IBM Launches Flash DIMMs
On Thursday IBM announced its X6 product family, the sixth generation of the company’s successful EXA server architecture. A smaller byline of the introduction was the company’s new eXFlash memory-channel storage or eXFlash DIMM which is offered as one of many flash options available to X6 users.
Close followers of The SSD Guy already know that I am a serious advocate of putting flash onto the memory bus. Why slow the technology down by Continue reading
OCZ: Bankruptcy Certain, Outcome in Question
On Wednesday OCZ announced that its bank accounts had been seized by one of its creditors and that the company would file for bankruptcy, but it did not commit on which of two courses of action it would take:
- To file for bankruptcy and sell itself as an ongoing business to Toshiba
- To file for bankruptcy and liquidate
If the company is sold to Toshiba the bankruptcy court will require an auction to be held to assure that the price that Toshiba pays is the best price that the company can get. This means that there is still the possibility of another company actually acquiring OCZ. Although Seagate was rumored to be interested there are certainly others who are also preparing bids.
OCZ has good technology and a loyal retail customer base, but one year ago Continue reading
LSI SandForce SSD Controllers Move the Knee in the Curve
LSI’s SandForce has just rolled out its SF3700 family of four SSD controllers aimed at the Entry Client, Mainstream Client, Value Enterprise, and Enterprise Storage marketplaces. Performance is impressive, with worst-case random PCIe IOPS at 150K read/81K write and 94K/46K for the SATA interface.
The SF3700 family builds on the division’s first two product families by adding a choice of PCIe or SATA interfaces, LDPC error correction, and a boosted set of flash management features. The SSD Guy will explore this last point after highlighting the other two.
By providing both PCIe and SATA interfaces LSI is directly addressing the future: PCs are aiming to move to the m.2 SSD specification rather than Continue reading
Kaminario Seizes SPC1 Title Again
For the second year in a row little Kaminario has beat the large established storage array vendors to produce the highest SPC1 benchmark rating at 1.24 million SPC-1 IOPS.
The results of the Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 report, show Kaminario surpassing last year’s record performance by 20k IOPS.
Interestingly enough Kaminario set the 2012 record using DRAM while this year the company was able to do it with its fourth-generation all-flash K2.
Why is the SPC1 test so highly respected in Continue reading
Violin & Microsoft Take a New Approach to Scaling
Violin Memory and Microsoft have jointly announced a novel way of harnessing the power of Windows Server software. Violin will be shipping its memory arrays with a special version of Windows Server 2012 R2 pre-installed on the embedded server that manages the internal operations of Violin’s all-flash array.
Violin explains that native support of specially-optimized versions of Windows Server and System Center that have been tuned for an all-memory array will provide improved performance and economics for large-scale enterprise cloud deployments.
The system can internally run Continue reading
Solving SSD Power Spike Issues
It would appear that you could build an all-SSD array by simply replacing all of the HDDs in a cabinet with SSDs. I tried that and ran into some surprising issues that were very confusing at first.
SSD spec sheets, might lead you to believe that power is just not an issue. For example, Samsung lists the power use for a 512GB 830 SSD at 0.127W (typical) for “Active Power Use”. This implies very low demands on the system power supply.
If you do some more research, you find that the peak power usage is a lot higher. AnandTech, in a review article reports sequential write power draw at 5.14W and random write power draw at 5.8W. In that 2.5” SSDs use the 5V power rail exclusively, this is more than Continue reading
SanDisk Turns 25
Today SanDisk announced that the company is now 25 years old and celebrated the fact by ringing the NASDAQ opening bell.
It’s intriguing to The SSD Guy that the company has reached 25 years, and has reached annual revenues of about $6 billion dollars, yet one of the founders is still the CEO. Sanjay Mehrotra has been leading the company since the retirement of co-founder Eli Harari, and has Continue reading
IBM Adds Server-Side Caching
IBM today announced its FlashCache Storage Accelerator, a software product that supports flash caching in a broad range of systems. FlashCache operates over three families of IBM servers (System x, BladeCenter and Flex System) and a variety of flash types to accelerate any back-end storage, including non-IBM storage arrays.
Although the cache’s data is dynamically updated to match the random workloads of virtualized systems (i.e. to accelerate VMware), it also improves the performance of Windows and Linux environments.
The cache uses a Write Through policy to solve a number of Continue reading
A New Way to Use SSDs
In his Flash Memory Summit keynote on Wednesday, Micron VP and Chief Memory Systems Architect Ed Doller made a compelling demonstration of the power and performance advantages of a new approach to computing.
With true showmanship, Doller had his co-workers hand out buttons with LED lights to the entire audience. The LEDs in these buttons were either green or blue, with the colors randomly dispersed among the crowd. Doller asked the entire audience to turn on their lights, then called one row of the audience to file up to the stage so he could determine whether each person’s button was blue or green.
He pointed out that this was like having a single CPU check the contents of a drive. He then asked why things should work this way – wouldn’t it be more sensible to Continue reading
Skyera Launches 500TB 1U Flash Box
Skyera, a flash appliance start-up, has been working for some time to amaze would-be flash users. The company takes advantage of the most advanced flash processes and non-SSD formats to squeeze as much flash as possible into a 1U cabinet.
Not content with the 44TB maximum of its original 1U skyHawk product (based on 19/20nm NAND chips from Micron and Toshiba) the company, at the Flash Memory Summit, introduced its new product, skyEagle, a system that provides up to 500TB of storage in the same Continue reading
