| NAS news |
aligning database block
sizes with SSDs
Editor:- February 5, 2013 - I often hear from
readers designing
software for SSDs who
- having researched the subject of
flash etc - have
spent too much time over-worrying about internal SSD hardware details that
they really shouldn't be worrying about. Because by the time they learn about
such things - that type of hardware anxiety is ancient history.
Today
I came across a recent blog by Chas. Dye at Pure Storage
called
Please
DON'T Fiddle with Your Database Block Size! - which also warns about this
very issue.
Chas says - "At Pure Storage, we believe that a factor
that should never influence the block size decision is your storage subsystem."
Editor's
comments:- I'd certainly agree that trying to slavishly make your data
structures look like something you've read about which might be inside an
SSD controller is
probably a waste of time - because unless you know the SSD designer you don't
really know what's going on - and the abstraction you read about in some web
site is only a small part of the picture.
If an
SSD is so sensitive to
the data you hit it with - it's not the SSD you should have bought in the
first place.
Skyera says GbE switches inside SSD save costs
Editor:-
September 25, 2012 - Skyera
created some waves last
month when it launched an SSD rack with the lowest
price per terabyte
(at the time) using a range of integrated technologies (adaptive R/W DSP,
large SSD
controller architecture and integrated
SSD software).
It's
hard to top that kind of announcement. And it may be a long time before Skyera
has anything so significant to say.
Pitched at a more mundane level
today - a
press
release from the company talks about one of the other factors in its
system which can help to reduce the cost for users. It has multiple embedded
GbE switches inside its SSD racks - so you don't need so many outside.
Nutanix has a new NFS for PCIe SSD accelerated CPUs
Editor:-
June 12, 2012 - Nutanix
today
Nutanix
announced the general availability of NDFS (Nutanix Distributed File
System), a bold new distributed filesystem that has been optimized to leverage
localized low latency PCIe
SSDs such as those from Fusion-io.
By
shifting the NFS datapath away from the network directly onto the VMware vSphere
host, NDFS bypasses network communications that have historically been fraught
with multiple high-latency hops between top-of-rack and end-of-row switches.
Nutanix accelerates both read and writes for any workload.
Redundancy and
availability are achieved by data mirroring across high-speed 10GbE
switches. Nutanix says it harnesses the same distributed system techniques
that power webscale clouds such as Google, Amazon, and LinkedIn clouds into an
enterprise-friendly package that starts out as a high-density 2U datacenter
rack.
Editor's comments:- Nutanix is in the
SSD ASAP market -
with CPU-SSD
equivalency architecture integrated in the OS. The company says their
architecture "collapses compute and storage into a single tier." You
can get the general idea from their
blog and
video.
no wear out yet in sight for Violin's VC flash cash
Editor:-
May 1, 2012 - Like many other SSD companies
Violin Memory is
still burning flash cash faster than it's coming in from customers - but
professional investors are still happy to fuel the flames.
The
company has increased the size of its recent series D funding round to $80
million - up from the $50 million announced a few weeks ago - to take advantage
of the high subscriber demand and has named a new strategic investor -
GE Asset Management. See
also:- VCs in SSD
Dell selects Micron's hot-swap 2.5" PCIe SSD
Editor:-
March 6, 2012 - Micron
today
announced
that it has developed a 2.5"
form factor, hot swappable,
PCIe SSD.
The new solution has been selected as a key storage device in
Dell's PowerEdge 12th
generation servers.
Editor's comments:- this is a natural
progression - from the pioneering work last year by
SANRAD (the first
company to ship front removable PCIe SSDs) and
OCZ (the first company to
demonstrate 3.5"
PCIe SSDs).
In a recent article -
are you designing a new PCIe
SSD? - I discussed some of the new storage architectural concepts which
are being enabled by new PCIe chips from
PLX - in the area of
fault tolerance
and PCIe enabled SANs. So there are a lot more changes in the PCIe SSD product
pipeline. 2.5" will be an additional form factor for PCIe SSDs - and won't
replace the traditional card / module form factor.
