Oracle acquires Pillar
Editor:-
June 29, 2011 -
Oracle today
announced it has
entered into an agreement to
acquire Pillar Data Systems -
which was already majority owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
Editor's
comments:- I guess I'd say - So what? This simply ends a fiction which
nobody seriously believed in. Pillar was hampered by its ownership which meant
that it could be yanked in any direction at a moment's notice. Pulling the
storage skunkworks inside the Oracle corporate fold will work better for
customers and as a business - even if it may upset some internal stakeholders.
FlashSoft launches software to unleash the power of enterprise
flash
Editor:- June 28, 2011 -
FlashSoft
today announced it has
secured
$3 million Series A funding and has launched its first product -
software which enables enterprise flash to be used as a cost-effective,
server-tier computing resource (ASAP functionality in
software) which is available for free evaluation through a 30-day "Try
Before You Buy" program.
FlashSoft says that despite the
performance advantages of flash SSD, 2 barriers have inhibited its adoption in
the enterprise.
- First, when used as primary data storage, flash memory cannot easily
integrate with and leverage the benefits of existing storage systems
infrastructure.
- Secondly, storing all of an application's data on server-attached flash
memory remains expensive.
FlashSoft's new all-software product
overcomes both of these objections with what they call a "tier minus one"
solution for flash virtualization. Enterprise IT can now provide databases,
applications and virtual machine environments with the performance benefit of
having the entire data set on flash, with only a fraction of the data actually
stored in flash. This innovation makes enterprise flash a cost-effective
performance solution that works seamlessly with existing storage infrastructure.
In fact, FlashSoft actually reduces the IO burden on storage, producing even
greater cost savings. FlashSoft's technology is designed to deliver flash-grade
performance within a standalone server, across server clusters, and throughout
the data center. Early Customer Successes
One early user -
Zenprise
said "By using FlashSoft, we aren't buying new server hardware or
licensing additional server software. We're simply making our existing servers
and software run at their full potential." And they were equally equally
impressed by FlashSoft's reliability when they set up stress tests (read case study).
In conjunction with its funding announcement, FlashSoft announced that it is
collaborating with industry leaders including VMware, Microsoft, SanDisk
Enterprise Storage Solutions, Virident Systems, LSI, OCZ Technology, and systems
provider AMAX. These relationships will help FlashSoft integrate its software
more closely with complementary hardware and software products, and provide
customers with the best solutions for their specific requirements.
Editor's
comments:- FlashSoft says its software (which runs on Windows Server - Linux
is in beta) works with any flash SSDs upto 1TB, and takes approx 5% CPU
utilization and 100MB of core RAM. I asked
How many physical SSDs
does the software support?
The number of SSDs is not limited, as long as they can be represented
as a single logical volume, eg. through a RAID.
Is the 1TB limit shown on your site the limit for the setof SSDs or just for
each drive?
The 1TB limit is the current logical limit for the
SSD used for caching. The data set is typically 5x greater (or more) than the
cache. The size restriction is an artifact of early development, and in a
near-future release, there will be no restriction on the size of the SSD
employed.
In the case of
sudden power
loss – what are the steps taken to protect the state of the cached data
and update the external storage?
FlashSoft employs a method called multi-level metadata
management, which stores some cache metadata in RAM, but most of it on the SSD
itself (and employs a balanced tree design for optimal efficiency). There are
two benefits to this design: first, it minimizes utilization of server memory.
Only the hottest metadata runs in server memory. The rest is cached in SSD.
Also, the application regularly creates snapshots of the metadata on the SSD, so
that in the event of a server crash, the cache metadata can be re-created from
the snapshots + most recent metadata almost immediately. Typical recovery is
less than a second. (Keep in mind, our team's background is at Veritas, Oracle,
Symantec, etc. so data recovery is a top priority for the product design.)
new industrial SSD range suits small spaces and power budgets
Editor:-
June 22, 2011 -
Emphase
announced a new
range of miniature
industrial SATA
SLC SSDs which have been engineered to operate off as little as 0.5 watts max
and fit into less than 4mm height.
Capacities range from 1GB to 32GB.
R/W speeds upto 120/100MB/s. All S3 Series SATA modules come with a tightly
managed BOM and a 5-year warranty, with the option for conformal coating.
See
also:- Efficiency -
making the same SSD - with less chips |
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