Blog Archives

Is All Thin Provisioning The Same?

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Eric Slack

Thin provisioning is a storage allocation process that improves the write efficiency of a storage system by enabling it to consume less capacity for storing a given amount of data. It is becoming an increasingly popular, almost commonplace, feature available…

Tagged with: Dell, Dell Compellent, Operating system, Provisioning, SCSI, Solid-state drive, Thin provisioning
Posted in Article

Overcoming The Challenges With SSD Reliability

Posted on June 3, 2013 by George Crump

Articles posted on the Storage Switzerland web site that focus on SSD Reliability are consistently among the top read articles on our site. Clearly there is concern about using the technology in the enterprise and IT planners want to know…

Tagged with: Flash memory, Hard disk drive, Hardware, Solid-state drive, SSD, Storage
Posted in Article

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

The Unknown Risk of SSD Mapping Tables

Posted on May 16, 2013 by George Crump

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,…

Tagged with: DRAM, Dynamic random-access memory, Flash, Flash memory, Hard disk drive, Non-volatile memory, Skyera, Solid-state drive
Posted in Article

Server Side VMware Caching Gets Smarter

Posted on May 6, 2013 by George Crump

Increasing virtual machine (VM) density is critical for organizations looking to continue to reap the ROI benefits of virtualization; the more VMs per server the more cost effective the virtualization project becomes. There is one primary roadblock to increased VM…

Tagged with: Cache, OpenVMS, Proximal Data, Solid-state drive, Storage area network, Virtual machine, VMware, VMware ESX
Posted in Product Analysis

Improving SSD Performance Through Better Flash Management

Posted on April 15, 2013 by George Crump

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…

Tagged with: DRAM, Flash memory, Granularity, Micron, Solid-state drive, SSD
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,…

Making Storage the VDI Solution, Not the Problem

Posted on April 9, 2013 by George Crump

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has found a niche in call-center types of environments where very large numbers of workers run essentially the same desktops. But in the broader market VDI hasn’t seen the same success, a fact typically blamed on…

Tagged with: Desktop virtualization, Solid-state drive, Top10-2013, VDI, VeloBit, Virtual desktop, VirtualBox, VMware
Posted in Article

What Is GEN 5 Fibre?

Posted on April 3, 2013 by George Crump

Despite the best marketing efforts of various forms of IP based storage, Fibre Channel continues to gain momentum in the enterprise. The growth in large, real-time databases and the increasing VM density per physical host, as well as the proliferation…

Tagged with: Brocade, Fibre Channel, Gen 5, ISCSI, SAN, Solid-state drive, Storage area network
Posted in Article

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…