Coraid gets another $50 million funding
Editor:-
November 3, 2011 - Coraid
today
announced
that it has closed a $50 million investment round - bringing its total funding
to over $85 million.
The company says its
EtherFlash solution
costs under $10/GB.
Conduction cooled rugged NAS SSDs find seats in war-planes
Editor:-
November 1, 2011 - Curtiss-Wright
today announced that it has received a contract from Lockheed Martin
Aeronautics to provide its rugged conduction cooled NAS SSDs -
Vortex CNS
products - to the U.S. Air Force's
HC/MC-130J
Super Hercules aircraft program.
The initial order is valued at
$800,000, with a potential lifetime contract value estimated at $7.5 million.
NEVEX launches SSD ASAP software for Windows Server
Editor:-
October 11, 2011 - NEVEX
today
launched
its first product - an auto-tiering
/ SSD ASAP software cache for Windows Server, VMware, Hyper-V priced at
$2,495 per physical server.
CacheWorks' selective cache optimization
technology empowers administrators by providing flexible control to accelerate
specific data by application, file type, and location to deliver typical
speedups of 3x - according to customer quotes in their
launch
press release (pdf).
virtual server acceleration mistakes
Editor:- June
21. 2011 -
5 Mistakes to
Avoid when trying to solve I/O Bottlenecks in Virtualized Servers is a new
article by IO Turbine
published on StorageSearch.com.
Needless
to say most of the discussion in here revolves around the best use of SSDs.
Among other things - IO Turbine says "While many enterprise-class storage
providers offer automatic tiering with data migration to and from the SSD
storage, these solutions typically take place well after the need for the I/O
acceleration has passed." ...read the
article
NetApp acquires Engenio
Editor:- March 9, 2011 -
Network Appliance
announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase the Engenio external
storage systems business of LSI for $480 million.
The close is anticipated to occur in approximately 60 days subject to
customary closing conditions.
Engenio will enable NetApp to address
emerging and fast-growing market segments such as
video, including
full-motion video capture and digital video surveillance, as well as high
performance computing applications, such as genomics sequencing and scientific
research. NetApp has the channel reach and customer relationships today that
require high performance and big bandwidth capabilities that will be well served
by Engenio's storage platform. NetApp says these segments are expected to
collectively represent a $5
billion incremental market opportunity by 2014.
Editor's
comments:- LSI has been trying to sell off Engenio since 2004. NetApp will
love them more. For a brief time this past week - searches for Engenio exceeded
that for "SSD". In the previous decade over
500 leading storage
companies were acquired, changed name or went bust.
How and why to monitor VM Performance
Editor:-
February 23, 2011 - How
to Proactively Monitor VM Performance is a new article on
Data Center POST written
by Alex Rosemblat,
Product Marketing Manager at VKernel
- who says "Proactive monitoring of a virtualized data center can assist
in finding potential performance problems before they occur..."
Editor's
comments:- OK he says a lot more than that - and that's why I mentioned his
article here.
I used to do a lot of performance analysis in my
pre cut and paste
career because I designed systems with guaranteed apps response times. And
in my current job I always check my stats before I look at my email. So I have
a lot of empathy for the storage
test and analysis market. The more you understand about the internals of
complex systems the less likely you are to get mugged by them. ...
read the article
Alacritech enters SSD ASAP market
Editor:- January
11, 2011 - Alacritech
launched
the ANX
1500 ($70,000 base price) - a 2U
fat flash
SSD ASAP optimized
for the NAS market - which
the company claims can deliver 120,000 NFS OPS when configured with 48GB of
DRAM and up to 4TB flash SSD.
Violin does that NFS ops - with SSDs - thing
Editor:-
November 17, 2010 - Violin
Memory (which makes
rackmount SSDs)
recently unveiled a
multi-terabyte
SSD cache solution for NAS
systems which use NFS.
