Solid Data's Excellerator 800 Ultra Awarded `HOT' Rating In InfoWorld Product Review; Solid State Storage Increases the Performance of Enterprise Application Servers

Business Wire, Feb 22, 1999

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 22, 1999--Solid Data Systems, a leading manufacturer of intelligent solid state storage systems, today announced that the Company has earned InfoWorld's prestigious "HOT" rating in a product review of Solid Data's Excellerator Ultra. Todd Coopee, InfoWorld review board member and a senior consultant at Specialized Communications in Ottawa, Canada, conducted the review of Excellerator 800 Ultra, the industry's fastest solid state storage system supporting a high speed Ultra SCSI interface.

"InfoWorld's technical staff recognizes the role of solid state storage in today's open systems environments, and we are excited that they awarded a HOT rating to our Excellerator Ultra," stated Criss Marshall, vice president of marketing for Solid Data. "The trend of mainframe applications moving to open systems environments has required a significant increase in both CPU speed and storage capacity. This has created a situation where systems are becoming I/O bound, saturating disks and bringing response times to unacceptable levels. InfoWorld recognizes that this problem threatens the viability of mission-critical applications, and that solid state storage is the most logical way to remedy this problem."

Excellerator Ultra delivers a data access time of only 14 microseconds, approximately 1,000 times faster than typical magnetic disk drives. This extremely fast access time provides a significant performance enhancement to enterprise applications servers, particularly during peak load conditions and demanding batch jobs. Excellerator Ultra can sustain Ultra SCSI data transfer rates of 40 MB/second in both sequential and random activity - performance that is unachievable with magnetic disk drive RAID systems. The Excellerator Ultra product line scales up to 17.1 GB in a single system, which is more than twice the capacity of any other solid state storage system on the market today.

InfoWorld's review pointed out that Excellerator Ultra offers an average access time of microseconds as opposed to milliseconds because it uses DRAM instead of rotating mechanical heads and spinning platters. The review explains that DRAM is inherently volatile, but, "Fortunately, [Excellerator Ultra] comes equipped with a complete Data Retention System. Included is an integrated battery backup, redundant power supplies, a backup disk, and a redundant array of inexpensive chips, or RAIC. In the event of a complete power failure, the Ultra 800's internal uninterruptible power supply will kick in, providing power for the memory array controller card, memory array, backup hard drive, and cooling fans for as long as 1 hour."

Excellerator Ultra Products Turbocharge Existing RAID and JBOD

Storage Systems

Solid Data's Excellerator Ultra products are self-contained storage systems utilizing DRAM architecture to turbocharge the performance of I/O intensive applications. The system runs alongside existing RAID or JBOD storage systems to improve the performance of applications such as relational databases (RDBMS), decision support systems (DSS), data warehouses, enterprise resource planning (ERP), online transaction processing (OLTP), Internet services, and document imaging. These application environments are ideal candidates for solid state storage because they are typically I/O-limited by a relatively small number of "hot files." Hot files are the high-activity files, typically only 5 to 10% of the total storage, that account for over 50% of all I/O traffic. By moving these hot files to Excellerator Ultra, Solid Data's customers solve I/O bottleneck performance issues at a fraction of the cost of purchasing additional CPUs or disk storage systems.

Product Specifications
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                                Excellerator       Excellerator
                                800 Ultra          1000 Ultra
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System Capacities
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Minimum and maximum capacity    536 MB - 5.36 GB   536 MB - 17.12 GB
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Available RAM slots             5                  16
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RAM card options:

    536 MB                      Yes                Yes
    1.07 GB                     Yes                Yes

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Model Specific Features
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Redundant power supply          Yes                Yes
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On-board, internal backup drive Removable          Fixed
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Configurations                  Rack mount or      Rack mount or
                                desk top           free standing
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