will rental break through
the uncertainty barrier for SSD ASAPs?
Editor:- January 26, 2012
- One of the business development obstacles facing
enterprise SSD ASAP
/ caching vendors in the past few years has been that users have mostly
thought of them as being HDD array accelerators.
And even if a user is
interested right now - and even if they are happy with their try before you buy
results - they often hold off making a purchase - because they think (after
reading web sites like this one) that one day they'll be ripping out their
rotating RAID systems and
replacing them with SSDs - so it might be silly to buy an SSD cache applaince
right now.
Now in reality - most users won't replace their entire HDD
storage as quickly as they might like to think - and ASAPs do have a permanent
role in the pure SSD datacenter too. Some vendors' marketing materials talk
about that - while others are still
harping on
about hard disks and the "superiority" of SSD - even when their
technology roadmap works just as well for SSD.
Seemingly breaking
through the user indecision barrier - Dataram today
published a customer story about their
"no
long term commitment" - Acceleration on Demand - leasing program. It
sounds like a good idea - but I don't know the exact terms and conditions
involved.
notebook SSD ASAP shipments may grow 100x
Editor:-
January 12, 2012 - iSuppli
says that the use of SSD as cache in ultrabooks (SSD notebook ASAPs)
will grow from just under a million units in
2011 to
nearly 26 million in 2012
and then may
continue
growing to 120 million units by 2015. See also:-
notebook SSDs
OCZ acquires SANRAD
Editor:- January 10, 2012 -
OCZ yesterday
announced it
has acquired SANRAD
for $15 million.
"SANRAD's software is a wonderful complement to
OCZ's Flash technology," said Oded
Ilan, CEO of SANRAD Inc. "We are excited with the opportunity
created by this unique combination between storage virtualization, caching and
PCIe Flash storage."
Editor's comments:- this makes the
4th SSD IP or company acquisition that OCZ has done that I've written about on
these pages. 3 out of the 4 have aimed squarely at the enterprise SSD market.
SSD software will be
a powerful sales and business growth accelerator for
PCIe SSD companies in
2012 - as it will open
up new market opportunities much faster than previously possible with human
engineering assets. Put simply - it's let the software solve the problem of
integrating the SSD. It's more than simply
auto-tiering - but
that's an important enabling tool as well.
SANRAD was also the 1st
company to ship front loadable PCIe SSD modules BTW.
the New Business Case for SSD ASAPs
Editor:-
December 6, 2011 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new article -
the New Business
Case for SSD ASAPs .
What's an SSD ASAP? - When I use this term it
includes:-
- auto-tiering SSD appliances
- SSD cache - the automatic kind
- SSD acceleration As Soon As Possible
- Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage
- combinations of the above
It's going to be a huge market. SSD
ASAPs are 1 of the 6 main SSD product types that will be around in the pure
solid state storage datacenter of the future in the
2016 to
2020
timeframe.
The word "new" in the title is deliberate. It
replaces an article I wrote about SSD ASAPs when the market started in 2009.
Since then - my thinking - and that of key players in the market has
developed. This should no longer just be regarded as a tactical market to bring
the advantages of SSD acceleration to legacy hard drive arrays. ASAPs are an
essential interface between different levels of SSD storage. ...read the article
analyzer suite could speed up auto-tiering SSD evaluations
Editor:-
November 29, 2011 - hyperI/O
today
announced
availability of its Disk I/O Ranger software analysis tool for Windows
environments.
The company says this will help users diagnose and
understand disk storage access performance problems and to to verify that QoS
levels are being met at the application/file/device level. It could also
simplify the evaluation of
auto-tiering SSD
appliances by collecting real-time metrics.
Editor's comments:-
I asked Tom West, President of hyperI/O what he was seeing of the SSD
market from his perspective of selling storage analysis tools. He said -"One
of the major users of the hIOmon software is listed within the top 10 of your
latest -
Top 20 SSD Companies."