Violin says its
vCACHE expands to
15TB of useable cache and delivers over 300,000 NFS operations per second over
8x 10GbE ports. It uses software from
Gear6 which Violin
acquired in June 2010 after the
software developer had
burned its way through $24 million
funding and crashed.
Editor's
comments:- I spoke to
Don
Basile, CEO of Violin Memory, and
Matt
Barletta. ...click
to read interview
Overland says cloud tech can scale NAS VTLs
Editor:-
October 14, 2010 - Overland
Storage today
announced
that it has acquired MaxiScale
- a cloud storage
technology
company.
Dr. Geoff Barrall, CTO and VP of engineering at Overland
Storage said "The logical next step for us is to create a clustered
scalable NAS forming a
local cloud of storage. When the opportunity arose to acquire MaxiScale's
well-regarded technology, we took notice. MaxiScale's architecture will provide
our customers with the ability to scale hundreds of (our)
SnapServers
into one unified pool of storage."
the SSD Bookmarks - WhipTail Tech
Editor:-
September 16, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published an update to the
SSD Bookmarks series
(which includes recommended reading from SSD industry thought leaders) -
with
new links for you
to see suggested by James Candelaria,
CTO - WhipTail
Technologies ...read the articles
HP and Dell battle over unavailable 3PAR
Editor:-
August 23, 2010 - 3PAR
has become part of a billion dollar acquisition tussle between Dell and
HP.
But would you buy software from a company whose home page
showed this message today? - "Site
Temporarily Unavailable Thank you for visiting www.3PAR.com. This site is
currently undergoing maintenance and is temporarily unavailable. We apologize
for the inconvenience."
Nimbus improves features in NAS SSD
Editor:- July 19,
2010 - Nimbus Data
Systems today announced
higher
density in its 10 GbE rackmount SSD systems - 10TB (enterprise MLC)
in 2U - implemented as 24 x 400GB hot-swappable
SAS flash blades.
The
company also announced improved connectivity - upto 120Gbps - from its internal
12 port FlexConnect 'virtual switch' which makes all storage available to all
ports without the need to create and assign volumes to specific ports.
Every port can run all supported protocols –
iSCSI, CIFS and NFS –
simultaneously, enabling unified block and file storage and converged
networking. Pricing for a 10TB system with FlexConnect is just under $110k.
New NAS systems will scale to 100Gbps
Editor:- July
12, 2010 - designing quad port 100Gbps ethernet will be made easier by a new
interface (PHY) from NetLogic
Microsystems .
The device supports 10Gbps SFI-to-XFI, 40Gbps
XLPPI-to-XLAUI and 100Gbps CPPI-to-CAUI modes to enable a seamless migration of
data centers from 10 Gigabit to 100 Gigabit throughputs. See also:-
storage chips.
the new dedupe? - Permabit inside
Editor:- June 7,
2010 - Permabit
today announced that its high performance data deduplication software
has achieved multiple design wins with leading OEMs who will embed it in
storage solutions coming to market by the end of 2010.
Permabit says
its
Albireo dedupe
architecture scales to petabytes of network storage (FC, iSCSI, NFS, or
CIFS), has application aware tuning and can deliver upto 800MB/s ingest on dual
quad core processors with an extremely small memory footprint.
ever wondered - why a NAS from Avere Systems will solve your
problems?
Editor:- June 1, 2010 - Avere Systems today
published an opinion piece article called -
5 Things to Consider
Before Upgrading Your NAS.
It talks about
HDDs versus
SSDs (a
long
running theme with our readers) and suggests that buying a
NAS compatible
SSD ASAP - like the
one they design and sell - is a really good idea.
I just use this
example to illustrate why you don't see many vendor written articles here on
StorageSearch.com. Even if some
of the sentiments appear reasonable - the overall quality of the "analysis"
in vendor originated articles is often patchy. The sweeping market assertions
are often incorrect. And the remedies to user "problems" are
suspiciously unique. ...read
the article
Nexenta streams online tv
Editor:- May 20, 2010 -
Nexenta Systems
announced
that its products (which include
SSD ASAP features)
are being used by the Dutch Public
Broadcasting Agency NPO for storing and delivering online tv in a
configuration which includes 192TB of
hard disk drives and a
1.9TB SSD read cache.
