Flash Hype Leads to
SSD Myopia - Says Solid Data
Editor:- September 29, 2009 - Steve
Topper, CEO of Solid
Data Systems today commented on market perceptions about
RAM SSD versus
flash SSD positioning in a press release about the company's updated range
of FC compatible terabyte class
RAM SSDs.
"There
is a market perception that only NAND flash is solid-state storage and that DRAM
is too expensive and too volatile," said Steve Topper. ""The
market is being told that flash drives are the way to go as they are cheaper and
can best deliver enterprise-class performance and reliability. This simply is
not true. While flash is somewhat less expensive than DRAM, they cannot beat us
on latency and performance, and large numbers of customers have told us that the
endurance of these products simply is not there. In many cases, these drives
wear out after only days of use."
Editor's comments:-
while I wouldn't agree exactly with all the details in these comments. I do
agree with some of it. It's important to realize that the most competitive RAM
SSDs are best regarded as part of a product continuum which starts with flash
and extends up to RAM. If a flash SSD can do the job - it generally will be
chosen because of the lower cost.
But in some applications access-time
replaces random-IOPS as the key determinant of application performance.
Let's say for example that a critical bottleneck in your application
looks like a small table resident on the SAN which involves 5 consecutive R/W
modify cycles to the same block of memory. At the system level - a
RAM SSD can be 10x
to 20x faster than a flash SSD - even if it has the same nominal
random IOPS* and data throughput. It's an undeniable fact that RAM SSDs do a
better job at application speedup for a small group of applications -
regardless of the 9x higher typical cost for the same capacity. That's
why customers still buy them.
* There are rare exceptions.
Violin Memory has
patented a non blocking write in their flash SSD array - which enables a read
operation to immediately follow a write on the same block (without waiting for
the erase write to complete). But I don't know how many consecutive operations
would be speeded up in that architecture - maybe just the next one in the
sequence - but not the whole set.
QLogic Ships 40Gbps InfiniBand Switches
Editor:-
June 8, 2009 - QLogic
today announced general availability of its
12000
Series 40Gb/sec QDR InfiniBand switches.
"With 864 ports and
bandwidth of 51 terabits per second, the QLogic 12000 series is the highest
capacity general purpose QDR InfiniBand switch on the market today," said
David Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. "The
huge bandwidth of this solution brings HPC customers better scale-out
performance, lower latencies, simpler management and reduced costs."
See
also:- SAN switches,
InfiniBand |
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| OnPATH
Unveils Industry's Largest Fibre Channel Switch |
Marlton,
NJ - October 21, 2008 - OnPATH Technologies today introduced its first
8Gbps Fibre Channel switch module.
The new module supports up to 12 multi-rate Fibre-Channel ports and
can be scaled up to 1,536 8Gb FC ports in one non-blocking switch. ...OnPATH Technologies
profile, SAN
switches | |
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