Ramtron's F-RAM Casualty
of Auto Market Crash
Editor:- May 7, 2009 - Ramtron said its
revenue declined
26% in the 1st quarter of 2009 compared to the year ago period.
A
sharp decline in orders from the automotive market was cited as a principal
cause.
Ramtron also announced an update on a legal suit related to
in-field failures of one of its F-RAM memory products in an unspecified
application. (In July 2008 Ramtron confirmed that specific batches of product
had failed due to manufacturing
process
defects in one of its partners fabs.)
Ramtron also announced
today that, over the next 2 years, it will transition the manufacturing of
products that are currently being built at Fujitsu's chip foundry located in
Iwate, Japan to its foundry at Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas and to its
newest foundry at IBM Corp in Essex Junction, Vermont.
Why You Need Better ECC Inside the SSD
Editor:- April
16, 2009 - this week SandForce
published an article on the subject of effective
error correction in flash
SSDs.
I like it because it resonates well with the thinking that
led me to publish this reliability page 3 years ago.
At that time - I
was concerned with the theoretical inadequacy of error correction used inside
hard drives. (Something
which has since been confirmed in practice and reported in some of the papers
cited at the top of this page.)
SandForce's short article shows you the
consequences - in terms of uncorrectable errors - if you use "industry
standard" strength ECC. And that's part of the sales pitch for their 10-to-the-minus-something-better
errors protection in their new SSD controller.
How Good SSD Controllers Manage Flash Data Integrity
Editor:-
April 3, 2009 - SNIA
has published a new white paper -
"NAND
Flash Solid State Storage for the Enterprise - an in-depth Look at Reliability."
(pdf)
It's co-authored by:- Jonathan Thatcher
Fusion-io, Tom
Coughlin Coughlin
Associates, Jim Handy
Objective
Analysis and Neal Ekker
Texas Memory Systems.
The
article contains the best integrated explanation I've seen of the design
trade-offs for error correction schemes and how they affect bit error rates
compared to the raw uncorrected results. It goes on to explain the
importance of the SSD controller and memory architecture (dispersing data
among many chips) and how these can improve data integrity by managing read
disturb errors. It also discusses wear-leveling and write amplification which
have been well covered elsewhere. ...read
the article
See also:-
SSD Reliability -
Understanding Data Failure Modes in Large Solid State Storage Arrays
SSD Bookmarks from Texas Memory Systems
Editor:-
March 16, 2009 - Texas
Memory Systems' President, Woody Hutsell - shares his SSD
Bookmarks today on the home page of
StorageSearch.com.
Those
who know the SSD industry well, mostly think of TMS as a company which makes
very fast SSDs for accelerating
SAN resident applications.
But in the many discussions I've had with Woody Hutsell during the past decade -
"reliability" has also been a frequent topic in our conversations.
That's because when you manufacture products which pack more memory chips than
anyone else has ever put into a single box - all those "10 to the minus
something" numbers which relate physics to semiconductor memory
effects - add up to design problems which are far from theoretical. TMS has
been engineering solid state storage systems for
30 years.
So I was not surprised to see an in depth paper about reliability being one of
the articles in this list of bookmarks.
New Tool Acts as Bouncer for Up Market Tape Joints
Boulder,
Colo. - February 3, 2009 - Spectra Logic has extended its Media
Lifecycle Management technology outside the library with a new reader - now
shipping.
The MLM Reader (approx $2,500) is a portable device
that allows customers to check tape health on any computer through
USB, without loading the
tape into a library, and
is designed to proactively identify faulty tape media before it is required for
a data restore. It tracks over 30 non-volatile statistics about data tapes,
such as export details; remaining capacity; encryption information; number of
reads and writes; date of last access; born-on date; and cleaning log. ...Spectra Logic profile
SiliconSystems Proposes New Methodology for Realistically
Predicting Flash SSD Reliability
Editor:-
December 15, 2008 - Gary Drossel, VP Product Planning at SiliconSystems
has written a new article - "NAND Evolution and its Effects on SSD
Useable Life."
This is probably one of the 3 most
significant articles on the subject of
flash SSD
reliability which have been published in recent years. Starting with a tour of
the state of the art in the flash SSD market and technology the paper
introduces several new concepts to help systems designers understand why
current wear usage models don't give a complete picture.
- Write amplification - is a measure of the efficiency of the SSD
controller. Write amplification defines the number of writes the controller
makes to the NAND for every write from the host system.
