Solid State Storage Initiative

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.

New Booklet: How Controllers Maximize SSD Life

SNIA (The Storage Networking Industry Association) has conferred a great honor upon the SSD Guy by bringing all of the blog posts in the series How Controllers Maximize SSD Life into a single printed volume of the same name.

Readers can either ask for a print copy from SNIA, or can download a pdf rendition by visiting the SNIA SSSI (Solid State Storage Initiative) education web page.

How to Locate a Storage Bottleneck

Few Sysadmins really understand what’s happening in the storage interface of their systems, yet there’s a lot of talk about SSDs with wide-ranging IOPS figures along with case studies of how these have helped solve system slowdowns. The big question is: “How do you determine what your storage bottleneck is, and even whether or not one exists at all?”

Tom Coughlin and I discovered a very low level of understanding of this issue when we performed the IOPS survey late last year that we documented in our report: How Many IOPS do You Really Need? A disconcerting number of respondents gave replies that Continue reading “How to Locate a Storage Bottleneck”

What’s the SNIA SSD Performance Test Specification (PTS)?

The Storage Networking Industry Association – SNIA – determined a few years back that it should address SSDs since they were about to become an important part of most storage systems. To this end SNIA created the Solid State Storage Initiative, or SSSI.

They didn’t name it after SSDs since there will clearly come a time when flash stops pretending it’s an HDD and abandons standard HDD mechanical and interface specifications. Continue reading “What’s the SNIA SSD Performance Test Specification (PTS)?”