Blog Archives

How to Make Flash Accessible on the Memory Bus

One of the more interesting technologies at the Flash Memory Summit this year was presented by SMART Storage and Diablo Technologies. They’ve taken server-side flash implementation to a new level with SMART Storage’s ULLtraDIMM, a flash storage device that puts

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Hybrid Storage Needs SSD Cache Flexibility

While specialized all-flash storage systems grab the headlines, hybrid storage systems are increasingly becoming the workhorses of the data center, hosting the majority of applications, virtual machines and file shares. To expand the number of workloads that they can support

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The Benefits of Software-defined Server-side Storage

Hyperscale Data Centers, Managed Service Providers, Cloud Service Providers and large Enterprises all face a similar challenge; how to cost effectively scale their cloud/virtual infrastructures so that maximum return on investment can be achieved. The answer is to build scale-out

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Are Flash Devices Putting Sensitive Data At Risk?

Flash based storage systems are now the “go to” option for improving the response time of performance sensitive applications. Some applications that require high performance are also storing extremely sensitive data that needs to be completely sanitized if the flash

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Bringing Flash Performance to Mainstream IT Environments

Virident’s FlashMax II PCIe solution has some of the best performance available in the industry and the company is enjoying big wins in what’s often called the “hyper-scale” market. These are large service providers, social media and web-based giants that

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Posted in Briefing Note

Server Side Caching vs. Raid Controller Caching

Caching is an ideal way to maximize an investment in solid state disk (SSD), especially in virtual environments where massively random I/O patterns are the norm. Caching provides an automated way to make sure that the most active data is

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How NVDIMM Can Protect Flash SSD Appliances

As Storage Switzerland discussed in two articles recently flash based appliances are particularly vulnerable to power failures. This vulnerability is related to the way these appliances use DRAM to buffer writes and to store meta data tables. DRAM is volatile,

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How to Make Reliable SSDs – Reliable NAND Flash

“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

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VMware Server Side Caching – Flash SSD or DRAM

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

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Next Generation Scale-Out NAS

The use cases for Network Attached Storage (NAS) have changed dramatically in the 20 years since the first NAS appeared. NAS hardware architectures have also changed. So have the capacities and performance levels that NAS systems are asked to support.

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