Benchmarking Solid State Drives

Isilon Systems Engineering, 2011-12

Liaison(s): Ben Melhuish ’94, Steve Hubbell ’95
Advisor(s): Anthony Bright
Students(s): Mark Ellis (TL-S), William Grabill (TL-F), Allison Card (S), Jeff Steele (S), Gurchetan Singh (F), Paula Ning (F)

Isilon Systems provides large-scale network attached storage to data-intensive industries. As Isilon incorporates a growing number of Solid State Drives (SSDs) into their storage solutions, they must develop a qualification process for these devices. To this end, the clinic team has developed an application called Isibench to benchmark Solid State Drives. The team has defined metrics for SSD performance and investigated causes of their performance degradation.