Emulex Offers
Bridging Hand to SSD Designers
Editor:- October 13, 2009 - Emulex is expanding
its
InSpeed
chip bridging technology to simplify the job of designing fast native
SAS and
Fibre-channel compatible
flash SSDs.
"SandForce is working
closely with Emulex to enable customers to build enterprise-class SSDs that
connect to Fibre Channel or SAS systems," said Thad Omura, VP of marketing,
SandForce. "Emulex's next generation InSpeed flexible bridging options
enable our SATA-based Enterprise SSD Processor, to be used with either Fibre
Channel or SAS systems. In initial testing, we've found the new InSpeed bridge
technology provides a robust and high performance solution for SSD applications."
SSD Controllers / IP
40 Years of Data Archiving
Editor:- October 13, 2009
-KOM Networks
today celebrated
40
years of secure archiving.
"We may not be a household name"
said Kamel Shaath, CTO of KOM Networks "but our customers are, and they
rely on us to protect, preserve, secure, store and retrieve their most critical
data."
KOM Networks is credited for the creation of the first software to
manage optical disks in 1983, the first optical storage management software for
Windows NT in 1995, and the first virtual file system with electronic file
lifecycle management in 2001.
storage
history
Editor's comments:- if KOM Networks makes 50 -
they'll be supporting SSD archiving too. It will offer 20x faster
recovery time than HDD or optical archiving. A few
issues to sort out
first though.
Fusion-io Slashes Costs for MySpace
Editor:- October
13, 2009 - Fusion-io
published a
case
study showing how their ioDrive
SSDs helped MySpace reduce
servers, claim back 50% rack space while increasing application performance and
massively decreasing electrical power.
The ioDrives performed much
better than the legacy SAS
disk arrays, but more importantly for MySpace, they did it with much less
hardware. A single ioDrive allowed MySpace to replace a 2U HP DL380 server with
1U HP DL160 server.
In the initial phase of this deployment MySpace
replaced 150 of their standard load servers, recovering 150U of rack space.
Additionally, the ioDrives' phenomenal performance reduced its need for heavy
load servers, allowing it to permanently end-of-life 50 of 80 heavy load
servers. This allowed it to recover another 65U of rack space.
Reliability also
increased and the Fusion-io solution is
greener.
Estimates suggest that the power savings alone could easily pay for the
ioDrives over their lifetime.
MySpace says it plans to replace
another 1,770 2U servers with Fusion-io enabled servers as they reach their
end-of-life.
"In the last 20 years, disk storage hasn't kept pace
with other innovations in IT, and right now we're on the cusp of a dramatic
change with flash technologies, with Fusion-io clearly leading this
transformation," said Richard Buckingham, VP of technical operations for
MySpace. "We looked at a number of solid state disk solutions, using many
different kinds of RAID configurations, but we felt that Fusion-io's solution
was exactly what we needed to accomplish our goals." ...read the
article (pdf)
Accusys Announces New iSCSI RAID
Editor:- October
12, 2009 - Accusys
today announced a
new range of
rackmount IP SAN products.
Accusys iSCSI ExaRAID family
includes 2U-12 bay, 3U-16 bay and 4U-24 bay
RAID systems designed
with active-active redundant controller support for high reliability and
availability, link aggregation and jumbo frame support for maximizing bandwidth
and performance over the Ethernet.
Dedupe Makes SSD Affordable - says WhipTail's CTO
Editor:-
October 12, 2009 -
WhipTail Technologies
became the 1st SSD appliance company to market integrated in-line
deduplication.
At
SNW WhipTail
announced
it will ship its newly renamed Racerunner (6TB) NAS SSDs with
Exar's Hifn
BitWackr
deduplication and compression solution in Q4 2009. Racerunner has demonstrated
deduplication performance in excess of 1Gbps.
James Candelaria, CTO of
WhipTail Technologies said "Once again, we're proving
Tier 0 storage
doesn't have to be expensive. By providing in-line de-duplication, customers can
save money by investing only in the storage they need."
New article - Data Integrity Challenges in flash SSD Design
Editor:-
October 12, 2009 - StorageSearch.com
today published a new article called -
Data Integrity
Challenges in flash SSD Design - written by Kent Smith Senior
Director, Product Marketing, SandForce.
Since
bursting onto the SSD scene
in April 2009,
SandForce has achieved remarkably
high reader popularity.
How did a company whose business is designing
SSD controllers
achieve this? - especially when the direct market for its products today
numbers less than 1,000 oems.
The answer is - that if you want to know
what the future of 2.5"
enterprise SATA SSDs might look like -you have to look at the
leading technology cores that will affect this market. Even if you're not
planning to use SandForce based products yourself - you can't afford to ignore
them - because they are setting the agenda in this market.
Reliability is the
next new thing
for SSD designers and users to start worrying about. A common theme you will
hear from all fast SSD
companies is that the faster you make an SSD go - the more effort you
have to put into understanding and engineering data integrity to eliminate the
risk of "silent errors." ...read the article
Sun Launches SAS SSD Rackmount
Editor:- October 12,
2009 - Sun Microsystems
launched
2 new SSD product lines.
- The F5100
Flash Array ($45,995 upwards) is a new 1U
rackmount SSD -
which has 16 SAS ports
and provides upto 1.92TB capacity. R/W IOPS are upto 1.6M and 1.2M respectively
(for a system populated with 80 SSD modules).
- The FlashFire
F20 is a 96GB SLC flash
PCIe SSD with 100k
read and 84k write IOPS. R/W rates are upto 1092MB/s and 501MB/s respectively.
The card also includes a
SAS controller.
Editor's
comments:- I added the F5100 Flash Array to the directory of
the Fastest
SSDs. It rates that on throughput and IOPS. However, its latency is 20x
worse than typical RAM
SSDs and its performance per channel is low.
In some ways it
looks like a product which has been engineered to
look good in a
benchmark - rather than to perform well in a range of real applications. So
- as I advise everyone looking at their 1st SSDs - try before you buy.
The
FlashFire F20, however, is totally unimpressive. It looks like a low capacity
version of products which Fusion-io
was shipping a year ago.
New Book - Oracle Performance Tuning with SSDs
Editor:-
October 9, 2009 - some of the technical folks at Texas Memory Systems
have contributed to a new book called -
Advanced
Oracle SQL Tuning - written by Oracle expert, Mike Ault.
This
is part of an august collection of Oracle tuning books published by
Rampant
Press.
"Solid State Disk storage is changing the game for
Oracle databases, and how we think about performance tuning," said Mike
Ault. "Whereas in the past a poorly-designed database might take 6 months
and $500,000 in consulting costs to repair, simply installing an SSD can mean
the database immediately runs more than 10x faster for a fraction of
the cost of repairing the source code. We wrote the book specifically for DBAs
so that they could easily understand the benefits and limitations of SSD in
their specific circumstances, and have all the tools they need to benchmark
effectively. Any DBA who wants to keep their performance tuning skills relevant
will read this book."
See also:-
Storspeed Unveils NAS SSD Appliance
Editor:- October
8, 2009 - Storspeed
emerged from stealth mode and unveiled the
SP5000
Application-Aware cache.
This is a NAS compatible SSD
accelerator (base price $65,000 ) which uses a
fat flash SSD
environment integrated within a
hybrid storage
pool.
Storspeed says its patent-pending real-time traffic inspection
engine identifies and dynamically accelerates user and application traffic
automatically with no user intervention or complex
tiering.
This
is the 4th automatic SSD accelerator product to be launched in the past
month. |
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