This very long article over at Tom’s Hardware is the most in-depth look at the new Intel/Micron storage media that I’ve seen. Well worth reading! Memory and storage collide with Intel and Micron’s new, much-anticipated 3D XPoint technology, but the road has been long and winding. This is a comprehensive guide to its history, its performance, […]
flash
Thanks for the memory: How cheap RAM changes computing
Adam Banks at Ars Technica has a great writeup on how cheap RAM changes storage, and in effect system architecture. Cheap RAM means the ratio of RAM to storage is changing in the database, allowing for more data to be loaded and reducing disk reads. The problem? Well volatile memory is… volatile, not necessarily something […]
The Four Stages of All-Flash Storage
Chris Evans of Architecting IT comments: This week has seen yet more stories and announcements on all-flash storage. IBM released new FlashSystem products based on XIV and an all-flash version of their mainframe/enterprise platform, the DS8888. I had another briefing from Violin (although that didn’t reveal anything new) and rumours started to swirl that X-IO Technologies might be […]
Surprises from 4 years of SSD experience at Google
Ray Lucchesi of RayOnStorage Blog comments: Flash field experience at Google In a FAST’16 article I recently read (Flash reliability in production: the expected and unexpected, see p. 67), researchers at Google reported on field experience with flash drives in their data centers, totaling many millions of drive days covering MLC, eMLC and SLC drives with a […]
When Did Hard Drives Get Workload Rate Limits?
Chris Evans of Architecting IT comments: A recent article on The Register reminded me that we’ve started to see hard drive vendors introducing warranty limits on their hard drives for the amount of data that can be written to them in any one year. Solid state drives have always had this restriction, because we know […]
NVMe for Absolute Beginners
J Metz writes on the Cisco Data Center and Cloud Blog: There are different ways to use Flash, of course, and different architectures abound in the marketplace — from fully “All Flash Arrays” (AFA), “Hybrid Arrays” (which are a combination of Flash and spinning disk), to more traditional systems that have simply replaced the spinning […]
Consumer grade SSD versus Enterprise grade SSD, which one to pick?
Frank Denneman of frankdenneman.nl comments: Should I use consumer grade SSD drives or should I use enterprise grade SSD drives? This a very popular question and I receive it almost on a daily basis. Lab or production environment, my answer is always the same: Enterprise grade without a doubt! Why? Enterprise Grade drives have a […]
Understanding the SSD write performance cliff
Eric Shanks of theITHollow comments: Because modifying a page, or deleting a page takes time, the Operating System usually updates the file system to say that the page is available to be overwritten, but never informs the disk controller. Since the disk controller never knows what pages have real data in them, and which […]
NMS UI and the Product Managers That Hate Us
Ryan Adzima of Techvangelist writes about WFD5 presenter AirTight Networks: I’m sitting here at Airtight Networks for Wireless Field Day watching a demo of their new wireless networking offering. Right off the bat all the delegates in the room noticed one thing, HTML5 interface. On top of that it’s simple, clean, intuitive, logical, customizable, and […]
Virtually Pragmatic?
Martin “Storagebod” Glassborow suggests two reasons EMC reversed course on virtualizing behind the VMAX: Maintaining margin on controllers and adapting to a flash-filled world. Both are reasonable ideas.