NexGen enters iSCSI auto-tiering SSD ASAP market
Editor:-
November 8, 2011 - NexGen
emerged from stealth mode and
announced
general availability of its first product - the
n5 - a 3U
iSCSI
auto-tiering and
real-time compression appliance - which internally leverages 48GB
RAM cache,
1.3TB PCIe SSD and
32TB raw SAS
HDD capacity to deliver
120TB RAID protected
usable fast virtual storage with adjustable performance QoS for every volume.
Satisfying apps speedup hunger without expensive SSD write
caching
Editor:- October 19, 2011 - Read caching can lift the glass
ceiling on write caching - as much as
3x. That's one of the unexpected twists revealed in a
new
blog by Gary
Orenstein VP of Products at Fusion-io.
What
are the practical applications of this? - Gary gives several examples - like
greatly simplified data replication / protection. But that's not the only
trick in the SSD toolkit. To demonstrate how this can be leveraged Gary
shows readers a graph which shows a 10x write speedup obtained when
using FIO's PCIe SSDs as read caches - managed by their
IO Turbine
SSD ASAP software -
in a server attached to a storage array from
NetApp.
Editor's
comments:- providing fail safe
data replication within the
low latency of an SSD acceleration environment is a non trivial problem -
discussed in an earlier
blog by Woody Hutsell (who now
works for Gary - see SSD news).
That
complexity is why you pay more for SSD solutions which include write
replication (like
Violin,
Kaminario,
Huawei Symantec and
Dataram) - the extra
cost appearing in both the invoice and accrued latency.
The new
blog by Gary Orenstein says - in effect - that you don't have to go all the way
to full à la cartre R/W SSD caching to get a satisfying meal of the day
apps speedup. ...read
the article
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).
GridIron's fat flash stirs ASAP caffeine sooner to beat weekly
peaky loads
Editor:- September 29, 2011 - GridIron Systems
today
announced
general availability of its
TurboCharger
- an FC SAN
fat flash
SSD ASAP / auto-tiering
cache - which has low latency (tens of microseconds) and is intended to be
used in what the company calls "Big data" installations.
Editor's
comments:- Although conceptually similar to
Dataram's 2 year old
XcelaSAN - GridIron's
product is scaled to work with much bigger storage capacities - and includes
more dedicated silicon.
Also - unlike most other caches - GridIron
says its hot data stores and recognizes peaking data patterns over many days -
and not just short term real-time data spikes. That makes it better able to
react more quickly to cyclical business demands - such as time of day, day
of the week, start/end of month etc - without having to relearn them. So the
acceleration will kick in faster.
Dell will distribute Dataram's auto tiering SSD
Editor:-
September 22, 2011 - Dataram
announced
that Dell
OEM Solutions will manufacture, provide hardware customization,
distribute and support Dataram's
FC SAN compatible
auto-tiering / SSD ASAP
- the XcelaSAN from
November 2011.
Editor's comments:- Since Dataram launched the
XcelaSAN 2 years ago
it has fixed perceived gaps in its failover characteristics and established
some impressive customer reference sites. But sales have been slow.
Part
of the problem has been that this product is aimed at users who don't have
the technical resources within their workgroups to
tune vanilla SSD
accelerators in SANs because of the
many complex data
architecture decisions which then arise. That's why they need
auto-tiering.
But without internal safety nets these ideal
potential customers have to be absolutely confident that it works and will
be supported. This deal with Dell goes a long way to doing that - and will tip
the balance for many who liked the idea but needed the reassurance that a 3rd
party heavyweight company has looked at the design and is prepared to support
it.
SANRAD enters the SSD ASAP market
Editor:- September
20, 2011 - SANRAD
has entered the
auto-tiering SSD / SSD
ASAPs market with the launch of its new VXL software which supports its
family of FC and GbE
unified storage network
routers.
"Many organizations are adding flash resources to
their virtual server environments but aren't able to use them efficiently,"
says Dr Allon Cohen,
SANRAD's VP Marketing. "By combining our software with their
infrastructure, they instantly have faster access, more secure data, and
resilience."
