Adaptec today announced the first solution for building and managing High-Performance Hybrid Arrays (HPHAs) - storage arrays that use both solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs). The solution delivers up to five times the I/O performance, up to 50 percent savings in capital and operating expenses, and a dramatic reduction in power consumption over HDD-only arrays, according to the company.

Adaptec's new MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution integrates a tuned 32GB Intel X25-E Extreme SATA SSD, used as high-performance cache, with Adaptec's MaxIQ SSD caching software.

"By incorporating Intel's SSDs into our MaxIQ solution, we're able to offer data center managers, particularly those running massive on-demand cloud computing data centers, a non-disruptive, scalable approach to managing storage with maximum application performance and reduced capital and operating costs," said S. "Sundi" Sundaresh, Adaptec president and CEO.

HPHAs built on the Adaptec MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution deliver up to five times more IOPS than HDD-only arrays, and can provide capital and operating cost savings of up to 50 percent by improving system resource utilization. Depending on individual data center requirements, an HPHA can consist of any combination of high-capacity, low-cost SATA (Serial ATA) drives or higher-performing SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives, plus SSDs.

The MaxIQ SSD Caching Software includes a patent-pending "Learned-Path(") algorithm that identifies frequently (hot) read data blocks and optimizes subsequent "reads" by moving "hot" data directly into the SSD cache for lower latencies and higher system performance. By leveraging its unique presence in the data path to create a "read cache pool", a high-performance hybrid array with a single MaxIQ SSD cache can deliver up to five times the IOPS (input/output per second) of comparable SAS-only deployments. The result is a dramatic acceleration in application performance, alleviating the bottleneck that can occur between server processors and hard drives, allowing data center managers to increase the number of users hosted per IT dollar, reduce the need for additional equipment acquisition and significantly cut data center energy costs.

MaxIQ is ideal for data centers running applications with high "read" demands such as web serving, file serving and databases. MaxIQ can be deployed using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, allowing data centers to convert industry-standard servers into cost-effective, high-performance, scale-out application storage appliances that require no modification of existing storage architectures, application software or operating systems for easy integration. It also offers simple and flexible expandability allowing up to four additional SSDs to be added to, or removed from, the cache pool without impacting data integrity or operations.

Paired with Adaptec Series 5Z, Series 5 or Series 2 Unified Serial((R)) (SATA/SAS) Storage Controllers, the MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Solution provides the following features:

- Adaptec Intelligent Power Management (IPM) - user-directed power management allowing for 3 levels of hard disk drive power modes
- Adaptec Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection - flash-based cache protection in the event of both power loss and drive failure, eliminating battery back-up (Adaptec Series 5Z only)
- Adaptec Storage Manager(TM)(ASM) - centralized management by local/remote browser or application-based interface across the network from a single console

The Adaptec MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Kit (MSRP US$1,295) includes one MaxIQ-tuned 32GB Intel(R) X25-E Extreme SATA SSD used as high-performance cache and MaxIQ SSD Caching Software, and is currently available.