- Wear-leveling efficiency - reflects the maximum deviation of the
most-worn block to the least worn block over time.
The paper discusses
the theoretical expected lifetimes and amplification factors for several
applications and concludes that measurement of wear-out in real applications is
the best way to understand what is happening. It suggests that systems
designers can use the company's SiliconDrive (which includes real-time on-chip
endurance monitoring) as an endurance analysis design tool. By simply
plugging in SiliconDrive(s) to a new application for a day, week or month - the
percentage of wear-out can be measured - and corrective steps taken (in software
design or overprovisioning) to correct reliability problems.
What
isn't stated in the article - but is a logical inference - is that even if
your product design goal is to buy SSDs from other oems - the SiliconDrives can
be used in your design process to capture information in a non invasive manner
which is difficult or impossible to collect using other instrumentation. ...read the
article (pdf), ...SiliconSystems
profile, storage
reliability
iStor Unlocks High Availability Features in Installed iSCSI ASICs
IRVINE, Calif. - October 7, 2008 -
iStor Networks, Inc. has begun shipping a new version of its
software, v2.5, as a no-cost upgrade for all its iSCSI storage solutions.
This software will provide dual-controller
iS512 systems with the
ability to automatically detect malfunctions in the operational controller and
to switch to the redundant controller without loss of data, function or
performance.
"This new software capitalized on the patented
capabilities of iStor's ASIC technology enabling HA capability with no
impact upon system performance before, during or after a controller failure."
said Jim Wayda, iStor's VP of Software Development. "iStor designed its
controllers from the very beginning to deliver advanced functionality such as HA
and we are very proud that we have been able to demonstrate the investment
protection inherent in iStor's approach of implementation..."
...iStor profile,
iSCSI,
storage reliability
Can You Trust Your Flash SSD's Specs?
Editor:- July 9, 2008 -
STORAGEsearch.com today published a new article which asks - Can you
trust your flash SSD specs?
The
flash SSD market
opens up tremendous opportunities for systems integrators to leverage solid
state disk technology. But due to the diversity of products in the market and
lack of industry standards - it's got tremendous risks as well.
The
product which you carefully qualified may not be identical to the one that's
going into your production line for a variety of reasons... ...read the article
Preparing for the Next Phase in the SSD Market Revolution
Editor:- June 25, 2008 -STORAGEsearch.com
today called for new papers on the theme - "Understanding Data
Failure Modes in Large Solid State Storage Arrays".
Multi-terabyte
solid state storage arrays are seeping into the server environment in the same
way that RAID systems did
back in the early 1990s.
But just as those RAID pioneers learned that
there was a lot more to making a reliable disk array than stuffing a bunch of PC
hard disks into a
box with a fan and a
power supply - so too will multi-terabyte
SSD users discover that
problems which are undetectable or do no harm in small SSDs can lead to
serious data corruption risks when those same SSDs are scaled up without the
right architecture and sometimes with it in place too.
I know from
the emails I get that many readers think that once they've looked at the
single issue of flash
endurance - they've covered covered the bases for enterprise SSDs.
That's
why storagesearch.com is planning to publish a collection of definitive
technology articles to help guide the industry through this risky transition
process.
The new articles will provide users with the theoretical
justifications they need when they are faced with the difficult economic choices
that come from deploying different types of SSDs (with different cost models)
in diverse applications within their organizations. ...read the article
HDD & SSD Reliability Event
Editor:-
May 2, 2008 - Here's news about an upcoming IDEMA event - "Hard
Disk and SSD Reliability - The Pursuit of Excellence" - May 15 in
Sunnyvale, CA.
This IDEMA Symposium will address HDD reliability;
the physics, mathematics, and statistics of its assessment, HDD design for
reliability, field performance experience of storage users and finally the HDD
production environment and supporting metrology to maximize yields and minimize
reliability detractors. Also included will be a similar discussion relative to
SSD product
reliability. Price is $455 for non members. ...IDEMA profile,
Storage Events
Disk Error Correction Company Gets $22 million Funding
Santa Clara, Calif. - April 9,
2008 - Link_A_Media Devices Corp secured $22 million in Series
B financing.
The funding round, led by
AIG SunAmerica Ventures,
was secured from 4 additional financial and corporate investors -
KeyNote Ventures,
NEC Electronics,
Micron and
Seagate.
Link_A_Media Devices is developing a new class of
chip controller resident
data recovery solutions for
HDDs and
SSDs. These are
designed to exceed the performance of conventional methods deployed in
peripheral storage devices, as well as provide adaptive features that can be
used during manufacturing to improve drive yields and product margins.
