Tag: IBM

IBM Adds Server-Side Caching

IBM's FlashCache Server-Side Caching SoftwareIBM 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”

IBM Makes Flash Even Faster

IBM Edge ConferenceAt 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”

SPDEcon Sneak Peek

SPDEcon Solid State PreviewWe have just finished up a webcast (now available for replay) that gives a preview of five of the solid state storage presentations that will be given at the upcoming Storage Plumbing and Data Engineering Conference – SPDEcon for short – hosted by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) on June 10-12 at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Santa Clara, California.

Our webcast, titled SPDEcon Solid State Preview, presents snippets of Continue reading “SPDEcon Sneak Peek”

IBM to Invest $1B in Flash Promotion

The following is excerpted from an Objective Analysis Brief e-mailed to our clients on 15 April, 2013:

Comparison of 3-Year Operating Costs: Flash vs HDD (Wikibon)On April 11 IBM kicked off “The IBM Flash Ahead Initiative”, committing to spend more than $1 billion for flash systems and software R&D and to open twelve IBM Flash Centers of Competency around the world staffed with flash experts armed with flash systems to help clients test drive flash in their own situations.

This follows from IBM’s August 2012 agreement to acquire privately-held Texas Memory Systems (TMS), a very low profile manufacturer of high-performance flash-based memory arrays and PCIe SSDs. TMS is the world’s oldest SSD maker, founded in 1976, to manufacture RAM-based replicas of HDDs. About four years ago TMS used its Continue reading “IBM to Invest $1B in Flash Promotion”

IBM Completes Texas Memory Systems Acquisition

IBM Acquires Texas Memory Systems (TMS)IBM announced on Monday October 1 that it had finalized its acquisition of Texas Memory Systems (TMS.)  This transaction was first announced in mid-August and was analyzed at that time in an Alert sent to Objective Analysis clients.

Here are a few salient points from the Alert:

  • TMS is the world’s oldest SSD maker, and has recently made an aggressive move from DRAM to NAND flash, providing very high performance PCIe SSDs and arrays.
  • TMS and IBM play into the same market: storage for large-scale computing.  Their technologies complement each other, since IBM’s current solid state storage offerings were lightweight compared to those of TMS.
  • The acquisition meshes with IBM’s mantra of “Smarter Planet, Smarter Storage, and Smarter Computing.”  SSDs improve storage speed while reducing power and space requirements.

Objective Analysis sees this as a good fit that will harness the synergies of two very similarly managed companies to produce very positive results.

 

Fusion-io’s Billion IOPS Monster

Meter Showing Fusion-io's Billion IOPS PerformanceLast night (1/5/12) at a DEMO Enterprise event in San Francisco Fusion-io unveiled a one billion IOPS (I/Os per second) storage system.  A billion IOPS!

The machine was built using 64 Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duos connected to eight HP ProLiant DL370 servers.

This came sooner than we anticipated.  It was only in July 2008 that the million-IOPS barrier was broken by IBM using 41 Fusion-io devices.

Continue reading “Fusion-io’s Billion IOPS Monster”