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Storage Test & Analyzer news

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."


ESG publishes test report on WhipTail's iSCSI SSD

Editor:- August 31, 2011 -Enterprise Strategy Group has published a test report on WhipTail Technologies' 2U iSCSI SSD appliance in a simulated 300 desktop VMware / W7 environment.

Applications ran glitch free - even when a flash drive was removed. ESG didn't have fast enough servers to stress test the performance - so they only verified 90% of the rated 250K IOPS.


Microsemi reports shake rattle and roll SSD results

Editor:- May 19, 2011 - Microsemi today announced that its TRRUST-STOR (2.5" rugged SSDs) are the industry's first SSDs to pass zero-failure testing at vibration levels that are consistent with the industry's most severe environments.

"No other SSD manufacturers have published zero-failure results at this level of vibration testing, which was conducted while our drives were fully operational, reading and writing data," said Jack Bogdanski, director of marketing for Microsemi. "The ability for SSDs to perform flawlessly under adverse environmental conditions is becoming increasingly important for applications where it is critical that data be protected at all times."

Microsemi's SSD units were pre-conditioned at 85°C for 336 hours.


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


SandForce publishes list of approved test tool partners

Editor:- January 31, 2011 -SandForce has started a directory of companies, tools, technologies and services to help SSD designers integrate its SSD processors and get them to market more quickly.

Each member company in the new SandForce Trusted™ program ensures that their products and/or services fully support SandForce SSD Processors and provides response to SandForce customer inquiries within 24 hours while committing to high-priority support for fastest problem resolution.

Editor's comments:- 6 out of the 7 initial companies in the new program provide test / design verification products.


test report for LSI's PCIe SSD

Editor:- January 3, 2011 - Demartek has published a test report (pdf) which evaluated the performance of a single PCIe SSD made by LSI (300GB WarpDrive - $11,500) in a simulated high traffic web server environment in which the activities were mostly reads.

The test compared performance, rackspace, electrical power and cost of the SSD based system compared to a conventional HDD based system and showed that for high traffic websites the SSD solution is significantly better in all respects. ...read the article (pdf)


Xyratex expands HDD test assets

Editor:- December 8, 2010 - Xyratex today announced that it has acquired the HDD component test related business and assets of Magnetic Recording Solutions, Inc. (MRS), including a 10 person development team.

This coincides with the recent acquisition of the assets, as well as the development team, of Optical Systems Corp - a respected provider of automated production technology to the disk drive industry.

A key element of Xyratex's business strategy is to expand its portfolio of test and process technology within the hard disk drive industry. The acquisition of MRS will combine Xyratex's industry-leading expertise in high volume disk drive test, servo writing, and media cleaning, handling and inspection technologies with MRS' extensive experience in complex media testing and head characterization.


Peeking inside the loop of ioMemory

Editor:- November 12, 2010 - Fusion-io has said it will ship a web based control panel - called ioSphere - for monitoring, analyzing real-time performance and controlling its SSDs sometime in Q1, 2011.

Editor's comments:- Usually when you retrofit software based analysis and control functions to storage networks there's an impact on performance. As spinning hard disk media is very slow compared to spinning electrons - this doesn't matter - especially when using fast multi-core CPUs.

But when you're talking about PCIe and Infiniband SSDs those precious micro-seconds that a new software agent spends fooling around with your data-flows can interfere with smooth running. Although SSD companies have many times in the past announced such functionality for legacy SAN based SSDs (for example in May 2003 - Imperial Technology launched the WhatsHot SSD analysis tool) real-time SAN SSD analyzers have mostly stayed out of the customer's mission critical cabinets and remained locked in the developer's labs.

Will ioSphere be any different? - Knowing a bit about the thinking behind Fusion-io's SSD controller architecture - which I discussed in an interview with their CEO in the summer - I anticipated that Fusion-io's ioSphere would be different. Why? - Because the host server processor is inside the SSD controller loop and all the critical control state diagrams are already in the software stack. So I asked for confirmation about this guess.

Fusion-io's VP of product and technical marketing, Gary Ornstein, told me - "Your assumption is correct. There is no overhead. The ioSphere software is providing insight to information that is already collected within our ioMemory modules"

If you look at the philosophy of the Fusion-io designs - one view you can take is that the SSD makes the host CPU work faster - because it speeds up access to the data. Another view - equally valid - is that because the host CPU is doing work for the flash memory - the faster the user's CPU - the faster the SSD. And the converse is true - which is it that the SSD operates slower when it's used in tandem with a slower host. Yet another way of seeing these roles is that both the CPU and the SSD are responsible for the speed of running the apps together - and you can trade CPUs for SSDs - something I used to call SSD CPU equivalence. It may be that fusion of function - which led to the company's founders choosing the name Fusion-io. Next time we talk I'll remember to ask about that.


pushing the SSD testing rock farther up the hill

Editor:- August 25, 2010 - I'm mostly resistant to the idea of rehashing recent news stories - but yesterday while talking about new SSD technologies a reader asked me to take another look at SNIA's SSD performance testing guidelines - which I reported on a month ago.