...Link_A_Media
Devices profile
Editor's comments:- MLC flash SSDs have
high internal
error rates and are currently unrecoverable. It looks like Link_A_Media's
technology could improve the odds of
data recovery in
failed devices which incorporate its technology (as well as reducing data errors
while the SSD is still operational.)
Another side effect of their
technology may be better
performance in
flash SSDs.
Link_A_Media
says their IOP
Buster architecture enables scalability within the controller to address
various segments of SSD applications seamlessly. It enables faster Read and
Write transfers.
Spectra Libraries will Log Tape Health Metrics
SNW,
ORLANDO, FL - April 8, 2008 - Spectra Logic announced details of its
soon to be released new Media Lifecycle Management software for its tape
library customers.
MLM will reduce backup failures by tracking
more than 30 pieces of information about individual LTO tapes and logging this
on on the tape's built in flash chip. Information such as: born-on date, number
of reads and writes, error rate, media quality, date of last access, application
usage, encryption information, cleaning log and remaining capacity are tracked.
MLM and BlueScale are compatible with all major
backup applications.
...Spectra Logic
profile
Editor's comments:- already past the decline and now in
the fall years of the tape
library market it looks like customers will get all kinds of useful
information and services which they probably would have liked to have before.
This sounds similar in concept to the
SMART
logs in hard disks
and SiSMART
in SiliconSystems'
flash SSDs.
Pillar's Petabyte Arrays are 99.999% Available
San
Jose, Calif. - April 7, 2008 - Pillar Data Systems today announced
availability of the Pillar Axiom 500MC - a mission critical storage system .
The Pillar Axiom 500MC delivers up to 192GB of cache, with the ability
to scale capacity to 1.6 petabytes. The system supports both
fibre channel and
SATA disk drives.
Pillar guarantees 99.999% availability. ...Pillar profile
Does Unhappy Notebook Maker Have High Rate of SSD Flash Backs?
Editor:-
March 19, 2008 - a report discussed in an article on CNET saying that
flash SSDs in notebooks are incurring double digit customer reject rates has
been dismissed by Dell as "untrue."
Study Enumerates Key Factors in Disk Array Failures
Editor:-
March 6, 2008 - a recently published paper called - Are Disks the Dominant
Contributor for Storage Failures? - reports on a 3 year study of nearly 2
million operating disks.
Among the many findings:- the
annualized failure rate in near-line systems which mostly use
SATA disks is
approximately twice as high as in systems which mostly use
fibre-channel disks.
But other factors such as datapath resilience, presence or absence of
RAID and
reliability of the
rack system components are just as significant contributors to storage
reliability as the hard
disks themselves.
...read
the article
Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
Editor:- February
27, 2008 - STORAGEsearch.com published a new article today called - Are
MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
This is a follow up
article to the popular
SSD Myths and
Legends which, in early 2007, demolished the myth that flash memory
wear-out (a comfort blanket beloved by many
RAM SSD makers)
precluded the use of flash in heavy duty datacenters.
This new
article looks at the risks posed by MLC Nand Flash SSDs which have recently
hatched from their breeeding ground as chip modules in cellphones and morphed
into hard disk form
factors. It starts down a familiar lane but an unexpected technology twist
(which arrived in my email this morning) takes you to a startling new world of
possibilities. ...read the article
WEDC Targets Medical CompactFlash Market
Phoenix, AZ - December 19,
2007 - White Electronic Designs Corp is leveraging its defense industry
experience and expertise to develop high-reliability modules for the growing
portable medical device market.
According to the U.S. Census
Bureau, there will be an expected 40 million persons in the U.S. over the age of
65 by 2010, driving the need for portable medical devices, especially for home
use. The portable medical device market is driven by the same requirements
and expectations as the defense segment; such as high quality and reliability,
shorter development cycles, a well-defined and documented supply chain and
extended product lifecycles. Among other products WEDC designs and
manufactures one of the industry's first medical series CompactFlash cards.
...White Electronic
Designs profile
Editor's comments:- WEDC has also recently
published a paper
Is All
CompactFlash Really Created Equal? (pdf) which uses the medical
instrumentation market as the backdrop for a discussion about
flash SSDs similar
to those concerns analyzed in
SSD Myths and
Legends - "write endurance" - which looked at the enterprise
server market.
