June 2013 – The SSD Guy Blog

Kaminario’s Performance and 7-Year Flash Life Warranties

Today Kaminario added a performance guarantee and a 7-year warranty to its arsenal. The company introduced its “Consistency Under Failure Guarantee” which ensures customers will see no more than a 25% drop in performance during a system failure. This means that critical operations and applications can continue to run at near-standard performance despite the failure of an SSD or even an entire node. Kaminario president Dani Golan told The SSD Guy last week that this is a conservative guarantee, and that few customers see more than a 10% degradation during failure tests in their own production systems.

As for the 7-year flash endurance warranty, no matter which SSD Continue reading “Kaminario’s Performance and 7-Year Flash Life Warranties”

Western Digital to Acquire sTec

The following is excerpted from an Objective Analysis Alert e-mailed to our clients on 24 June, 2013:

Western Digital Corporation (WDC) and sTec, Incorporated announced today an agreement for sTec to be acquired by WDC for $340 million in cash. The HGST subsidiary will assume control of sTec and will continue to support existing sTec products and customers, while also remaining a part of its joint development program with Intel Corp. HGST’s current line of SSDs uses an Intel controller architecture combined with an SAS interface, end-to-end data protection, and other features key to the enterprise SSD marketplace.

Although sTec was a glorious first mover in the SSD business with EMC’s Continue reading “Western Digital to Acquire sTec”

SanDisk Upgrades FlashSoft Cache

SanDisk has rolled out a new revision of its FlashSoft server-side enterprise caching software that includes multiple improvements over the prior versions. The new release adds:

Support for multiple SSDs of mixed sizes and types
Concatenation of two or more SSDs into a single caching volume
SSD mirroring for “Safe Write-Back” caching
A maximum cache size increase from 1TB to 2TB
2,048 accelerated objects can be stored in each cache, up from the earlier release’s 255

The company prides itself in the ease with which the software and a server-side SSD can be added to a system without otherwise changing its storage architecture.

With the “Safe Write Back” feature the FlashSoft software has been upgraded Continue reading “SanDisk Upgrades FlashSoft Cache”

IBM Makes Flash Even Faster

At IBM’s Edge 2013 conference last week the company not only extolled the values of flash, as does anyone who has had a flash experience, but it also showed how flash could be made even faster than it already is.

You’re probably already thinking: “Flash is about 1,000 times as fast as HDD – how do you make it even faster?”

The answer is actually pretty simple: compress the data. If there is a limit to how much bandwidth you have going into and out of a piece of storage, you can speed it up if you can reduce the size of the data that consumes that bandwidth.

Of course, that’s not always easy. Compression often slows data access down, even for HDDs, and it could Continue reading “IBM Makes Flash Even Faster”

Webinar: Replacing DRAM with SSDs

I will be presenting a webinar at BrightTalk’s Enterprise Storage Summit on Wednesday, June 12, to discuss how to use SSDs to reduce DRAM usage in the enterprise.

DRAM?!? Yes! Many experienced SSD users already take this approach, and it does a great job of cutting cost, power, and other resources while improving system response time.

The presentation is titled SSDs: Not Just About Storage. You can view it by clicking on the title.

Join me at 11:00 Pacific Time to hear the webinar including participation in the Question & Answer session at the end.

Can’t make it? A recording will be available shortly afterwards with the full slides, the recorded conference, and the Q&A. The major difference is that you won’t be able to participate in the Q&A yourself.

Join me and check out the other presentations that will also be available from this event.