Editor's comments:- the thinking behind
SANRAD's acceleration architecture is described in this white paper -
Where
to put your flash SSD accelerators - for best enterprise results (pdf)
will OCZ's new hybrid PCIe SSD be a market game changer?
Editor:-
September 1, 2011 - OCZ
yesterday
launched a
hybrid PCIe SSD - the
RevoDrive Hybrid - which integrates 100GB SSD capacity along with an onboard
terabyte HDD and
SSD ASAP / auto hot spot
cache tuning controller capable of 910MB/s peak throughput and upto 120,000
random write IOPS (4K) - all for an MSRP under $500.
"The
RevoDrive Hybrid leverages the best attributes of both solid state drives and
traditional hard drive technology to deliver dynamic data-tiering on a single
easy to deploy PCIe storage drive," said Ryan
Petersen, CEO of OCZ.
Editor's comments:- although
many oems have tried to make a success of
all in one SSD-HDD
hybrid drives - the hybrids which have come to market in the past 6 years
have mostly been failures ...read
more analysis on main SSD news page
Fusion-io acquires SSD ASAP software company
Editor:-
August 4, 2011 - Fusion-io
announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire IO Turbine for
approximately $95 million.
David Flynn, Chairman and CEO of
Fusion-io. "We believe integrating ioMemory and IO Turbine adds a critical
and previously missing performance component to virtualized IT environments that
will accelerate the adoption of Fusion-io technology. This acquisition also
underscores our focus on providing customers with an enterprise solution that
features software and hardware components designed to accelerate their business'
full suite of applications."
Fusion-io also
reported
revenue of $72 million for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2011, more than 6x
as much as the year ago quarter in 2010 and up 7% from from the prior
quarter.
Editor's comments:- these are the first financial
results reported by Fusion-io since it became a publicly listed company. The
results - and the company's decision to acquire an
SSD ASAP software
company together confirm and validate the company's strong showing in our
predictive top 10 SSD
companies list in recent years. The
SSD market has
become a serious business - and is no longer just about how cleverly a bunch of
electronics guys can tame a bunch of unruly memory chips and make them play
hard drive tricks.
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.)
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
Dataram delivers 24x speedup for telco
Editor:- May
5, 2011 - Dataram
has started to say more about the
speedup
ratios that customers are seeing with its
XcelaSAN (the industry's
first SSD ASAP).
One of my
11 SSD predictions
for 2011 was that SSD marketers would start to talk the language of xN
speedups for common apps or customer groups rather than simply tossing
around native IOPS and throughput numbers.
"We knew from the
outset that XcelaSAN would deliver unbeatable value and performance to our
customers, and we are now seeing proof of the many financial and business
benefits that all our users are receiving." said John Freeman, President
and CEO of Dataram. "We are very pleased to find that our customers can now
do more at lower CapEx and OpEx, while extending the usable life of their
equipment in a wide range of business environments."
Marvell flies a kite for DragonFly accelerator
Editor:-
April 4, 2011 - Marvell
today unveiled a PCIe
compatible SSD ASAP.
Marvell claims 10x speedups can be realized using its new
DragonFly
Virtual Storage Accelerator - which is designed to reduce
write amplification
to external storage arrays and acts as an OS agnostic multiprotocol storage
cache for NAS,
SAN or
DAS storage arrays.
The product - is expected to sample in Q3.
Editor's comments:-
more than 20 companies have launched similarly impressive sounding accelerators
in the past 2 years in form factors ranging from cards to racks. Based on the
track record of the SSD industry in this particular segment I think it would be
realistic for users to think about a timescale which is more like another
year than another quarter before application software issues are resolved
in this new product - and the speedup ratio quoted may or may not be sustainable
too.
Xiotech enters ASAP market
Editor:- January 31, 2011
- Xiotech is
the latest company to join the crowding
SSD ASAP market with
the
launch
of its Hybrid ISE - a
3U FC rack with
14TB of capacity and 60,000
IOPS
performance which internally uses a mixture of
2.5" SSDs and
HDDs.