Patent May Suit High Reliability SSD OEMs
MINNETONKA, MN - November 23, 2007 - ECC
Technologies, Inc. announces that its parallel Reed-Solomon error
correction designs and US Patent are immediately available for licensing.
PRS encoder and decoder designs allow parallel I/O storage devices to
be designed with automatic, built-in backup (fault-tolerance). PRS applied to
flash SSDs (for
example) enables SSDs to be designed that can tolerate NAND Flash chip failures.
PRS can also be applied to Hard Disk Arrays. Potential licensees can read
about the PRS technology applied to
SSDs and to
HDDs on these
preceding links. ...ECC
Technologies profile,
storage reliability
Editor's
comments:- in the early days of a fast growing technology market most
vendors are too busy growing their revenue by selling products to customers.
But when markets get big enough or growth rates slow down - another round kicks
in - of harvesting money from those who succeeded in the market - but didn't
protect themselves properly with patents.
When I was a young engineer
several designs of mine did get patented. In one particular company I remember
being asked to leaf through some 10 year old logbooks of my predecessors to find
some prior art to help nullify a competitor's potential attack. I always
preferred doing things my own way - so I grumbled at being asked to delve into
these dusty old files. But I did find what my boss was looking for.
Panasas Solution Targets RAID Unreliability
FREMONT, CA - October
9, 2007 - Panasas, Inc. announced the Panasas Tiered Parity
Architecture which the company claims is the most significant extension to disk
array data reliability since Panasas CTO Garth Gibson's pioneering RAID
research at UC-Berkeley in 1988.
With the release of the
ActiveScale 3.2 operating environment, Panasas will offer an innovative
end-to-end Tiered-Parity architecture that addresses the primary causes of
storage reliability
problems and provides the industry's first end-to-end data integrity checking
capability.
Traditional
RAID implementations
protect against disk failures by calculating and storing parity data along with
the original data.
In the past 10 years, individual disk drives have
become approximately 10x more reliable and over 250x denser than those protected
by the first generation RAID designs in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, the
number of disk media failures expected during each read over the surface of a
disk grows proportionately with the massive increase in density and has now
become the most common failure mode for RAID. A RAID disk failure can cause loss
of all the data in a volume which may be tens of terabytes or more. Recovery
of the lost data from tape
(assuming that is all backed up) can take days or even weeks.
Other
storage system vendors recognize this same issue and apply RAID 6, often called
double parity RAID, to address this problem. Double parity schemes only treat
the symptom of the failure, not the cause, and they carry substantial cost
and performance penalties, which will only get worse as disk drive densities
continue to increase.
Panasas Tiered Parity architecture directly
addresses the root cause of the problem, not the symptom. Solving the storage
reliability problem caused by these new 1TB and larger disks allows Panasas to
build larger and more reliable storage that allows users to get more value from
their data and are less expensive for IT to support.
"The challenges with storage system reliability today have
little to do with overall disk reliability, which is what RAID was designed to
address in 1988. The issues that we see today are directly related to disk
density and require new approaches. Most secondary disk failures today are the
result of media errors, which have become 250x more likely to occur during a
RAID failed-disk rebuild over the last 10 years," said Garth Gibson, CTO of
Panasas. "Tiered Parity allows us to tackle media errors with an
architecture that can counter the effects of increasing disk density. It also
solves data path reliability challenges beyond those addressed by traditional
RAID and extends parity checking out to the client or server node. Tiered Parity
provides the only end-to-end data integrity checking capability in the industry."
...Panasas profile
Editor's
comments:- the problem of data corruption in large data sets because of
obsolete technology assumptions built into hard disks, interface and RAID
products has been looming for several years. You can see articles and research
about this on the storage
reliability page.
Is the solution more reliable hard drives?
better interfaces? or a smarter storage OS? Users can't wait another 5 years
for ideal solutions because the symptoms are there today when you look. The
Panasas solution sounds like a pragmatic tactical approach for some customers -
but the industry is a long way from a better storage reliability mousetrap.
Why Sun will Shine with a New Lustre
SANTA
CLARA, Calif - September 12, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today said
it will acquire the majority of Cluster File Systems, Inc.'s
intellectual property and business assets, including the Lustre File System.
Sun intends to add support for Solaris OS on Lustre and plans to
continue enhancing Lustre on Linux and Solaris OS across multi vendor hardware
platforms.
...Sun Microsystems profile,
Acquired storage companies
Editor's
comments:- I hadn't heard of this company before. A sure sign that they
were heading straight for the
gone away storage
companies list without any deviations on route. Here's what I picked up from
their web site present and
past.