The
broadcaster's website has approximately 80TB of video available to online
users who want to watch previously broadcasted television programs. During an
average evening, between 10 and 20,000 people stream data, adding up to 25GB in
capacity. The customer (who evaluated multiple vendors ) says that important
selection criteria were:- performance, price, support and power
consumption.
Solid Access launches very fast NAS SLC SSD
Editor:-
May 20, 2010 -Solid
Access Technologies today
launched the
UNAS
100 a very fast 2U
rackmount
NAS SLC
fat flash SSD
- with 2.4TB capacity, 96GB DRAM Cache, 2x 10GbE ports, 300,000
IOPS,
1,000MB/s bandwidth and under 10 microseconds access time.
Editor's
comments:- this is the 1st
flash SSD system
from Solid Access - which has been in the
RAM SSD market for 8
years and has often appeared in our directory of
the fastest SSDs.
As you'd expect - the new system includes enterprise
SSD reliability
features - and the flash modules are hot swappable and can be mirrored.
...Later:-
June 4, 2010 - I was curious to learn more about the flash SSD modules inside
the UNAS 100 - so I asked Tomas Havrda, Managing Partner at Solid
Access Technologies for more info. He confirmed that the internal interface in
the rackmount SSD is SAS
- an interface with which they are very familiar - having shipped the world's
1st SAS RAM SSD in 2005.
"After
a search of almost 2 years, we partnered with a Flash SSD vendor that provided
the type of sustained, predictable performance Solid Access required to bring an
entry to market. This has always been one of the major attributes of our DRAM
SSD appliances and we needed to find Flash technology that reasonably
approximates this capability to continue to project Solid Access's image as a
high performance storage appliance vendor offering products that will perform
next month or next year the same way as today.
"We were also equally concerned about
performance drop off
from Burst to Steady State mode and our selected vendor has the least
performance loss of the vendors we tested or have been able to obtain results
for."
5 Cloud Storage Tips from Nasuni
Editor:- May 13,
2010 - Nasuni
recently published a guide to the top 5 issues you should consider when looking
at
cloud storage.
This
is a very hype-laden market - which has taken 10 years to get nowhere
substantial very fast - but I suppose others might (wrongly) say something
similar about the
35 years
it's taken for the SSD market
to get seriously started.
Because I have grown suspicious about all
new storage software
companies - I let this one sit in my inbox for a few days before looking at it
in more detail.. But the points made seem quite sensible. ...read
the article
DCIG publishes buyers guide - midrange storage array market
Editor:-
May 11, 2010 - DCIG
has published the
DCIG Midrange Array
Buyer's Guide (100+ pages) which contains product information on over 70
different midrange arrays from 20 storage providers.
DCIG says the
guide is intended to narrow down the playing field to develop a list of
competitive products that have comparable features to meet specific application
or business needs. Developed to be the go-to resource for IT professionals, the
guide provides direct comparisons of storage systems classified as midrange
arrays and delivers insight into the range of offerings available on the market.
New for 2010, the DCIG Midrange Array Buyer's Guide provides product
comparisons among the widest range of storage array options and identifies the
winners and losers across five categories, including FC/iSCSI,
FC only,
iSCSI only, hardware and
software.
Pricing ranges from $5,000 for 1 print copy - upto $20,000 which
includes:- internal distribution, 1 hour of analyst debriefing and marketing
citation rights.
StorSimple fills "missing link" in cloud storage DNA
Editor:- May 4, 2010 - StorSimple has
exited stealth mode - announcing a bunch of collaborative customer supply
agreements - and disclosing info about its Armada storage appliance - which is
designed to reduce the cost and simplify the integration of
cloud storage within
datacenter applications and infrastructure.
