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Building from the ground up.
High end enterprises require their flash storage systems to be extremely reliable, with excellent performance density, the ability to upgrade in place, and lasting for years.
The best way to achieve that is starting the system design from scratch (the flash chips). Building from the ground up, Violin Memory is able to work with their vendors to build the best performing systems, with proven results.
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Why did we take disk drives out of servers? Now we rely on traditional disk array storage and surround it with data center compute. The industry doubles processing power every 12 to 18 months and Gigabit Ethernet and Infiniband now provide 10 – 40Gig bandwidth with very low latencies. So we have lots of compute and we are swimming in bandwidth but the storage array hasn’t evolved at even 1/100 the pace? The lack of IO is killing the applications.
Now in 2012 it seems clear that solid state storage will be the solution to balance the network-compute-storage triangle and provide the IO necessary to not only virtualize the easy applications but now tackle the hard (latency-sensitive) IO bound applications that have been fine tuned to run on dedicated servers. Read More …
George Crump of Storage Switzerland shot another chalk talk video, the subject of this one is sharing solid state storage. George added it to his article from a month ago where he shared his thoughts on Violin’s certification with IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC).
You can view more Storage Switzerland videos on YouTube
George Crump of Storage Switzerland posted an article a couple of months ago titled “What is a Memory Array?” It’s a good overview and he also includes a discussion of generic SSDs.
George also put together the below video where he gives a short chalk talk on where to use solid state storage.
I wrote an article for IT Business Edge that covers the five key things to consider when implementing real-time processing. Please click over to the full article where I cover:
Part 1 (Garbage Collection) and Part 2 (Commodity SSDs)
What about PCIe cards?
Another option is to pack as much flash as possible onto a PCIe card to sit in a high speed slot on a server. Because of their much higher interface speeds, PCIe cards have much better performance than your typical commodity SSD, but face their own unique issues. To speak with the Operating System (OS) PCIe cards require specialized software drivers. With some cards these drivers are so heavy-weight that their vendors don’t even call them drivers anymore but try to convince you they are a great value added software layer. That might be true except for the fact that those cards gain their performance by stealing CPU cycles from the core that’s hosting it, the same core running the business software your trying to accelerate. Read More …
In my last post I discussed a few of the technical aspects of flash that make it a unique storage media, particularly the complexity of garbage collection. Here we take a look at flash packaging and how that impacts architectural decisions. For this post I’ll focus on the question: “Should I use commodity SSDs?” and move on to PCIe cards and Enterprise Flash Drives in subsequent posts.
It’s easy to see why HDD form factor SSDs seem attractive: they have the same look and feel as a regular disk drive, they do usually weigh less, and they fit in the same HDD connectors you have in your existing server. That’s all you need to see great flash speed, right? Sure they look good in the benchmarks, and while some benchmark sites have become a lot more sophisticated in measuring SSD performance, the SSDs have also become more sophisticated at Specsmanship.
Flash is coming to the data center. Contrary to perception 18 months ago, now this seems to be accepted as ‘common knowledge.’ There is still much discussion around what that flash will look like and in what form it will be consumed. I plan to write a series of blogs describing the unique challenges involved in building large flash Memory Arrays and some of the decisions made along the road. A good place to start with is the “let’s build it myself” group of folks and the challenges they will encounter.
The very adventuresome amongst you might start with, “I’ll just make my own”.
Lately I’ve been asked how data reduction technologies like DDUP and Compression should be applied to flash Memory Arrays. Both of these technologies promise more efficient use of storage by eliminating duplicate data, and thereby reducing the effective $/GB. To date, these technologies have largely been targeted at the backup and archival markets, where storing less data in the capacity disk tier is a big win in terms of space, power, etc. Products in this space basically throw a bunch of processing power, and for DDUP a lot of memory, add some very clever algorithms, and crunch the data to reduce its footprint. Now when applied to spinning disks the performance hit is pretty small when compared with the time it takes for disks to get anything done. What this means in practice is that even if your data doesn’t actually DDUP or compress all that well you probably won’t notice a difference. However, as with so much else, Flash changes the rules. Read More …
No, this isn’t going to be my existential ramblings on Life, the Universe, and well you know… but it is the first question I get asked, or more specifically “Why am I here at Violin Memory?”
Well first I have to say that I’m a big believer in Flash as a replacement for high RPM spinning disks. While this is not exactly news in the storage industry, it’s nevertheless the early days of Flash in the Enterprise and I’m excited to have a chance to rethink assumptions on how we’ve always done things. Whenever something gets a hundred times faster and cheaper it’s time to ask yourself “Should we be doing something different?”
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