The
Lustre
product description (pdf) says - "the Lustre architecture was first
developed at Carnegie Mellon University as a research project in 1999."
The company's website started in about 2001 amd they released Lustre 1.0 in
2003. By
2004
had a product ready for a bigger market.
Strangely enough Solaris
support isn't listed as a strong feature in their recent
roadmap. So why does Sun
want this technology? - Well - even if you're not in the supercomputer business
- some technologies which start there eventually trickle down to the rest of us.
"Zero single points of failure" - mentioned on their home page - is a
good enough reason. As I wrote in my
7 year storage market
predictions (2005) storage
reliability is going to become a major headache in enterprise storage in the
next 5 years.
See also:- Robin
Harris's blog which explains the business background to CFS - "why
aren't they rich?"
Tapewise Enterprise Checks Tape Media Errors
Farnborough
UK - September 18, 2007 - Data Product Services today announces the
release of Tapewise Enterprise.
Tapewise is software that writes
data to a tape and then reads it again, tracking any errors, soft recoverable
ones or unrecoverable ones, that occur. It streams a whole tape through a drive
in this way and, with its Tape Error Map technology, produces a 3D graph
showing errors encountered along the length of a tape when data was being read
and written.
The user can decide what an acceptable error rate is
and that boundary will be shown on the graph with any error rates above the
user-defined norm instantly visible. The software supports a large number of
tape formats: 3480; 3490; DLT; SDLT; 3590; 9840; 9940; T10000; LTOs 1, 2 and 3
and 3592. Costs start at $16,000 approx. A free 14-day evaluation copy is
available. ...Data Product
Services profile,
Tape drives,
Storage Testers
Noise Damping Techniques for PATA SSDs
Editor:-
August 10, 2007 - SiliconSystems today published a new white paper
called - "Noise Damping Techniques for PATA SSDs in Military-Embedded
Systems."
This article looks at electronic signal integrity
issues in integrating high speed PATA SSDs. It helps electronic designers
understand how factors such as ground bounce, loading, power supply noise and
signal trace mismatches can lead to false data or even device damage. Examples
given in the tutorial style commentary include scope shots and logic analyzer
traces. ...read
the article, ...SiliconSystems
profile, storage chips,
storage analyzers
Editor's
comments:- the article gives a good grounding (couldn't resist that one) in
the signal quality factors needed to get high
reliability
operation and is equally relevant to
hard disks. To simplify
the 20 page document:- if you connect reliable electronic modules using
unreliable signal paths - that will compromise the integrity of the data. Logic
states are virtual - but digital signals are real and can have completely
different shapes to what you expect if you don't follow basic rules.
Squeak! - Green Storage - What's Green. What's Not
Editor:- June 24,
2007 - STORAGEsearch.com today published a new article - Green Storage -
Trends and Predictions.
There's a lot of nonsense in the media
about so called "Green Storage". This article blows away the
puffery
and clears the air for a better view of forward looking green data storage
technologies. Reliability gets an honorable mention. Find out what's really
green - and what's not. ...read the article
Hard Drive
Unreliability Costs are Reason to Switch to SSDs
Aliso
Viejo, Calif., May 30, 2007 - SiliconSystems, Inc. today announced the
publication of a white paper called - "Solid-State Storage is a
Cost-Effective Replacement for Hard Drives in Many Applications."
The paper cites data from Google
and Carnegie Mellon University that
indicates hard drive
field failure rates are up to 15x greater than quoted in disk
manufacturer data sheets. The white paper was developed by SiliconSystems to
educate OEMs about the numerous technical and business decisions they must
successfully navigate to select the best storage solution for their application.
...read
the article (pdf),
...SiliconSystems
profile
Editor's note:-
storage reliability
is a type 4 application in our
SSD Market
Adoption Model.
Debunking Misconceptions in SSD Longevity
Editor:- May 11,
2007 - BiTMICRO Networks today published a new article called - "Debunking
Misconceptions in SSD Longevity."
It cites lifetime
predictions from my own popular article -
SSD Myths and
Legends - "write endurance" and fires a warning shot aimed at
some competitors by saying "some
flash SSD makers
have even quoted higher write endurance ratings than those provided by
manufacturers of their flash
memory components."