Similarly
to many other ASAP vendors - Xiotech claims its systems has "fully
automated set-and-forget simplicity". The company says that using ROI
calculations from weighted I/O counts, automated tiering begins within 1 minute
of I/O and continues to manage the performance requirements of applications in
real-time.
ASAPs will still be needed after hard drives have gone
Editor:-
January 21, 2011 - today a reader asked a good question about the
SSD ASAP market -
effectively asking if I thought some vendors might have missed an opportunity
here - because of
how long it
was taking to get customers to accept them.
When the first ASAPs
came to market in 2009
- I commented that the clock was ticking - because I didn't see the need for
this type of product once enterprises transitioned to a pure SSD environment in
the dataceneter.
I was glad to get the email because I have revised my
thoughts about this. Here's the text below from the reply I sent this morning.
I've
been revising and updating my long range SSD market model recently - some parts
of which appeared in
this article last year.
Something which comes out of filling in
the details is that I was wrong to say that SSD ASAPs will have a limited market
life. When the datacenter transitions to a 100% solid state storage in the
2015 to 2019 period - there will be an even bigger need for automatic
tiering technology between the 3 levels of SSDs in the new storage
architecture described in the petabyte SSD article.
That's because the
difference in latency between the fastest SSDs and the slowest (bulk storage
SSDs) will be bigger than the ratio between hard drives and cartridges in a
tape library. That means
the best performing ASAPs will still find a place in the market - long after I
originally expected.
I initially thought the need would disappear in
an environment which was 100% solid state storage. In some apps that will be
true. But in bigger enterprises complexity and economic realities mean that
tiering - between different classes of SSD storage - will still be necessary.
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.
Demartek tests LSI's CacheCade
Editor:- November 2,
2010 - Demartek
has published a sponsored
test
report (pdf) which compares the performance of
SSDs and
HDDs in a simulated
web server environment when managed by LSI's
CacheCade
software - which provides
SSD ASAP
functionality.
Editor's commnents:- The report shows that
throughput and access times were improved by at least 3x using a single
SSD cache compared to the HDD only situation.
However - it's
disappointing that the sizing of the test was not best chosen to draw
meaningful conclusions. Because the web content was only 25% larger than
the SSD capacity! It would have been more helpful to design a simulated case in
which there was at least a 10x or 100x size difference. Because if you
can fit all the web content onto an SSD then you don't need the burden of the
"cache" software at all - and might get better results by switching it
off.
There are case studies going back nearly 10 years which show that
SSDs can provide big speedups in web servers. The exact speedup depends on how
fast the SSD is. This test report doesn't answer the question - is LSI's
CacheCade useful in a realistically scaled environment?
NVELO launches notebook SSD ASAP
Editor:- August 17,
2010 - NVELO
launched
Dataplex - a software product
aimed at PC oems - which provides
SSD ASAP
functionality inside a
notebook.
Since Dataplex works with off-the-shelf storage devices, PC OEMs and
consumers have complete freedom to choose any SSD and any HDD, from any vendor.
"Consumers love the idea of SSD performance, but there is still a
huge (price) gap
between HDDs at $0.20/GB and SSDs at $2.00/GB; as an HDD replacement, the
economics simply don't work for all but a very small percentage of the market,"
said David Lin, VP of product management at NVELO. "With Dataplex, we are
making SSD performance economically feasible for a much larger market by using
the strengths of SSD and HDD technology together. And we're not talking about
simply installing the OS and whatever applications can fit onto a small SSD.
Dataplex learns user behavior, and intelligently caches all important data and
applications in an SSD device while maintaining the full capacity of the HDD for
storage."
Dataplex will begin shipping from select Tier 1 PC OEMs
in 2011. NVELO is currently in discussions with leading
HDD and
SSD vendors to enable
aftermarket sales and bundling options for Dataplex, and has begun development
of an enterprise version of Dataplex for server systems.
Editor's
comments:- if successful - NVELO's product will render obsolete most
hybrid drives
aimed at the notebook market. In the server ASAP market - it's a direct
competitor to the unloved
MaxIQ
SSD Cache Performance Kit created by
Microsoft, taken to
market by
Adaptec - and now owned
by PMC-Sierra.
