Blog Archives

Advancing the State of the Art in PCIe SSD

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Eric Slack

Solid State Drives (SSDs) that leverage the PCIe bus provide the ultimate storage I/O performance boost by providing the CPU with direct access to zero-latency storage. But all PCIe SSDs are not created equal. There is room for advancing the…

Tagged with: Flash memory, Flash memory controller, MLC, Multi-level cell, OCZ Technology, PCI Express, Solid-state drive, SSD
Posted in Product Analysis

The Benefits of a Flash Only, SAN-less Virtual Architecture

Posted on September 20, 2012 by George Crump

Shared storage using either a storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS) device enables many key features of the virtual server environment, such as virtual machine (VM) migration, distributed resource management and site recovery management. As a result…

Tagged with: Flash, Flash memory, OCZ Technology, PCI Express, SAN, Solid-state drive, Storage area network, Virtual machine, VM, VMware
Posted in Article

How to Solve the SSD Endurance Problem

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Eric Slack

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…

Tagged with: DIMM, DRAM, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, NVDIMM, PCI Express, Solid-state drive, SSD, Viking
Posted in Article

Demo Day At The Flash Memory Summit

Posted on August 24, 2012 by George Crump

We wrapped up the Flash Memory Summit today with another round of briefings and we participated in a panel studying the state of the SSD market. Today was a little different than other days as we went down to the…

Tagged with: Flash memory, IOPS, Marvell, Multi-level cell, OCZ, Solid-state drive, SQL, SSD, VMware, WhipTail
Posted in Briefing Note

Overcoming The All Flash Cost Challenge

Posted on March 28, 2012 by George Crump

If all storage were the same price, all storage would be solid state storage. We would end data tiering, there would be no performance tuning and the discussion of storage performance problems would be a thing of the past. Of course all…

Tagged with: Flash memory, Hard disk drive, Multi-level cell, Pure, SLC, solid state storage, Solid-state drive, storage efficiency, VMware
Posted in Article

Why Flash Wears Out and How to Make it Last Longer

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Eric Slack

The life expectancy and durability of flash-based storage is a common topic in many presentations involving solid-state drive (SSD) products. While flash endurance is a prime factor in the economics of this technology, seldom is the audience given an explanation…

Tagged with: Bit Error Rate, ECC, Flash memory, Flash memory controller, HGST, MLC, Multi-level cell, Solid-state drive, SSD, sTec
Posted in Article

The Challenges with SSD Caching and Tiering

Posted on February 29, 2012 by George Crump

It is universally accepted that for most applications, adding flash to the storage infrastructure will greatly improve storage performance and offer a productivity return on the investment. The controversy in the industry is deciding where the flash storage should be…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Cache (computing), Flash memory, flash storage, Hard disk drive, Hardware, Pure, Solid-state drive, storage system
Posted in Article

Achieving Maximum SSD Efficiency

Posted on January 25, 2012 by George Crump

There are two well-known facts about solid state disk (SSD). First, SSD is fast and second, SSD is expensive—compared with traditional disk drives. There are also two well-known facts about the data center. First, almost every data center needs more…

Tagged with: Data center, Deduplication, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, RAID, Solid-state drive, SSD
Posted in Article

As an SSD Supplier, LSI isn’t just a Flash in the Pan

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Eric Slack

Flash technologies are certainly a hot topic in storage and IT these days. A lot of new companies are coming onto the market with exciting new products. There’s one company that’s somewhat of a fixture in the storage industry but…

Tagged with: Flash memory, Flash memory controller, LSI, LSI Corporation, NetApp, Solid-state drive
Posted in Briefing Note

Advancing The State Of Solid State Caching

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Eric Slack

Most applications could benefit from a faster infrastructure. Storage performance, especially IOPS, has been routinely identified as a primary impediment to improving compute infrastructure speed. Not surprisingly, customers are turning to Flash Solid State Devices (SSDs) as a solution to…

Tagged with: Cache (computing), Flash memory, IOPS, Marvell, Multi-level cell, PCI Express, Solid-state drive, SSD
Posted in Article