That's certainly true - but I knew when
writing my article that endurance varies from batch to batch of flash chips
within the same semiconductor fab process. Some SSD oems
sample test and
reject chips which are at the lower end of the distribution curve. That
means their worst case numbers are better than would be the case by simply
accepting merchant quality flash chips. Although starting from a different base
of assumptions -
BiTMICRO's
article "conclude(s) that fears about the endurance limitations of
SSDs are rightfully fading away."
Seagate Drops Notebook Drives
SCOTTS
VALLEY, Calif - March 12, 2007 - Seagate Technology today announced the
worldwide availability of a 7,200 RPM hard drive with free-fall
protection for beefed-up laptop durability.
Momentus 7200.2 delivers up to 160GB of capacity and has a
SATA interface. The
hard drive is also
offered with an optional free-fall sensor to help prevent drive damage and data
loss upon impact if a laptop PC is dropped. The sensor works by detecting any
changes in acceleration equal to the force of gravity, then parking the head off
the disc to prevent contact with the platter in a free fall of as little as 8
inches.
...Seagate profile
Editor's comments:- Hitachi revealed details
about its similar
ESP drop sensor
in 2005. The drop sensor approach is better than nothing, but doesn't get
around the unavoidable fact that hard disks can break when dropped.
Another
approach is that of Olixir
Technologies who have marketed repackaged high performance hard drives which
can be dropped repeatedly onto
a concrete floor from 6 feet and still survive.
But
solid state disks are
inherently even tougher than that because there are no internal moving parts to
crash together. That's
why they have been used in space ships, helicoptors and missiles. In 2006
In-Stat predicted that
half of all mobile computers would use SSDs (instead of
hard disks) by 2013.
It's not just the ruggedness and better power consumption. A
video
by Samsung demonstrates the advantages more graphically.
Hard Disk MTBF Specs Incredible - Say
User Reports
Editor:-
February 28, 2007 - an article published today in Channel Insider - "Hard
Disk MTBF: Flap or Farce? - casts serious doubt on the inflated MTBF claims made
by all hard disk manufacturers.
Reviewing a number of recently
published reliability studies from end users - the author
David
Morgenstern says "...there's a gap between the reliability
expectations of manufacturers and customers. The current MTBF model isn't
accounting accurately for how drives are handled in the field and how they
function inside systems." ...read
the article, storage
reliability
Google Reports on HDD Reliability
Editor:-
February 20, 2007 - Researchers at Google recently published a paper at
the recent Usenix conference about hard disk reliability and failure
prediction - based on their own experiences as a large user of hard disk drives.
The fascinating paper describes how Google measured available metrics
and status reports generated by the drives themselves and how this correlated
with actual failure patterns. One of the key insights in the report is Google's
view of how useful
SMART
parameters were for predicting failures.
"Our results are
surprising, if not somewhat disappointing. Out of all failed drives, over 56% of
them have no count in any of the four strong SMART signals, namely scan errors,
reallocation count, offline reallocation, and probational count. In other words,
models based only on those signals can never predict more than half of the
failed drives... ...even when we add all remaining SMART parameters (except
temperature) we still find that over 36% of all failed drives had zero counts on
all variables." ...read
the article, Hard disk
drives, storage
reliability
PS - the measured data on the percentage of disks which
fail each year over a 5 year cycle under various conditions is essential
reading for disk to disk backup
contingency planning.
Agere Halves Power Consumption for Mobile HDD Interface
ALLENTOWN, Pa - February 6,
2007 - Agere Systems has begun shipping a new fully functional
90-nanometer TrueStore read channel.
The TrueStore RC1300 uses half the current required by the previous
generation of read channel chip technology in this market segment and is 25%
faster. It targets the 1.8-inch and smaller
HDD form factor that
provides critical data storage of 20 to 160 gigabytes in a wide variety of
consumer devices.
...Agere Systems profile
STORAGEsearch.com Launches a New Strategic Directory - Storage
Reliability
Editor:- June 20, 2006 - STORAGEsearch.com
today launched a new directory dedicated to the subject of "Storage
Reliability".
Reliability was named as one of the 3 most important
future trends in storage in my
state of the storage market
article published last year. In that article I also predicted that
uncorrectable failures in storage systems (due to embedded design assumptions
made in earlier generations) could, if not dealt with by drive and interface
designers, pose a more serious threat to enterprise computer systems
than the Y2K bug in the late 1990s.
In addition to covering
news about what the industry is doing to improve reliability in future drives,
media and interfaces, STORAGEsearch has invited CTOs and technical directors of
leading companies to write special articles about this subject - which will
appear in the months ahead.
