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
Storage Developer Conference Focuses on SSDs
Last week the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) hosted its 2012 Storage Developer Conference (SDC). There was a strong focus on SSDs at this forum, with 15 papers, one keynote, and a panel devoted to the subject.
Consider that the 2008 SDC was the first such conference in which SSDs were discussed. This year I commented to another participant: “Some day we will look back on this transition and be amazed at how suddenly SSDs became fundamental to the way storage is configured!”
Many of those papers and keynotes made it clear that the PCI Express (PCIe) interface has Continue reading
OCZ: Three Solid State Storage Products in Three Weeks
SSD maker OCZ has been on something of a tear recently, introducing three new solid state storage products in three weeks:
- Two weeks ago the company introduced the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCIe SSD, designed for the data center, in single-card capacities ranging from 300GB-16TB. This product can transfer data at multiple gigabytes per second rates to deliver over a million IOPS.
- Last week saw the introduction of the OCZ-SANRAD VXL enterprise storage accelerator, after OCZ’s January acquisition of SANRAD. This product is flash cache acceleration software for VMware ESX and Citrix Xen virtualized environments that allows 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.
