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Founded in 1975,
Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software,
services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full
potential.
see also:-
Microsoft
- mentions on StorageSearch.com,
Microsoft's
SSD pages
11 Key Symmetries in
SSD design
some
thoughts about SSD customization
say
farewell to reassuringly boring industrial SSDs
who's who in the SSD market? - Microsoft
by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
I
began analyzing data companies from an SSD angle before most of them even
realized that this was a market which would
become very
important to them.
It's fun sometimes to see what I said in the old
days. Here are my editor's comments re Microsoft and its SSD positioning from
May 2012
Microsoft is one of many companies in the
SSD software
market.
Like other legacy OS companies Microsoft's experiments
at trying to do useful things with solid state storage haven't resulted in
anything worthwhile.
That's because the SSD market has been
discontinuous in its architecture - and often moving suddenly in directions
which appeared (to those outside the
SSD analyst loop)
to be tangents. OS companies like Microsoft prefer to know the shape of new
hardware features typically 5 to 10 years before they appear so they can plan
support and integrate it in their releases.
Microsoft has been used
to getting such roadmaps - regarding future CPUs and interfaces - although
chipmakers complain privately that Microsoft can still be slow to do anything
with that lookahead info.
Sorage history
too - demonstrates that Microsoft reacts slowly to real changes which weren't
in its fishbowl sights. (It took many years before the company supported
iSCSI for example.)
It
would be a mistake to look for leadership in SSD support from Microsoft. It
won't happen. The best that you can expect is that by 2020 - if Microsoft is
still around - then the needs of the SSD market will have stabilized enough to
get useful support in the OS. (Although by then - all storage will be solid
state anyway - so it won't be necessary to have any special support for SSDs
from the OS.) Until then look to SSD manufacturers and SSD software specialists
for tactical and proprietary solutions.
Microsoft mentions in
SSD market
history
Iin March 2010 - in yet another simulated
benchmark
published
today related to Adaptec's
SSD ASAP caching
technology - which they leverage in their
MaxIQ SSD product - I
learned that the underlying technology was originally developed by
(surprise! surprise!) - Microsoft.
"When
our datacenter team came up with some innovative ideas around using solid state
devices as read caching devices, we determined it made good sense to license
these advances to Adaptec because Microsoft itself doesn't sell these types of
products," said David Kaefer, GM of Intellectual Property Licensing at
Microsoft. "By collaborating through licensing, Adaptec customers benefit
from a product that delivers impressive performance and cost savings over
alternatives in the market."
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| "In November
2006 - Microsoft announced business availability of its new Vista
operating system - heralded as being the first PC market OS which included
SSD-aware support and native SSD cache management....." |
| ...from:-
SSD market
history | | |
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| how fast can your
SSD run backwards? |
SSDs are complex devices and there's a
lot of mysterious behavior which isn't fully revealed by benchmarks, datasheets
and whitepapers.
Underlying all the important aspects of SSD behavior
are
asymmetries
which arise from the intrinsic technologies and architecture inside the SSD.
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| In November 2002 -
Bill Gates, talking about Tablet PC's said:- "There are also a lot
of peripherals that need to improve here. ...Eventually even the so-called solid
state disks will come along and not only will we have the mechanical disks going
down to 1.8 inch but some kind of solid state disk... will be part of different
Tablet PCs." |
| ...from:-
Charting the
Rise of the SSD Market | | |
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| Microsoft
acquires NASA's cloud hybridisor - Avere Systems |
Editor:- January 3, 2018 - Microsoft today
announced
it has agreed to acquire Avere Systems.
Ron Bianchini,
President and CEO - Avere Systems said - "When we started Avere Systems
in 2008, our founding ideology was to use fast, flash-based storage in the most
efficient, effective manner possible in the datacenter. Along the way, our team
of file systems experts created a technology that not only optimized critical
on-premises storage resources but also enabled enterprises to move
mission-critical, high performance application workloads to the cloud."
...read more from Ron Bianchini
Editor's comments:- There was a
lot of deep thinking in Avere. I wish them luck in the reset and recompile
chaos-sphere.
the
SSD empowered cloud
after AFAs what's
next? - cloud adapted memory | | |
| .. |
cool
runnings
Rambus and Microsoft team up to coach faster DRAM |
Editor:- April 20, 2017 - Back in the early 1990s
it was not uncommon to hear about specialist server companies which were using
peltier effect heat sinks to refrigerate the fastest workstation processors so
that they could be run at higher clock speeds. But this kind of extreme
approach to server acceleration only provided short term competitive gains in a
single dimension.
One of the biggest bottlenecks in the past decade
has been RAM architecture and DRAM implementation itself. (You can read more
articles about the background to this on the
DRAM resource page here on
StorageSearch.com.)
A new angle on extending the performance of DRAM
was
announced
recently by Rambus
and Microsoft who are collaborating on the design of prototype super cooled
DRAM systems to explore avenues of improvement in latency and density due to
physics effects below -180 C.
A new article -
Rambus, Microsoft
Heat Up With Cold DRAM - by Junko Yoshida
, Chief International Correspondent - EE Times - discusses these plan in
more detail.
In the article - Craig Hampel,
chief scientist at Rambus, told EE Times that "Microsoft isnt alone...
heavy data center users like Google, Facebook and Amazon are all in search of
new memory architecture. Indeed, these tech giants who have primarily grown
their business via their technological prowess in software development are now
finding the future of their business growth severely constrained by hardware
advancements." ...read the article
Editor's
comments:- At room temperature the main problem in fast DRAM systems is
that the energy required for refresh cooks the chips which means cells lose
charge faster which creates data integrity risks which in turn needs more
frequent refresh.
This is a limiting design factor.
It
means that even if you have a miraculous packaging technique which can sandwich
more chips into a box - DRAM loses out to nvm technologies which don't
require refresh - when the scale of the installed capacity (and watts) in the
box is high.
Because if you can't fit enough RAM into the same single
box then the memory system accrues a box-hopping fabric-latency penalty which
outweighs the benefits of the faster raw memory chip access times inside the
original box.
If you freeze DRAM then the refresh cycle can be
extended (which means you can pack more capacity in a box) but also the native
transit time for data in the copper interconnects and inside the silicon gets
faster too.
Although Rambus and Microsoft are pitching this a
progressive research exercise I don't think that it will provide a general
solution for data intensive factories.
While it's a good thing for
researchers to play around and explore the limits of what can be done with all
kinds of memory devices - I think that the answer to greater performance lies in
new architectures rather than freezing old ones. | | |
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| Microsoft's
SSD-aware VMs - discussed on InfoQ |
Editor:- September 24, 2014 - There are now so
many enterprise SSD
software companies that keeping track of them all is a little like tallying
2.5" SSD makers -
a tedious chore -which in most cases isn't worth the bother.
Nevertheless
- SSD-centric software
is strategically
important - and some vendors are more important than others - despite having
been latecomers in the
enterprise flash
wars .
One such company is Microsoft.
A
news story today - Microsoft
Azure Joins SSD Storage Bandwagon on InfoQ
- discusses Microsoft's D-Series SSD-aware VMs - and places this in the context
of other products from well known sources.
The blog's author - Janakiram MSV says "One
important aspect of SSD based VMs on Azure is that they are not persistent. Data
stored on these volumes cannot survive the crash or termination of virtual
machines. This is different from both Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine,
which offer persistent SSDs. On Azure, customers have to ensure that the data
stored on the SSD disks is constantly backed up to Azure blob storage or other
VMs." ...read
the article | | |
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