Intel shows power of SSDs with IPTV HD stream demo

For a change, the Day 1 keynotes of IDF Fall in Taipei was rather interesting compared to previous years with many demos and such for us to report to you.


Also in his Digital Enterprise Keynote, Kirk Skaugen did his bit in pimping Intel's SSD business unit by running a demo showing the amount of power and server rack space one can save by switching from regular hard disk drives to an SSD - although, Intel's X-25M 80GB SSD, of course.


This demo displayed (view the video we shot below) an IPTV HD broad deployment system with one server using hard drives and the other using Intel SSDs. The traditional HDD system required a massive 36 hard drives (75GB SAS 15k RPM drives to be exact) to produce about 440 HD streams in a production environment.

On the other hand, when it came to showcasing the SSD based system, it only required eight Intel X-25M 80GB SSD drives to produce 450 HD streams in the same production environment. The SSD system fits into 2u rack space and the HDD system requires much more room, using 8u rack space. When it comes to power - and that is probably the biggest thing to take note of here, the HDD system chewed up about 768 watts of power whereas the SSD system only required a staggeringly slow 16.8 watts of power.

So, the key messages from Intel in this demonstration is that SSD provides a 6x increase in read speeds, using 46x times less power and in this particular demo, offers a 75% reduction in the amount of space required for the system.

Yeah yeah Intel... we know SSD rocks, but now you're just showing off a little bit too much, don't you think?