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
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
‘Noisy Neighbor’ or Cuckoo?
SolidFire has launched a campaign about a phenomenon the company calls the “Noisy Neighbor.” This term is used to express a concept in which one very demanding application absorbs all of the data center’s storage resources to the performance detriment of all other applications. The company points out that this leads to performance variability and poor Quality of Service (QoS.) This, in turn, can drive the enterprise to shun cloud-based services.
The SSD Guy sees this phenomenon as something similar to a “Denial of Service” (DoS) attack, or even the way that cuckoos reproduce. One resource demands more than its fair share of support driving performance below acceptable levels. Heck, even the politics of water rights works this way. In this particular case the constrained resource isn’t network bandwidth, food, or water, but storage bandwidth.
At the bottom of its Noisy Neighbor press release SolidFire has posted an interesting infographic that explains this phenomenon and brings the consequences to monetary terms. Naturally it advocates solid state storage as a solution to the problem. It’s worth a look.
Big Data? Move the App to the Data
In Big Data circles there is a saying that it might be easier to move the application program to the data, rather than to move the data to the server where the application is working. There’s a lot of wisdom in that. The application is small and can move rapidly. Big data takes time to move.
In that spirit at least one Violin Memory customer has decided to move their applications into the servers that reside within one of Violin’s 6000 Series flash Memory Arrays. These are the two green boards running Continue reading
Violin D-Round Values Company at $800M
Violin Memory has announced a $50 million mezzanine round that indicates that its latest crop of investors values the company at $800 million. That’s pretty good for a start-up whose product has only been shipping since the end of 2008.
This round includes increases from existing investors Toshiba and Juniper Networks (a Violin user) along with new investors SAP Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, and others now joining the pool.
The company has been recruiting a highly-pedigreed staff from companies like Continue reading
New White Paper: Enterprise Reliability, Solid State Speed
The SSD Guy has just posted a new white paper to the Objective Analysis home page. It’s about Kaminario‘s approach to solid state storage.
Yes, this is a commissioned white paper, but that doesn’t preclude my taking the same unbiased approach my clients have come to expect. Kaminario has re-thought how SSDs should be used in storage, and that deserves some attention.
It’s only six pages, but even so I will condense the content for this post: Flash is tricky Continue reading
Fusion-io’s Billion IOPS Monster
Last night (1/5/12) at a DEMO Enterprise event in San Francisco Fusion-io unveiled a one billion IOPS (I/Os per second) storage system. A billion IOPS!
The machine was built using 64 Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duos connected to eight HP ProLiant DL370 servers.
This came sooner than we anticipated. It was only in July 2008 that the million-IOPS barrier was broken by IBM using 41 Fusion-io devices.
SSD Presence Growing at Oracle OpenWorld
At Oracle’s October OpenWorld conference in San Francisco more exhibit hall space was dedicated to SSDs this year than ever before. That’s because Oracle runs faster on systems with SSDs than on systems without.
Even Oracle ships SSDs in its popular Exadata system, and the company recently announced that it had shipped over 1,000 installations since its introduction in 2009. Continue reading