When most people think about storage
reliability - they think about MTBF and thermal factors.
If an
individual drive isn't reliable enough - wrap it in a
RAID. If heat reduces the
life of the disks - then cool them with more fans. If a memory system or
interface is critical to an application - cocoon it with error detection and
correction codes. Those are approaches which have worked adequately for the
past few decades - but they are not good enough any more.
The demands
for storage reliability are growing. Non stop applications need data that can
be trusted to be available on demand.
Compliance
dictates that data should be readable not just years - but possibly decades
after it was created. Meanwhile storage components, interfaces and systems are
increasing in speed and capacity - while many of them are using error correction
thinking that comes from earlier generations when data sets were smaller. As
storage gets bigger - users face the risk of having uncorrectable errors in the
heartland of their decision making data. That's why - all over the industry -
manufacturers are starting to talk about new storage reliability initiatives.
There's
also the risk that new storage technologies which get rushed to serve the needs
of the consumer market - have not in fact been tested long enough to guarantee
that they will not fail or start to corrupt data in the timeframe that
enterprise customers care about.
Wrapping arrays of consumer
disks based on new 2
year proven media technology in a big "enterprise" box - cannot
guarantee that the data will still be readable in 5 years time. This is not a
worry for consumers. They'll throw a failed disk away or buy a new one. But if
your enterprise owns thousands of these disks (hidden by virtualization) it
could be a big headache when the crumbly nature of the storage defects start to
hit the news. This is
another of the many concerns we'll be covering in these pages.
Storage media have
failed in the past and been withdrawn because they didn't meet their original
extrapolated lifetimes. Lessons are not always learned from errors in the past
- but can be forgotten and reoccur.
Storage reliability is changing.
If you are interested - I hope you'll stay tuned to the new storage reliability
channel here on the mouse site - as we report on these exciting developments in
the months ahead.
Why Solaris will Get 128 Bit Addresses
Editor:-
May 1, 2006 - an article today in InformationWeek.com discusses the
Zettabyte File System - a new 128 bit addressing scheme for Solaris.
The
article says that apart from the obvious advantage of being able to access more
storage, Sun is apparently thinking about building in error correction into the
new address scheme.
In a
market forecast
published last year in STORAGEsearch.com
- Storage Reliability and failures were cited as one of the most important
long term problems which oems and users will have to deal with.
The
cause of the problem is that storage interfaces as well as modules and
components (like disks,
tapes,
optical drives etc) use
error correcting schemes which were designed for the much smaller and slower
architectures of the past. As storage systems expand - new algorithms and
correction schemes will be needed to guarantee that users don't get affected by
data failures which are uncorrectable using today's products and
protection schemes.
It's good to see that Sun is working proactively
on one aspect of the problem. I've talked to many storage manufacturers about
the upcoming reliability problem - which could be more serious than the Y2K
threat - if not dealt with in advance. Sun is highly sensitive to data
reliability concerns.
Problems
with its own SPARC server cache memory design back in 2001- were cited at
the time by many large users as reasons for considering a switch to Intel and
PowerPC based systems.
See also:-
SPARC Product Directory
Hard Disk Sector Size May Change
SUNNYVALE,
Calif - March 23, 2006 - IDEMA today announced the results of an
industry committee assembled to identify a new and longer sector standard for
future magnetic hard disk drives.
This Committee recommended
replacing the 30 year-standard of 512 bytes with sectors having ability to store
4,096 bytes. Dr. Ed Grochowski, executive director of IDEMA US, reported that
adopting a 4K byte sector length facilitates further increases in data density
for hard drives which will increase storage capacity for users while continuing
to reduce cost per gigabyte.
"Increasing areal density of newer magnetic
hard disk drives
requires a more robust error correction code, and this can be more efficiently
applied to 4,096 byte sector lengths," explained Dr. Martin Hassner from
Hitachi GST and IDEMA Committee member.
...IDEMA profile
Whitepaper Measures ROI of Disk Defragmentation
Burbank,
CA - January 24, 2006 - Diskeeper recently sponsored IDC to
write a whitepaper called - "Defragmentation's Hidden Value for the
Enterprise."
This measured the ROI of defragmentation
software in real customer sites. During the reliability test, the servers that
were defragmenting files automatically had a higher uptime (5 to 10%) than the
servers that didn't have defragmentation software automatically running.
