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With the release today of the new Intel 710 “Lyndonville” Enterprise SSD (solid state drive) series, Intel has set its eyes firmly on the enterprise sector of the server market. Intel believes SSDs are the way forward for enterprise applications and have, for quite some time, focused a considerable portion of its formidable research and development capability on this sector of the market. Enterprise-grade systems demand high performance, low power consumption and, above all, rock-solid reliability; and it is these requirements, Intel argues, that make SSDs the logical choice for this market sector.

New drives promise better performance, fewer failures

Unlike mechanical hard disk drives, SSDs have no moving parts that can fail, offer significantly higher performance figures, require little or no cooling and have significantly lower power consumption figures. Cost, however, has always been the SSD’s Achilles heel. Intel claims its new SSDs tackle this issue head on and are designed to provide the enterprise sector with a range of SSDs that combine significantly reduced price per gigabyte costs with market-leading levels of endurance.

The new Lyndonville range, being released today, September 14, 2011, will replace Intel’s existing X25-E series of highly successful enterprise-grade SSDs. The new range will continue to exploit the 2.5-inch SATA form-factor and will be available in three capacities: 100, 200 and 300 GB. The 710 drives will fully exploit the 3.0 Gb/s capabilities of the SATA II interface and will make use Intel’s latest high endurance NAND flash memory.

New SSDs are more cost effective

The development of Intel’s latest high endurance flash technology has proved to be a critical step in their drive to to address the price per gigabyte concerns that have long been associated with solid state storage. Standard single-level cell NAND flash memory (SLC NAND) has proved to be highly durable, but extremely expensive. In contrast multi-level cell NAND flash memory (MLC NAND) is far more cost effective in terms of capacity, but does not generally offer the levels of endurance that data-centers and enterprise applications typically demand.

Technology used in Intel 710 SSDs

Intel’s solution to this problem has been the development of a new type of flash memory which they call “high endurance technology multi-level cell NAND” (HET-MLC NAND). These new memory chips are built using a 25-nanometer fabrication process which, Intel claims, delivers the endurance of SLC NAND, the capacity of MLC NAND and significantly reduced costs. These new flash chips are the core of the 710 SSDs and Intel believes they deliver a significant cost advantage over their rivals in this sector of the market.

Performance of Lyndonville SSDs

So how do these units perform? Well, extremely well seems to be the answer. The sequential read speed of the entire range is an impressive 270 MB/s. Sequential write speeds are also very good: up to 170MB/s for the 100 GB model and up to 210 MB/s for the 200 GB and 300 GB units. Because the 710 series uses the 3 Gbps SATA II interface, its 4k random read performance is, unsurprisingly, broadly similar to most SATA II MLC based SSDs at 38,500IOPS (input/output operations per second). However, 8k random read performance does vary across the range: 26,000 IOPS for the 100 GB drive and 27,000 IOPS for the two larger capacity units. Moving up through the range by capacity, the 4k random writes figures are 2300, 2700 and 2000 IOPS respectively, and the 8k random write figures are 1900, 1300 and 1700 IOPS.

Longevity

Finally, endurance: Intel is claiming endurance figures of up to 1.1 PB for the 710 range, and this would seem to suggest that Intel is currently producing the most durable MLC flash memory available today. This, combined with the performance figures detailed above suggests that Intel’s designers have achieved exactly what they set out to do and have delivered a mightily impressive range of SSDs. The new Intel 710 “Lyndonville” Enterprise SSD series is a big step forward for solid state storage and will probably prove to be popular with server builders and enterprise application developers for quite some time.

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