I said I had been surprised it took ORGs like SNIA so long to look at these issues - because I had been aware of "Halo effects" in flash SSD benchymarks for years - and commented - "But I guess member led ORGs have a built in lag factor and only move at the speed of the slowest exec members."

The reader - Neal Ekker - whom I knew from his time at Texas Memory Systems - put up a spirited defense for this particular ORG opus and said...

""...We've all known about the fishy-ness of SSD performance claims for years. But I'd like to draw attention to what an impressive accomplishment the SNIA SSS PTS represents, no matter its technical merits or ramifications. I watched it happen, and I can tell you it was an amazing POLITICAL achievement. And I don't mean that in a negative way. Any time there's more than one person in a room, there's politics. For a collection of engineers representing both their own egos and the interests of their employers to finally agree on even this rather bare-bones beginning standard was just remarkable to observe. I can't begin to give enough credit to some of the chief movers and shakers.

Neal Ekker added - "This is why I want more attention focused on the SSS PTS right now, so we don't lose momentum entirely. There's still plenty of work to be done. We need additional companies and fresh faces and energies to step up and push this rock a little farther up the hill."

Editor's comments:- During the majority of the SSS PTS development Neal Ekker served as the SNIA SSSI Education Committee Chair. He's now a for-hire independent SSD marketing consultant. ...Neal's bio, ...SSS PTS (pdf), Storage People

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Surviving SSD sudden power loss
Why should you care what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?

This important design feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases - has a strong impact on SSD data integrity and operational reliability.

This article will help you understand why some SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be negligible.
image shows Megabyte's hot air balloon - click to read the article SSD power down architectures and acharacteristics If you thought endurance was the end of the SSD reliability story - think again. ...read the article
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Bad block management in flash SSDs
This is an introduction to the thinking behind one of the many vital functions inside a flash SSD controller.

Native media defect quality in new flash memory chips has grown steadily worse in the past 10 years as geometries have shrunk.
click image to read the article - principles of bad block management in flash SSDs This article enumerates the scale of the problem and explains how intrinsically dodgy flash memory is transformed into dependable flash SSDs which you can entrust with your data. ...read the article
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SSD Data Recovery Concepts & Methodologies
It's hard enough understanding the design of any single SSD. And there are so many different designs in the market.
broken barrel image - click to read this data recovery article If you've ever wondered what it looks like at the other end of the SSD supply chain - when a user has a damaged SSD which contains priceless data with no usable backup - this article - written by Jeremy Brock, President, A+ Perfect Computers - who is one of a rare new breed of SSD recovery experts will give you some idea. read the article
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SSDs - computer tonic medicine?
The risk of flash SSD wear-out due to ineffective endurance control is like that of influenza.

Just because you've already had it before - or been innoculated against the previous strain doesn't mean you are invulnerable to what may happen in the next flash / flu pandemic.
image shows the mouse wizard Spellabyte stirring the potion - click to read SSD tonic article A good way to think about SSDs is like vitamin supplements or medicine for computers. ...read the article
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the Problem with Write IOPS
the "play it again Sam" syndrome

Editor:- Flash SSD "random write IOPS" are now similar to "read IOPS" in many of the fastest SSDs.

So why are they such a poor predictor of application performance?

And why are users still buying RAM SSDs which cost 9x more than SLC? - even when the IOPS specs look similar.
the problem with flash SSD  write IOPS This article tells you why the specs got faster - but the applications didn't. And why competing SSDs with apparently identical benchmark results can perform completely differently. ...read the article
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The New Skinny on flash SSDs
Editor:- my article - RAM Cache Ratios in flash SSDs - explains why thinking about SSDs in groups - skinny, regular and fat - segmented by the RAM cache to flash ratio - is a useful mental shortcut when evaluating a new SSD.
read the article RAM Cache Ratios in flash SSDs This simple metric tells you a lot about the performance and reliability characteristics of the SSD's architecture. ...read the article
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partial A to Z index of StorageSearch.com

1.0" SSDs
1.8" SSDs
2.5" SSDs
3.5" SSDs

3 things could've killed flash SSD market

1976 - 2011 - SSD history
2011 - SSD timeline
2012 - SSD look ahead

20K RPM HDDs - no-show

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Cost of SSDs - why so much?

more - A to Z
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