ISS Technology Focus, Number 14

Figure 1-1: SLC and MLC technologies have different endurance, retention, performance,
density, and cost.
HP Enterprise SSDs
In addition to providing high performance, SSDs are far more robust that spinning media
drives against high shock and vibration up to 1000G. HP enterprise class SSDs features
are described below.
Full Data-Path Error Detection
The higher data rates of SSDs can increase the probability that an unreported data bit
error can occur, such as a bit flipping from 1 to 0 if the SSD does not have full data-path
error detection. Enterprise class SSDs and HDDs have full data-path error detection, and
error correction in some cases.
Surprise power loss protection
Power loss protection ensures that if the drive loses power (including hot plug removal),
user data in write cache still writes to the drive and the drive can be ready in a short time.
This allows HP SSDs to avoid the lengthy metadata rebuild process required for SSDs
without power-loss protection.
SmartSSD Wear Gauge support
All HP SSDs incorporate sophisticated features to monitor SSD usage and wear. These
monitoring features enable tools that present information to you on the percentage of life
used and amount of life remaining under the workload-to-date. This information can
validate your choice of SSD for the application and help you with SSD end-of-life
planning.
IO accelerators
I/O accelerators are also based on SLC or MLC NAND flash memory technology. Like
other storage devices, I/O accelerators present themselves as standard block level
storage, allowing applications to access them like other storage volumes. However, an
I/O Accelerator is both a controller and storage device, with its own specialized driver that
translates standard block level I/O into NAND reads and writes. It delivers block I/O
directly across the PCIe bus, resulting in lower latency performance advantages in
particular environments. The I/O accelerator architecture leverages the greater bandwidth
and multi-core processing capabilities of server CPUs to achieve higher block storage
throughput and lower latencies than are possible with a traditional storage stack and drive
controller.
HP enterprise SSD and IO accelerator applications
Not all SSDs are the same, so the HP solid-state storage portfolio includes multiple products
to meet various application needs. Our portfolio consists of four classes of solid-state storage
devices: Enterprise Performance, Enterprise Mainstream, Enterprise Value, and IO
Accelerators. Each class of device meets the requirements of different applications shown in