangibles like BOM control, product change notifications, ISO 9001 quality procedures, post-sale service and support, and supply-chain management are of great value to managing embedded system designs.
STEC is 100% focused on the needs of embedded and industrial OEM system designers and offers a full line of card and module solutions to meet their unique storage technology and business needs. As a pioneer and leader in the industrial flash storage industry, STEC is uniquely positioned to offer the broadest range of industrial flash storage solutions in the industry. This provides customers with a convenient, one-stop-shop as well as a common flash storage framework for which to design embedded systems around and integrate seamlessly into future applications. Furthermore, because STEC develops its own controller technology and card/module designs, customers can rely on innovative flash storage solutions leveraging next generation interfaces including SATA, PCIe, USB, SD, and other emerging technologies.
Often times embedded subsystems require more configuration flexibility from the memory and storage subsystems so that they can be tuned and manipulated to function correctly. These include things like forced PIO/Memory modes, specific timing parameters, specific LBAs, fixed versus removable storage, unique IDs, etc.
Because STEC owns its own controller technology and card/module designs, this flexibility is easily supported through firmware and hardware design modifications.
This differs significantly from off-the-shelf or outsourced designs using 3rd party controller technology in that customization and design modifications are often very limited. |
Yet another relatively unique requirement in many embedded systems is low power and heat. As many of these systems are part of larger applications, they contribute to the overall power and heat envelope of the host system and are often allocated a maximum power and heat limit. The storage subsystem is again a focus of system designers as traditional PC storage solutions require much higher power than that of smaller solid state storage solutions and also generate more heat that requires the use of cooling fans, adding to the total power required. By contrast; STEC is committed to “green” solid state storage solutions, most of which require less than half the power of traditional PC storage solutions and run much cooler thereby eliminating the need for extra cooling fans (a side benefit being a quieter system). |
Sometimes no larger than a deck of playing cards, embedded systems have relatively unique storage requirements as it relates to available system space. Because of their compact size, many do not support traditional computer storage solutions and must rely on much smaller card or module solutions including CompactFlash, USB, and SecureDigital. Having the ability to manipulate these smaller storage solutions to mimic traditional PC type storage (e.g. use as a boot device to run an embedded OS) is of particular concern to embedded system designers.
STEC supports a full line of flash-based card and module storage solutions. These devices support OS booting to mimic a fixed disk drive allowing embedded system designers to offer true fixed disk alternatives to traditional PC/Server storage solution. |
There are challenges in properly measuring the performance of SSDs as compared to the normal methods applied for years to benchmarking HDDs.
SSDs, while similar, but faster to normal hard disk drives do operate differently.
In the enterprise space knowing these differences in crucial to getting an SSD that will perform as expected consistently and continuously in the demanding environment of the enterprise data center for storage or server applications.
Here STEC is offering you the tools needed to learn about benchmarking SSDs along with the tools to properly precondition and test SSDs.
This document is a primer on why benchmarking properly is important. SSD's often give misleading results when run under industry standard HDD style benchmarks. Empty SSDs run faster than filled SSDs and many benchmarks write repeating or zeros as data that do not deliver real world results when writing actual data to SSDs. This white paper will explain some of the tricks and traps to understand and work around when benchmarking SSDs to get to real "steady state" performance results.
Click Here to download white paper
This tool is recommended to be used prior to running your benchmark software to ensure that the drive is fully filled with randomized data to enable benchmarking the filled or steady state capability of the SSD.
This is a specially modified version of the venerable IOMETER program from the Sourceforge project now creates and writes randomized data during the benchmarking testing (previous versions write either zeros or repeatable data patterns that some SSDs recognize and avoid actual write operations that can generate inaccurate performance results). |
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What's Inside
STEC IOMETER (EXE)
DYNAMO (EXE)
DRIVE PREP (EXE)
DRIVE PREP READ ME (TXT)
IOMETER READ ME (TXT) |
STECtools.zip
ZIP Archive
1.52 MB
5 Files
Last Modified: 12/12/2010
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Click to Download