The biggest flash drive in the world

ViON have produced a 100TB DRAM solid state drive, which they claim to be the largest flash memory-based storage box in the world.

The HyperStor-6200 uses both Hitachi Data Systems and Texas Memory Systems technology - think RamSan 6200 - and provides five million I/Os per second (IOPS) with 60GB/sec bandwidth. It is a monster of an SSD.

TMS says it has sold it to a single customer and has worked with ViON to do so. ViON calls it an enterprise eFlash product and says the 100TB of capacity has error checking and correction (ECC), a roughly .072ms average response time, and is RAID-protected. Host servers connect to it by either InfiniBand or Fibre Channel.

ViON and TMS both says this big bucks box is optimised for enterprise, research, and government applications, such as large OLTP systems or data warehouses, real-time video on demand, graphic rendering, geospatial analysis, seismic processing, and high-speed data acquisition.

You can find out more about the ViON view of the box here, and the TMS view here. There is no information about the role of HDS in the sale apart from ViON saying it's involved.

There is no information on price but, generally, six figures of IOPS capability often involves six figures of cash. There is no information about the customer either, but ViON specialises in sales to US government agencies.

So we might surmise the Department of Homeland Security or a similar agency needs lightning low latency responses to tens of thousands of queries a minutes into a massive database of... what exactly? Is the USA building a database of the world's entire travelling and communicating population? What else would need such an extreme of SSD design? ®