At 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”
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.