About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Intel, Ion Provide SSD Boost to kdb+

Subscribe to our newsletter

A just published STAC report sponsored by Intel provides insight into performance benchmarks for Kx Systems’ kdb+ database running against an Ion Computer Systems storage appliance containing solid state disk (SSD) technology from Intel.

According to the report, several tests that form part of STAC’s M3 benchmark suite – focused on the performance of historical tick databases – showed performance boosts compared to traditional ‘spindle’ disk storage.  Specifically, results were between 2.2x and 2.7x that of spindle technology, with Ion’s Storion SR-71 appliance taking up just 2U of rack space and drawing less than 500 watts of power.

The ‘stack under test’ used to perform the benchmarks consisted of:

– Kx Systems kdb+ 2.8
– Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 with ext4
– Ion Storion SR-71 appliance, equipped with Intel 320 SSD Storage Systems
– IBM x3850 X5 Server with 4 * 10-core Intel  E7-4870 chips, at 2.4 GHs, and 512 GB RAM
– Intel 520 x10gE adaptors, and a Netgear XSM7224S switch, linking the IBM server to the Ion storage appliance.  A total of 4 adaptors in the server linked to 4 in the SR-71.

Ion’s SR-71 provides up to 10 GB of usable storage, with 600,000 input/output operations per second.  Storage can be increased by connecting multiple SR-71s.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: From Data to Alpha: AI Strategies for Taming Unstructured Data

Date: 16 April 2026 Time: 9:00am ET / 2:00pm London / 3:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Unstructured data and text now accounts for the majority of information flowing through financial markets organisations, spanning research content, corporate disclosures, communications, alternative data, and internal documents. While AI has created new opportunities to extract signals, many firms are...

BLOG

EuroCTP Taps DataBP to Build Digital-First Administration for EU Consolidated Tape

In a critical step toward the operational reality of a European consolidated tape, EuroCTP has selected DataBP, specialists in commercial management solutions for financial market data, to administer the licensing and subscriber management for its forthcoming equities and ETFs consolidated tape. The move signals a foundational focus on modern, digital-first infrastructure for what is poised...

EVENT

Data Management Summit New York City

Now in its 15th year the Data Management Summit NYC brings together the North American data management community to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

Corporate Actions USA 2010

The US corporate actions market has long been characterised as paper-based and manually intensive, but it seems that much progress is being made of late to tackle the lack of automation due to the introduction of four little letters: XBRL. According to a survey by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and standards...