Storage Networking Industry Ass’n

My friend and associate Eden Kim of Calypso Systems has published a new white paper on real workloads for SSDs.

This is the company that has helped the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to develop performance tests for SSDs that get past the issues that plague SSD users: Yes, it does well when it’s new, but how will an SSD perform after a year or two of service?

Calypso has recently published a new White Paper entitled: Datacenter Server Real World Workloads. This document analyzes real-life datacenter server workloads and performance to provide important insight into how an SSD might perform in actual environments rather than in synthesized workloads. It compares data center class SSDs against SAS HDDs to take a lot of the guessing out of issues about IOPS requirements, endurance needs, and so forth by comparing the measured activity over 24 hours of a 2,000-outlet retail chain web portal running SQL.

The tests in the paper represent a Continue reading “Getting the Most from Data Center SSDs”

Jim Pappas of Intel, a fellow member of SNIA (the Storage Networking Industry Association) shared a really intuitive way to understand storage delays at the last Storage Developer Conference (SDC). It’s very simple. First consider these two facts:

The difference between the speed of system memory and that of a hard disk drive (HDD) is roughly 6 orders of magnitude, or 1 million times
SSDs split the gap. An SSD is about 1,000 times faster than an HDD, and is about 1,000 times slower than system memory. Memory access times are measured in nanoseconds (ns), SSDs in microseconds (µs) and HDDs in milliseconds (ms)

The problem with understanding this (ns, µs, ms) is that Continue reading “Understanding Storage Delays”