The m.2 SSD format has become wildly successful in the data center for use as a boot drive and even in SSD arrays. The m.2 format supports either the SATA or the NVMe interface, Something that has been missing, however, is a version of this format for high-availability (HA) systems. These are mission-critical systems that cannot fail, no matter what.
Until today HA systems had to Continue reading “High Availability in an m.2 Format”
IBM today announced its FlashCache Storage Accelerator, a software product that supports flash caching in a broad range of systems. FlashCache operates over three families of IBM servers (System x, BladeCenter and Flex System) and a variety of flash types to accelerate any back-end storage, including non-IBM storage arrays.
Although the cache’s data is dynamically updated to match the random workloads of virtualized systems (i.e. to accelerate VMware), it also improves the performance of Windows and Linux environments.
The cache uses a Write Through policy to solve a number of Continue reading “IBM Adds Server-Side Caching”
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”
At this week’s Storage Networking World (SNW) conference there was no shortage of SSD presentations, but none of the keynoters who shared their data center experiences had deployed any SSDs in their systems.
This seemed particularly odd to The SSD Guy since the MySQL conference I have been attending for some time has fewer SSD presentations simply because almost everyone who attends that conference already uses SSDs.
Why is there such an odd disparity?
The simple reason is that Continue reading “SNW SSD Shortage”
In Big Data circles there is a saying that it might be easier to move the application program to the data, rather than to move the data to the server where the application is working. There’s a lot of wisdom in that. The application is small and can move rapidly. Big data takes time to move.
In that spirit at least one Violin Memory customer has decided to move their applications into the servers that reside within one of Violin’s 6000 Series flash Memory Arrays. These are the two green boards running Continue reading “Big Data? Move the App to the Data”
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”
