Seagate Technology has made a $40 million investment in Virident Systems and has already begun to offer Virident PCIe SSDs to its customers. This was announced on January 28 by the two companies.
Objective Analysis issued an Alert a few hours after the announcement to our clients. Some items we pointed out: Continue reading “Seagate Jumps into PCIe SSDs with Virident”
During this month’s Storage Visions conference, SMART Storage Systems hosted a “NAND Band” party. The company kept the details secret until the guests were all there, after which two “Blues Brothers” impersonators (SMART’s president John Scaramuzzo and Rick Neff, Director of Business Development) showed up in a video singing their new rendition of the 1966 Spencer Davis Group hit: “Gimme Some Lovin’.” SMART’s version was called: “Gimme Some Endurance” and the lyrics centered around the importance of endurance in SSDs.
(SMART’s NAND Band should not be confused with the techno band named NAND which I only discovered while writing this post.)
The reception was held only a couple of hours after Continue reading “The NAND Band!”
Micron Technology has produced a very good four-minute video that shows how SSDs are made. It starts with the design & manufacture of the NAND flash chips themselves and goes right through their assembly into SSDs, interspersing videos of manufacturing processes with graphics of the product’s operation.
This is on the SSD Guy’s recommended YouTube videos list. Check it out by clicking:
Few Sysadmins really understand what’s happening in the storage interface of their systems, yet there’s a lot of talk about SSDs with wide-ranging IOPS figures along with case studies of how these have helped solve system slowdowns. The big question is: “How do you determine what your storage bottleneck is, and even whether or not one exists at all?”
Tom Coughlin and I discovered a very low level of understanding of this issue when we performed the IOPS survey late last year that we documented in our report: How Many IOPS do You Really Need? A disconcerting number of respondents gave replies that Continue reading “How to Locate a Storage Bottleneck”
My company has received some questions lately asking why we think SSDs will cause a lot of software to need reconfiguration. This can be relatively easily answered with the text below, which is copied out of our most recent report: How Many IOPS is Enough? This report was co-authored with Coughlin Associates. (The full report can be purchased for immediate download on the Objective Analysis website.) Here it is:
Although SSDs will usually provide a significant boost to system performance, the full speed advantage of an SSD cannot be realized Continue reading “How Software Can Hamper SSD Performance”
