Tag: SolidFire

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”

‘Noisy Neighbor’ or Cuckoo?

SolidFire's "Noisy Neighbor"SolidFire has launched a campaign about a phenomenon the company calls the “Noisy Neighbor.”  This term is used to express a concept in which one very demanding application absorbs all of the data center’s storage resources to the performance detriment of all other applications.  The company points out that this leads to performance variability and poor Quality of Service (QoS.)  This, in turn, can drive the enterprise to shun cloud-based services.

The SSD Guy sees this phenomenon as something similar to a “Denial of Service” (DoS) attack, or even the way that cuckoos reproduce.  One resource demands more than its fair share of support driving performance below acceptable levels.  Heck, even the politics of water rights works this way.  In this particular case the constrained resource isn’t network bandwidth, food, or water, but storage bandwidth.

At the bottom of its Noisy Neighbor press release SolidFire has posted an interesting infographic that explains this phenomenon and brings the consequences to monetary terms.  Naturally it advocates solid state storage as a solution to the problem.  It’s worth a look.