“Reliability” in a storage context means that the storage infrastructure can be counted on to keep data safe and to produce that data in a reasonable timeframe when called upon. While it’s true that storage systems have redundancies built in…
“Reliability” in a storage context means that the storage infrastructure can be counted on to keep data safe and to produce that data in a reasonable timeframe when called upon. While it’s true that storage systems have redundancies built in…
Server virtualization has a well-documented problem; it creates an I/O blender that can bring storage networks and storage systems to their knees. The I/O blender vs. the desire to design increasingly dense virtual machine (VM) architectures has created a new…
Solid State Disks (SSD) and Flash Appliances use mapping tables to track where data is stored on the flash device. These tables play a similar role to iNode or File Allocation Tables (FAT) and if they get corrupted or lost,…
Solid State Drive (SSD) storage has become a viable performance option thanks to the advent of NAND flash devices which are making memory-based storage affordable. The performance of an SSD is not solely dictated by the NAND but by the…
Hybrid Storage is a term used to describe storage systems that are designed with a blend of flash-based solid state disk and hard disk drives to provide high performance at an affordable price. They try to address the dollar-per-IOPS vs…
As the storage medium for main memory DRAM is where the processing work gets done in application servers. It’s generally the fastest mass produced data storage area available and can support the nearly unlimited cycle of writes and overwrites that…
As Storage Switzerland discussed in the article “What is Server Based Solid State Caching” there is much to be gained by moving solid state disk (SSD) closer to the application and its processor. The substantial reduction of network I/O and…
The fog around solid state storage is lifting. Most storage and database administrators are convinced that solid state technology is the most practical next step in storage performance. The challenge is that solid state performs so well that now there’s…
Solid State Disk (SSD) storage devices now commonly use flash memory as the media on which they record data. Flash has driven the SSD cost per capacity significantly below that of DRAM based SSD and flash is narrowing the lead…