SSD Bookmarks - suggested by Dataram
Editor:-
August 16, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
today published
SSD Bookmarks
- suggested by Jason
Caulkins, Chief Technologist Dataram.
A
year ago Dataram was at the forefront of a wave of companies creating a new
market for what I called "SSD ASAPs". It's
still unclear which type of approach will be most successful in this emerging
market. But you can learn about the issues that impinge on Dataram's technology
thinking by reading
the articles suggested.
Nimble Storage enters the ASAP market
Editor:- July
15, 2010 - Nimble
Storage announced the release of the
Nimble CS-Series
an iSCSI compatible
SSD ASAP which has
been optimized for backup and compression performance.
The model
CS240 has 18TB of primary storage and 216TB backup. At launch pricing was
under $3/GB (usable) for primary storage and $0.25/GB for backup storage.
will it work any better this time? - consumer bybrids
Editor:-
June 3, 2010 - Objective
Analysis published a new white paper -
Flash
Cache is Back (pdf) which says soon all computing platforms will employ
a cache layer between the
HDD and the
DRAM.
Author
Jim Handy says projections from
notebook SSD
makers that SSDs would already have replaced tens of millions of HDDs were over
optimistic and may "never happen". Instead he says a flash cache,
supported by a properly designed
SSD ASAP controller "will
provide near-SSD
performance at near-HDD
prices".
Early implementations of such flash cache schemes -
cited in the article - didn't work properly because... ...read
the article (pdf), ...read editor's
comments
ever wondered - why a NAS from Avere 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.
PMC-Sierra acquires Adaptec's SSD ASAP and RAID business
Editor:-
May 10, 2010 - PMC-Sierra
announced a
definitive
agreement to acquire Adaptec's channel
storage business for approximately $34 million in cash.
This deal
includes Adaptec's RAID storage product line, its global VAR customer base,
board logistics capabilities, and
SSD cache performance
solutions.
Editor's comments:- I had heard that
Adaptec's storage business was up for sale a few months ago.
In my
storage market outlook
2010 to 2015 article - published last year - I explained why I thought that
the RAID controller
market couldn't stay as it was.
These companies have to get into
offering complete SSD
solutions in the long term. In the short term PMC-Sierra may be able to do a
better job aggregating a bigger percentage of whatever remains of the untied
RAID controller business.
I expect the RAID business (for
hard disks) will
eventually become a consumer / SMB market - while the enterprise storage array
part of this market will morph through an
SSD ASAP phase -
while users struggle to redefine
new storage
architectures for the datacenter.
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.
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.
Adaptec's SSD seed corn came from Microsoft
Editor:-
March 25, 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."
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.
Tiering SAN Shifts Real Estate without Costly Tears
Editor:-
February 22, 2010 - Compellent
published a
case
study (pdf) - which shows the benefits of
automated
tiering
SAN storage - applied to
the online marketing of real estate.
Demonstrating the flexibility of
Compellent's "Fluid Architecture" their customer -
WhereToLive.com - is quoted as saying
- "With the Compellent system... I'm able to get a million-dollar SAN
over time and without that one-time million-dollar capital expenditure."
What
is Fluid Architecture? - Compellent's VP of marketing, Bruce Kornfeld,
explains...
"Compellent'sFluid Data storage
enables automated tiering at a granular level between any drive technology,
speed and even RAID level.
Shifting data between SSD,
FC,
SATA, and
SAS works quietly
and unobtrusively in the background. Businesses want a "set it and forget
it approach" and that's why automated tiering has proven popular –
because it saves customers a lot on disk drives, space and power costs. The fact
that most large, legacy storage vendors are now introducing their own solutions
only validate that customers are asking for automated tiered storage. Automatic
tiering is one party no storage vendor can afford to miss."
Editor's
comments:- this month is the
8th anniversary of
the "Affordable SAN Initiative." Like
$$Ds - there's
affordable and AFFORDABLE. |
