Move over, NAND; there’s a new flash architecture in town. HGST Inc., the enterprise storage supplier that merged into hard drive kingpin Western Digital Corp. two years ago, has unveiled a proof-of-concept that it claims surpasses the current gold standard for solid-state memory by a wide margin.

The subsidiary claims that the prototype, which is on display today at the Flash Memory Summit and Exhibition in San Jose, CA, can deliver performance of up to three million input/output operations per second (IOPS) when handling 512-byte data blocks in a regular queued environment. That represents an orders-of-magnitude improvement over what can be achieved with the NAND architecture used by competitors such as SanDisk Corp., which recently acquired PCIe card pioneer Fusion-io in a bid to extend its footprint beyond the consumer space to the more lucrative enterprise market.

HGST’s experimental product also uses a PCIe link to transfer data, but that’s where the similarity ends. The drive is made up of eight 45-nanomillimeter chips packing one gigabyte of capacity each that are based on Phase Change Memory (PCM). The technology uses a chalcogenide alloy that can be rapidly shifted between its crystalline and amorphous states to deliver greatly increased read/write performance while also accelerating data transfer speeds.

According to Dr. Zvonimir Bandic, who heads storage architecture research for HGST, the prototype is capable of operating at latencies of close to the one millisecond for small-block random reads in non-queued environments. That’s considerably lower than the 10 millisecond delay that is generally considered acceptable for transactional workloads. also HGST collaborated with researchers at the University of California, San Diego on a new communications protocol that enhances performance.

Western Digital is duking it out with IBM, which is also working to commercialize PCM. Earlier this year, the enterprise stalwart  demonstrated its own implementation that combines the technology with existing storage architectures on a controller that it said outperforms traditional SSDs between 12 and 275 times.

Yet until Phase Change Memory hits general availability, customers will have to settle for NAND, a compromise that HGST hopes to elevate with the latest iteration of its FlashMAX series of PCie cards, which made its debut alongside the proof-of-concept.  The new generation is pegged as twice as cost-efficient as its predecessor.

FlashMAX III  achieved up to 540,000 random read input/output operations per second (IOPS) in an internal test and averaged  200,000 for a mixed workload of read and write operations, according to HGST. On top of improving performance, the card also supports PCIe 2.0 and a five-year warranty.

The upgraded SSD is joined by an enhanced version version of the company’s complementary ServerCache  software that  extends support to a broad spectrum of  storage-attached network (SAN) and direct-attached storage (DAS) systems running Linux or Windows. That includes third party solutions, which addresses the increasingly heterogeneous makeup of enterprise environments.

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