Seagate’s Big Intro: Four New SSD Families in One Day
Seagate this week updated its SSD portfolio with four new product families and now claims to have the broadest portfolio of storage products in the industry. This announcement squarely places the company in all the key SSD markets: SATA, SAS, and PCIe.
Here’s Seagate’s new lineup:
- Seagate 600 6Gb/s SATA, a drive that Seagate calls: “The ultimate laptop upgrade”. The company claims that this is the first Continue reading
Webinar: How Many IOPS Do You Really Need?
Earlier today Tom Coughlin and I presented a BrightTalk webinar in league with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to discuss our joint report: How Many IOPS is Enough?
The report is based upon a survey that asked IT managers about their enterprise IOPS requirements. The webinar gives a taste of the report’s contents, and explains the survey methodology. During the course of the webinar and at the end Tom and I answered a number of listener questions relating to the content.
The presentation also includes a little plug for SNIA’s client IOPS survey which is being run by downloading a program called the Workload I/O Capture Program, or “WIOCP.”
A replay of this webinar is available on the BrightTalk website.
The presentation was well received by our audience. Have a listen.
CEO Change at Fusion-io
On May 9 Objective Analysis sent an Alert to our clients discussing the prior day’s CEO change at Fusion-io.
In a nutshell, co-founders David Flynn (CEO) and Rick White (Chief Marketing Officer) have left the firm, with Flynn being replaced by board member Shane Robison, HP’s former Chief Strategy Officer, who helped put together HP’s acquisition of Autonomy.
Here are some of the Continue reading
Kaminario Goes All-Flash
Kaminario has introduced the 4th generation of its K2 enterprise-grade storage array. Unlike the company’s earlier K2s, which supported DRAM, SSD, and HDD, the fourth generation K2 is all-flash, based on SAS SSDs alone. The company says that its new approach reduces the cost of ownership by supporting a larger capacity within a smaller footprint while requiring less power and cooling.
The SSDs are MLC products, rather than the SLC ones used in earlier K2s, allowing Kaminario to reduce the cost. Although the SSDs Kaminario uses come with a 5-year warranty, the K2′s SPEAR operating system optimizes flash endurance allowing Kaminario to offer a 7-year warranty. (SPEAR is Kaminario’s scale-out performance storage architecture operating system software.)
The original K2 was built with a focus on Continue reading
WDC’s HGST Intros 12G SAS MLC SSDs
In case you didn’t have enough abbreviations in your life, The SSD Guy brings you the headline above, with the promise that the news below is really interesting: HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technology, but now a division of WDC – Western Digital Corp.) has brought out a new line of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs based on MLC flash. These are a part of the UltraStar line.
Whereas HGST’s first-generation UltraStar SAS SSDs used SLC flash, the new SSDs are based on 25nm MLC flash but offer the same warranties as HGST’s prior generation. Even so, performance for the new SSDs is significantly faster than that of their SLC-based predecessors, with no reduction in wear or lifetime specifications.
These SSDs are the first to support Continue reading
Seagate Upgrades Hybrids, Phases Out 7,200RPM HDDs
Seagate made two important statements on two successive days – March 4 and 5: First, the company disclosed plans to phase out its 7,200 RPM 2.5″ notebook HDDs, and second, Seagate announced a new line of Momentus XT hybrid hard drives, which the company calls: “Solid State Hybrid Drives” or “SSHDs.”
Are these two announcements related? Well, The SSD Guy thinks they are!
Higher-RPM HDDs help to accelerate disk accesses by a small percentage while a hybrid can boost speeds significantly. According to Seagate, Continue reading
Are HDDs Vibration Sensitive?
One reason to use SSDs is that, with no moving parts, these devices are insensitive to shock and vibration. HDDs, on the other hand, are sensitive enough to vibration that it can cause access delays.
How sensitive are they? Well, I have seen some overblown claims from SSD makers that shock will cause HDD head crashes. I am not sure that I believe such claims, but I certainly do believe that an HDD’s actuator (the read/write head mechanism) can be shaken away from its track, causing a Continue reading
One-Hop vs. Two-Hop PCIe SSDs
Lately a number of PCIe offerings have hit the SSD market. The SSD Guy breaks them into two camps: One-Hop SSDs, in which the commands are translated directly from PCIe to the NAND flash without going through an intermediary protocol, and Two-Hop SSDs, which use off-the-shelf HBAs and SATA SSD controllers to move commands first from PCIe to SATA then from SATA to NAND. There are aslo versions that go through SAS: PCIe to SAS, then SAS to NAND.
The SSD Guy figured that Easter would be a good time to talk about these since everyone already has the Easter Bunny hopping through their minds!
It’s not hard to understand why Continue reading
Understanding Storage Delays
Jim Pappas of Intel, a fellow member of SNIA (the Storage Networking Industry Association) shared a really intuitive way to understand storage delays at the last Storage Developer Conference (SDC). It’s very simple. First consider these two facts:
- The difference between the speed of system memory and that of a hard disk drive (HDD) is roughly 6 orders of magnitude, or 1 million times
- SSDs split the gap. An SSD is about 1,000 times faster than an HDD, and is about 1,000 times slower than system memory. Memory access times are measured in nanoseconds (ns), SSDs in microseconds (µs) and HDDs in milliseconds (ms)
The problem with understanding this (ns, µs, ms) is that Continue reading
Nimbus Upgrades both Software and Hardware
Nimbus Data made a dual announcement on Monday, introducing an upgrade to the company’s zero-license-fee Halo storage management software and announcing volume shipments of the new Gemini storage array.
The Halo storage software, which already boasts a rich feature set, has added a new API, a mobile access to performance information, and powerful analytics tools that track and report over 200 metrics in real time with unlimited scroll-back.
The Nimbus Gemini system has already been shipping for a couple of months and is finding acceptance in Continue reading
