RAID – The SSD Guy Blog

Webinar: How Many IOPS Do You Really Need?

Earlier today Tom Coughlin and I presented a BrightTalk webinar in league with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to discuss our joint report: How Many IOPS is Enough?

The report is based upon a survey that asked IT managers about their enterprise IOPS requirements. The webinar gives a taste of the report’s contents, and explains the survey methodology. During the course of the webinar and at the end Tom and I answered a number of listener questions relating to the content.

The presentation also includes a little plug for SNIA’s client IOPS survey which is being run by downloading a program called the Workload I/O Capture Program, or “WIOCP.”

A replay of this webinar is available on the BrightTalk website.

The presentation was well received by our audience. Have a listen.

Intel Jumps Into the PCIe SSD Market

Intel has gotten into the fast-growing and lucrative market for PCIe SSDs. The company has announced a PCIe SSD, the 910, that provides the high performance you would expect of a PCIe drive with the quality guarantees that customers expect of Intel.

Who could blame them? Fusion-io has become a Wall Street darling for creating the PCIe SSD market, and still rides it to continually growing revenues. LSI is fascinated by the growth of its Warp Drive. Micron attained a significant design win at EMC, Texas Memory Systems (TMS) has had success in its own narrow markets, and Virident, OCZ, and STEC have also participated in the PCIe SSD’s market growth.

Intel’s 910 consists of four Hitachi SAS SSD Continue reading “Intel Jumps Into the PCIe SSD Market”

SSDs and RAID

The SSD Guy has been asked a number of questions lately about SSDs and RAID. Most of these center around the difference in failure behaviors between SSDs and HDDs – HDDs fail randomly (if ever), while SSDs fail relatively predictably due to wear.

Oddly enough, SSD failures due to wear make them a little friendlier than HDDs. The wear mechanism is managed by the controller in the SSD. SSDs have spare blocks, and the controller manages those blocks, so the controller understands exactly how much wear the SSD has undergone and how much room is left before the SSD will start to have difficulties. Continue reading “SSDs and RAID”

LSI Acquires SandForce

On October 26 LSI announced its acquisition of leading SSD controller maker SandForce. The privately-held firm has made significant strides in the development of high-performance controllers that have gained great popularity through a string of impressive benchmark results in the online reviewer community. Continue reading “LSI Acquires SandForce”