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: Data platform modernisation: Best practice approaches for unifying data, real time data and automated processing

Date: 17 March 2026 Time: 10:00am ET / 3:00pm London / 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 minutes Financial institutions are evolving their data platform modernisation programmes, moving beyond data-for-cloud capabilities and increasingly towards artificial intelligence-readiness. This has shifted the data management focus in the direction of data unification, real-time delivery and automated governance. The drivers of...

BLOG

BMLL and Features Analytics Target Surveillance Benchmarking with Level 3 Order Book Data

BMLL and Features Analytics have partnered to develop new trade surveillance benchmarking and market integrity analytics built on reconstructed historical order book data, signalling a shift towards more measurable, performance-driven surveillance frameworks. Under the agreement, Features Analytics will build and commercialise surveillance benchmarking products on top of BMLL’s harmonised historical Level 3, 2 and 1...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit New York

Our TradingTech Summit in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2022/2023 – Tenth Edition

Welcome to the tenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a publication that has tracked new regulations, amendments, implementation and data management requirements as regulatory change has impacted global capital markets participants over the past 10 years. This edition of the handbook includes new regulations and highlights some of the major regulatory interventions challenging...