Samsung SSDs Offered On All HP ProLiant G6 Servers

Hewlett-Packard is offering Samsung Electronics solid-state drives asan option across HP ProLiant G6 rack, tower and blade servers. Solid-state drives are more expensive than hard-disk drives, but costsare lower over time. They're faster, more reliable, smaller, anduse less power, HP says. Nevertheless, HP argues that SSDs will lower costs over time."Samsung's latest SSD technology coupled with HP ProLiant serversdelivers energy-efficient server platforms to enable customers to slashtheir power usage and reduce costs," Jim Ganthier, VP of marketing forHP x86 servers, said in a statement.

Samsung's 60 GB and 120 GB SSDs will also be available with select ProLiant G5 servers, the companies said Thursday. The advantages of the SSDs over hard-disk drives include lower power usage, higher performance, and better reliability. However, SSDs are considerably more expensive. Samsung claims that 3 Gb-per-second SATA SSDs can be up to 40 to 50 times faster than 10,000 or 15,000 revolutions per minute HDDs, depending upon the application and computing workload. In addition, SSDs can free up physical space that can be allocated to additional system memory, which improves performance further. In terms of power consumption, Samsung SSDs consume 1.9 watts whenwriting to the drive and 1.5 watts when reading to it, which is about afifth of the power of a conventional enterprise hard drive, accordingto the vendor. Power usage for the SSDs in idle mode is 0.1 of a watt.

The Proliant G6 is HP's latest line of x86 servers. They are designedfor virtualized application environments that require significantmemory, data storage and network connections to reap the greatestserver performance. HP has launched a Web site with more details on theSSD offering. HP is not the only computer maker offering SSDs withservers. Rival IBM in May added the option to servers using IBM'sPower6 processors.

For performance, Samsung SSDs execute random read commands at 25,000 input/outputs per second and random writes at 6,000 IOPS. It has a sequential read speed of 230 MB per second and a sequential write speed of 180 MB per second.  Experts say that SSDs make the most sense for use with high-performance applications, such as video-on-demand, virtualization, Web serving and online transaction processing. That's because SSDs cost much more that HDDs and have far less storage capacity. For example, a server-based HDD costs $1 to $2 per gigabyte, while SSD costs from $15 to $90 per gigabyte, according to IDC.

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