...read
the article (pdf), ...Diskeeper
profile
ProStor Systems Unveils New Backup
Technology
BOULDER,
CO - November 2, 2005 - ProStor Systems made its public debut
today by introducing the firm's RDX removable disk backup technology.
The RDX removable cartridge uses the same 2.5" hard disk media platters
found in notebook computers and provides initial capacity upto 400GB
(compressed). That will will increase in line with conventional hard disk
technology. But the difference is that RDX uses a new patent-pending
error correcting format, which makes the data 1,000 times more
recoverable than in a standard hard drive. ProStor says this means that
RDX-stored data will be readable even after the cartridge has been archived
and non-operating more than a decade. ...ProStor Systems profile,
Removable Storage,
Disk to disk backup,
Storage People
Editor's
comments:- the reliability of embedded storage modules and components such as
disk drives,
tape drives and
optical disks will become
an important issue for users in the
next 7 years.
These
products rely on inbuilt error correction algorithms which were designed over a
decade ago - when storage capacities were much smaller. All those "ten to
the minus something" numbers which you see quoted for error rates sound
good - except that when your enterprise is managing Petabytes of data, at every
higher connection speeds, then you will start seeing uncorrectable data
failures occurring every year - inside the storage, and beyond the scope
of your RAID or other
protection scheme to correct. ProStor is one of a new generation of storage
manufacturers addressing this problem, and we'll soon publish a directory
section dedicated to storage reliability issues such as this. | |
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| Can You Trust Your Flash
SSD's Specs? |
Editor:- I've noticed is that
the published specs of
flash SSDs change
a lot -from the time a product they are first announced, then when they're
being sampled, and later again when they are in volume production.
Sometimes
the headline numbers get better, sometimes they get worse. There are many good
reasons for this.
The product which you carefully qualified may
not be identical to the one that's going into your production line for a
variety of reasons...
And here's another thing to worry about...
The
enterprise flash SSDs which you benchmarked yourself - may surprise you by
running much slower when deployed in your own applications due to
common "halo" errors which are implicit in the set ups of many
performance test suites which were originally designed for HDDs. ...read the article | |
| . |
| Are MLC SSDs Safe
in Enterprise Apps? |
This is a follow up
article to the popular
SSD Myths and
Legends which, a year earlier demolished the myth that flash memory
wear-out (a comfort blanket beloved by many
RAM SSD makers)
precluded the use of flash in heavy duty datacenters.
This new
article looks at the risks posed by MLC Nand Flash SSDs which have recently
hatched from their breeeding ground as chip modules in cellphones and morphed
into
hard disk form
factors. |
 |
It starts down a familiar
lane but an unexpected technology twist takes you to a startling new world
of possibilities.
...read the
article | | |
| . |
| Z's Laws - Predicting
Future Flash SSD Performance |
A a reader asked me a
very good question.
"Is there an industry roadmap for future
flash SSD
performance?"
That prompted other questions like...
- How fast are flash SSDs going to be in 2009?, 2010? or 2012?
- What are the technology factors which relate to flash SSD throughput and
IOPS?
- How close will flash SSDs get to
RAM SSD performance?
There wasn't a simple answer I could give at the time. Clues lay
scattered all across this web site
and in my many one on one discussions with readers about the market... |
 |
But I agreed there should be
a single place on the web where these answers could be found.
Forget
Moore's
Law. That gives you the wrong answer, and this article explains why. ...read the article | | |
| . |
Sanitization
Methods for Cleaning Up Hard Disk Drives - article by Intelligent Computer
Solutions
Removing the data on old unwanted disk drives has
become a concern for all users.
7 out of 10 recycled hard-drives
bought over the Internet contain readable data.
This article reviews
the various methods available to sanitize hard disks along with the advantages
and disadvantages in each case....read the article,
...Intelligent Computer
Solutions profile,
disk sanitizers | |
| . |
 |
the
Impact of Compliance on Archival Storage Strategies - article by Plasmon
It's
difficult enough protecting and archiving your data so that it's available to
the right people at the right time (and cost). But now that's only part of the
problem. With so many new rules and regulations which prescribe how you should
destroy data records at the appropriate time - how do you guarantee that they
stay deleted?
Archiving data on the wrong kind of media could mean you
run the risk of breaking the law. Advances in the
data recovery
industry, and the future cohabitation of storage search-engines both mean that
Compliance Officers have to pay much more attention to the ways in which data is
dispersed and disposed of in different types of media.
This article
summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of currently available market
technologies. ...
read the article,
...Plasmon profile,
Optical Libraries | |
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