Editor's comments:-
Just as application specific SSDs
are the future for the SSD
market - StorSimple's Armada system can be regarded as an application
specific SSD ASAP
which includes features such as real-time
dedupe and cloud
data encryption.
The simplest way to think about it is as "the
missing link" between the promise of cloud storage and its practicality.
The companies which have agreed to be named in StorSimple's company launch press
release (Amazon, AT&T, EMC, Iron Mountain, and Microsoft) seem to think it's
a noteworthy part of cloud storage DNA too.
WhipTail publishes SSD SAN acceleration paper
Editor:-
April 21, 2010 - WhipTail
Technologies recently published a
white paper which
discusses how SSD acceleration can economically close the scaling performance
gap which comes from virtual desktops and compares the SSD vs HDD array
costs for a 5,000 virtual user system.
Although there's nothing in this
article which introduces new
SSD
acceleration architectural concepts - the 13 page document is a clearly
written modern introduction to anyone interested in learning about how
SAN centric SSDs can
accelerate common applications.
...read the article (pdf)
GreenBytes unveils 1U dedupe ASAP
Editor:- March 29,
2010 - GreenBytes
today
unveiled
the GB-1000 (under $10,000)
a 1U 4TB SSD accelerated
dedupe appliance
which supports simultaneous SAN
and NAS deployments.
Ingest
and restore performance is stated as 0.54TB/hr.
Infortrend reduces NAS costs with SSDs
Editor:-
March 24, 2010 - Infortrend
today
announced
it has added an SSD
acceleration layer to its
EonNAS
product line.
The company says that by using a judicious combination
of SATA
HDDs and
SSDs the overall
ASAP has the same
performance as if it used 15K RPM SAS HDD arrays - but at 75% lower
cost per GB.
Coraid expands AoE rackmount catalog
Editor:- March
23, 2010 - Coraid
today
announced
new models in its AoE
compatible NAS line
including a 2U 24 drive (2.5") model - EtherDrive SRX3500 - with 6
10GbE ports.
The company says its
SRX-Series appliances
can deliver more than 500MB/s throughput in virtualization environments. OS
support includes Windows, Solaris, and Linux.
Digitiliti Launches Virtual Corporate Library
Editor:-
March 22, 2010 - Digitiliti
today
announced
availability of its
DigiLIBE
a multi-functional continuous VTL,
dedupe,
compression, ediscovery appliance which automatically captures and archives
new data from the time it is created and
sanitizes it at
the end of its policy mandated life.
Pricing starts at about $20,000
for a 3TB information director and $3 per GB archived after dedupe and
compression, plus $100 per client.
$10 million Funding for AoE Pioneer
Editor:- January
25, 2010 - Coraid
today
announced
that it has closed a $10 million Series-A
financing round with
Allegis Capital and Azure Capital Partners to accelerate the development and
adoption of its AoE
compatible storage. | |
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| SSD Pricing -
where does all the money go? |
SSDs are among the most
expensive computer hardware products you will ever buy.
Understanding
the factors which determine SSD costs is often a confusing and irritating
process... |
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...not made any easier when
market prices for identical capacity SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1!
Why is that? ...read
the article | | | |
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| What's the
best / cheapest - PC SSD? |
Editor:- I often get emails
from readers which ask the above question.
An article on
StorageSearch.com - called
What's the best
/ cheapest PC SSD? - is my attempt to create a simple FAQs page - which
answers the question... |
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...of why I can't answer
your question - and follows on to pose some probing questions which you
can ask yourself. ...read the article | | | |
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What's the
best way to design a flash SSD?
and other questions which split SSD
opinion |
| More than 10 key areas of
fundamental disagreement within the SSD industry are discussed in an article
here on StorageSearch.com called
the
the SSD Heresies. |
 |
... |
Why can't SSD's true believers agree upon
a single coherent vision for the future of solid state storage? ...read the article | | | |
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