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Superior Data Solutions manufacturers
Tier 0 and Tier 1
Solid State storage solutions for the enterprise. Our FC enclosures incorporate
today's best of breed FC
or SATA high
performance, enterprise grade, flash solid state drives while balancing overall
performance with cost. SpeedStor, a direct connect FC or SAN enclosure,
incorporates the worlds' fastest flash disk technology. SpeedStor offers access
rates comparable to DRAM at a fraction of the cost. FlashStor, a cached SATA to
FC flash RAID, balances capacity, performance and cost in order to offer a
reasonable alternative to today's HDD subsystems.
see also:-
Superior
Data Solutions - editor mentions on STORAGEsearch.com and
Superior's
SSD page
- editor's comments:- September 2011 - Superior Data Solutions was a
pioneer in the use of flash SSD in enterprise apps - and in the 2006 to 2008 era
of SSD market history were listed in StorageSearch.com's
fastest SSDs list.
Nowadays SDS markets solutions which integrate SSDs and RAID into VMware
environments.
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Superior Data's 1st enterprise SSD was
developed in 2006 in partnership with
Gnutek.
More
recently - in 2008
- Sun Microsystems oemed
SDS's SpeedStor - a 1U rackmount flash SSD which includes best of breed COTS
fibre-channel SSDs.
An important thing to bear in mind about the SpeedStor is it doesn't
have any internal RAID
protection. That's why the box looks superficially faster than some other flash
SSD rackmounts (which do have internal RAID) - for example from
EasyCo.
For
serious online server apps you may need to deploy multiple SpeedStors and wrap
data protection around the boxes - which could impact overall cost,
performance and complexity.
In November 2008 -
Linda LaPorta,
President of Superior Data Solutions confirmed my guesses above - and said more
about how customers use this product.
"The SpeedStor is designed
to target high
IOP
environments with concurrent access to the same files (the more the better). In
regards to RAID-Like protection; we purposefully designed SpeedStor to have
direct connections to the FC HBA in order to ensure no additional latency.
Furthermore, 2 or 3 drives will saturate most controllers. Again, this is to
take full advantage of the drive's capability."
"For those
whom require HA,
we recommend host based mirroring, as the CPU overhead is negligible (remember,
we are not placing entire databases on here). For instance, Sun places the
metadata of SAMQFS onto the SpeedStor, and mirrors with disksuite. Overhead was
not worth noting (.0003%). We do have customers who have designed very large
high IOPs SSD systems with multiple drives, each on their own FC port, striped
in a RAID 5 configuration with QFS as well as ZFS. " |
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| One of the challenges for
the enterprise SSD market when designing new rackmount products is to understand
complex customer needs and decision criteria - which go beyond the traditional
use cases analyzed before. |
| Decloaking
hidden segments in enterprise flash | | |
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| SDS shrinks
SSD IOPS in VMware |
Editor:- September 15, 2011 -
the use of
SSDs
with VMware has popped up in these news pages in recent years more times
than I care to count. But I got a new angle on this a few days ago in a
discussion with Linda LaPorta,
President of Superior
Data Solutions .
Now you may ask - who is SDS? (the spelling is
important here) and what do they know about SSDs? (It had been several
years since I last heard from them too.) But you've all heard about
STEC's ZeusIOPS - right?
- Well SDS was
selling this particular enterprise flash SSD design in 2006 - before STEC
acquired it from Gnutek.
An SDS platform was also one of
Sun's early SSD offerings
too. But SDS have switched focus from raw hardware to applications - and they
are the US distributor for a product called
VirtualStorm.
Linda
LaPorta told me - "...Our software is changing the game in VDI. Right now
IOPs is a big barrier to the acceptance of VDI because the cost to implement
storage can be very high. (Windows 7 users are figuring 24-28 IOPs per VMgets
pricey if you need to provision HDAs for 10,000). We need a fast IO device to
store the virtual applications. We like a fast SSD, but it only needs to be 100
to 200GB. It is a read only drive that stores the master image of each
application. |
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"All the VMs go to a
well cached raid system.
This is where we reduce the IOPs to 2-4 /VM and we keep the capacity
requirement to 3GB/per VM (which is actually making it AFFORDABLE to consider
all SSD instead of HDDs)..." | | | |
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