Data Center – The SSD Guy Blog

Getting the Most from Data Center SSDs

My friend and associate Eden Kim of Calypso Systems has published a new white paper on real workloads for SSDs.

This is the company that has helped the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to develop performance tests for SSDs that get past the issues that plague SSD users: Yes, it does well when it’s new, but how will an SSD perform after a year or two of service?

Calypso has recently published a new White Paper entitled: Datacenter Server Real World Workloads. This document analyzes real-life datacenter server workloads and performance to provide important insight into how an SSD might perform in actual environments rather than in synthesized workloads. It compares data center class SSDs against SAS HDDs to take a lot of the guessing out of issues about IOPS requirements, endurance needs, and so forth by comparing the measured activity over 24 hours of a 2,000-outlet retail chain web portal running SQL.

The tests in the paper represent a Continue reading “Getting the Most from Data Center SSDs”

Micron Unveils New 5100 Enterprise SSDs

Micron has announced a new line of Enterprise SSDs that it has named the 5100 family. The three members of the family are designated by different suffixes: 5100 ECO, 5100 PRO, and 5100 MAX, as listed in the table below.

The three models support the same maximum read IOPS performance, but have a wide range of write IOPS figures, endurance (measured in DWPD = Drive Writes per Day), and maximum capacities.

All of these SSDs are based on Micron’s 3-bit 3D NAND. Micron has been aggressively ramping its 3D NAND technology since it began shipments in earnest last June.

The three SSD models are designed using the same fundamental firmware architecture, which Micron has named FlexPro, to yield consistent performance and reliability across the family, and with the hopes that customers will be able to qualify all three models in a single effort, which would provide one more reason for users to source their Continue reading “Micron Unveils New 5100 Enterprise SSDs”

New Study Forecasts Huge Enterprise SSD Growth

Objective Analysis has published a new study, Enterprise SSDs: Technologies & Markets.

This study breaks the market into 23 application types, and provides an explanation of each along with forecasts by major application category.

Virtualized systems will drive the greatest 5-year average unit shipment growth, at 85%, although the data center will retain its leadership in enterprise SSD consumption. Overall enterprise SSD unit shipments will grow at an annual average of 32% through 2018.

Since SSD prices are cost-based, with roughly 80% of the cost coming from flash chips, NAND flash price swings will cause Continue reading “New Study Forecasts Huge Enterprise SSD Growth”

LSI’s Take on Data Center Flash

LSI Corp. has launched a new blog that covers (among other things) flash storage. It’s only natural – the company’s SandForce subsidiary is riding high on the SSD wave and LSI’s HBAs are finding widespread use, both internally and externally, in the production of two-hop PCIe SSDs.

A recent post called “What are the Driving Forces Behind Going Diskless” by LSI Fellow Rob Ober outlines the leading Continue reading “LSI’s Take on Data Center Flash”