Tiering/Caching – Page 2 – The SSD Guy Blog

White Paper: Using Flash as Memory

Today NAND flash is being shoehorned into HDD formats simply because it is persistent – the data doesn’t disappear when the lights go out. This approach fails to take advantage of NAND’s greatest strength – its low cost relative to DRAM – and this prevents it from fully meeting the needs of most data centers.

Since 2004 NAND has been cheaper than DRAM, and today its price per gigabyte is an order of magnitude lower than that of DRAM. NAND is cheaper and slower than DRAM, and HDD is cheaper and slower than NAND.

A role better suited to NAND flash technology is Continue reading “White Paper: Using Flash as Memory”

Diablo: Flash Belongs on the Bus

Diablo Technology has just introduced a new set of DIMMs that put flash memory right onto the DDR3 memory bus.

I can already hear readers saying: “Wait! You can’t do that!” Well, you’re right, but the new module comes awfully close to that by putting the NAND behind an ASIC that interfaces between the DDR3 bus and the NAND.

Why do this? Quite simply because you can get more “Bang for the Buck” by adding NAND to the system once you’ve reached a certain DRAM size. The Diablo “Memory Channel Storage” (MCS) approach supports the addition of terabytes of NAND at the loss of Continue reading “Diablo: Flash Belongs on the Bus”

OCZ Launches Database Accelerator

OCZ has just introduced a new software/hardware combination aimed at accelerating the performance of Microsoft SQL Server. The OCZ ZD-XL SQL Accelerator combines a custom PCIe SSD with caching software optimized for the SQL Server workload. The company boasted that this product won the “Best of Interop 2013” award, a distinction certainly worth crowing about!

How does this product differ from standard caching software? OCZ tells us that the key elements required to Continue reading “OCZ Launches Database Accelerator”

Webinar: Flash Best Practices

I had the opportunity to participate in a round table webinar covering the best practices for solid state storage on July 18. The hour-long session (including Q&A) can be replayed at BrightTalk.

In this round table webinar entitled Best Practices for Solid State Storage Implementation storage analyst Tom Coughlin moderated three of us, Radoslav Danilak of Skyera, Esther Spanjer of SMART Storage Solutions, and The SSD Guy (Yours Truly) in a Continue reading “Webinar: Flash Best Practices”

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”

PC Caching Software is Not All the Same

NVELO Dataplex Benchmarks Consistently Outperform Intel iSRT The folks at NVELO recently provided The SSD Guy with some benchmark data comparing their Dataplex software’s performance against the Intel iSRT caching software that is becoming prevalent among Ultrabooks.

For those unaware of these two technologies, they are both caching software that automatically maintains “Hot” data within a low-capacity SSD while leaving “Cold” data on the system HDD. The end result is that the PC performs as if it boasts a large SSD when, in truth, it uses Continue reading “PC Caching Software is Not All the Same”

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 “OCZ: Three Solid State Storage Products in Three Weeks”

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 “New White Paper: Enterprise Reliability, Solid State Speed”

SSDs and Caching

One of the SSD Guy’s favorite subjects is caching and SSDs. This is because I wrote a book on processor caches in the early 1990s, and the advent of SSD caches in storage systems hearkens back to the technology detailed in that book.

Caching works well whenever there are two layers in the memory hierarchy since the fast expensive layer can replicate data in the slow inexpensive layer to accelerate the processor’s performance. Continue reading “SSDs and Caching”

Sometimes SSDs Don’t Improve System Speed

The SSD Guy attended TechTarget‘s Storage Decisions Conference last week in San Francisco. Dennis Martin of Demartek gave a very good presentation called Making the Case for Solid-State Storage.

Demartek tests a lot of systems based on various forms of storage.

I really liked an expression that Mr. Martin shared to compare SSDs to HDDs. He said that SSDs cost dollars per gigabyte and pennies per IOPS, while HDDs cost pennies per gigabyte and dollars per IOPS. This is a really good way to think about the strengths and weaknesses of these two technologies. There is every reason to use a mix of both. Continue reading “Sometimes SSDs Don’t Improve System Speed”