Blog Archives

What Does EMC Want With ScaleIO?

Posted on June 20, 2013 by George Crump

Storage Switzerland just received confirmation from one of our more trusted sources that EMC is actively in discussions to acquire ScaleIO. This makes some sense; EMC has a tendency to buy early stage Israeli based companies (XtremeIO and Kashya) and…

Tagged with: EMC, PCI Express, Quality of service, ScaleIO, Software Defined Storage, VMware
Posted in Blog

What Is A Hyperscale Data Center?

Posted on May 20, 2013 by George Crump

Hyperscale data centers have architectures that are designed to provide a single, massively scalable compute architecture. The architecture is typically made up of small, individual servers, called nodes, that provide compute, storage and networking. These nodes are then clustered together…

Tagged with: Hardware, Hyperscale, PCI Express, SMART Storage, Solid-state drive, SSD, Storage
Posted in Article

Power Failure and Flash Storage

Posted on April 10, 2013 by George Crump

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the issue of power failures in flash based solid state storage systems. In various tests run by industry associations flash based solid state disk (SSD) devices, when subjected to a sudden power-loss,…

Video Review of Sonnet Tempo And Samsung 840 Pro SSD

Posted on March 22, 2013 by George Crump

Next up in our lab is a review of the Sonnet Tempo PCIe SSD Card and the Samsung 840 Pro SSD. Once again we leveraged the OWC Helios as part of the test exchanging the OWC Accelsior with the Samsung…

Tagged with: Flash memory, Hard disk drive, PCI Express, Personal computer, Samsung, Samsung 840, Samsung 840 Pro, SATA, Serial ATA, Solid-state drive, Sonnet Tempo
Posted in Blog, Video

Maximize SQL Performance By Integrating SSD Software & Hardware

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Eric Slack

Getting the most performance impact from a flash purchase involves more than just buying fast hardware or efficient caching software. Both of these components must work together to maximize their use of processing power that’s available. The hardware certainly must…

Are All PCIe SSDs Created Equal?

Posted on January 16, 2013 by George Crump

One of the more popular approaches to implementing solid state disks (SSDs) is to implement the flash memory on a PCIe card, which is installed directly into a server. This places the high performance storage directly at the point of…

Tagged with: Controller, Flash memory controller, OCZ Technology, PCI Express, performance, Serial ATA, Solid-state drive, SSD, SSDs
Posted in Article

OCZ’s VXL Solves the “DAS Problem” of PCIe Flash

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Eric Slack

Storage problems are ‘taking the fun’ out of virtualization. Legacy storage systems can’t keep up with the performance demands of highly random workloads that server virtualization environments generate. Because of this, companies are seeing these deployments make for much lower VM…

Tagged with: flash storage, ISCSI, OCZ Technology, PCI Express, SAN, Solid-state drive, Storage area network, Virtual machine, VMware
Posted in Product Analysis

Cutting The Price On 1 Million IOPS

Posted on November 1, 2012 by George Crump

Marvell is a leader in the development of storage, communications and consumer silicon solutions, basically they provide vendors with key components so they can deliver complete solutions to end users. Recently Marvell announced the 88N9145 native PCIe SSD controller which…

Is it Time for Hybrid SSD RAID Controllers?

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Eric Slack

Server side SSD caching solutions are popular implementation choices for performance upgrades because they allow users to put the performance right where it’s needed, in the application server itself. For many of these use cases, a direct attached disk array…

Tagged with: Flash memory, Hard disk drive, LSI, Multi-level cell, Nytro MegaRAID, PCI Express, RAID, RAID controller, SandForce, Solid-state drive
Posted in Briefing Note

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