Flash technology is emerging rapidly as the storage solution of choice for real-time big data applications, and it is easy to see why. For a street price of just $720 and only 0.3 watts of power, a 1 TB solid-state drive (SSD) system can handle more than 245,000 reads/writes per second—making flash storage powerful, cost-effective, and energy efficient. However, not all SSDs are equal when it comes to database performance.

To address the challenge, Aerospike announced today that it is making the Aerospike Certification Tool (ACT) for benchmarking solid-state drives available as open source software. ACT runs on Linux, and it can be downloaded at http://github.com/aerospike/act. With ACT now available as open source code, SSD vendors can more readily tune their drives for today’s real-time big-data demands, and application developers, enterprise IT organizations, and database companies can easily benchmark competing drives’ performance and determine the models that best support their specific data management use cases.

Aerospike first developed ACT to support customers taking advantage of SSD optimizations built into the Aerospike real-time NoSQL database and key-value store. A native flash database, such as Aerospike, delivers predictable high performance with specific access patterns that take advantage of large block writes and random read capabilities inherent to flash storage. ACT automates the measurement of read latency during sustained large block write loads over extended periods of time and enables developers to determine if a drive is capable of meeting their high throughput, low latency requirements. Today, Aerospike has published test results for several SSD models from Fusion-io, Intel, OCZ, and Samsung. These results can be viewed at http://www.aerospike.com/blog/act-ssd-benchmark.

“From the start, we recognized that a database optimized for flash would be ideal for an emerging new class of applications that rely on fast big data,” said Brian Bulkowski, Aerospike founder and CTO. “With ACT, we want to accelerate the development and industry-wide adoption of SSDs that can reliably support interactive, consumer-facing big data applications where real-time response is critical, and failure is not an option.”

“We recently compared the performance of data-in-flash, using databases such as Aerospike, with that of data-in-DRAM used by other NoSQL databases, and we discovered up to a 17-times cost advantage of data-in-flash over data-in-DRAM,” said David Floyer, resident CTO of Wikibon. “We applaud Aerospike’s move to make its ACT benchmark program available as open source code. It will be a valuable evaluation tool for ISVs and IT executives who seek to gain a competitive edge through the performance and cost advantages of flash technology.”

About Aerospike

Aerospike, Inc. offers the only real-time NoSQL database and key-value store that delivers predictable high performance for mission-critical, Web-scale applications. Aerospike’s flash-optimized, shared-nothing architecture scales linearly, consistently processing over 500k transactions per second per node with sub-millisecond latency. With automatic fail-over, replication, and cross data center synchronization, the Aerospike database reliably stores billions of objects and terabytes of data—while providing 100% uptime and 17x improvement in TCO over other NoSQL databases. Customers accelerating their business with Aerospike include adMarketplace, Bluekai, eXelate, Sony’s So-net, and The Trade Desk. For more information, visit http://Aerospike.com.

Aerospike is a registered trademark of Aerospike, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.