Blog Archives

Boosting Server Performance

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Colm Keegan

SSD Performance Accelerated A typical flash implementation constitutes less than 1% of the overall storage provisioned in a typical production environment. Consequently, systems planners have to exercise extreme prudence when deciding how to best utilize flash storage. They have to…

Tagged with: Dynamic random-access memory, Flash memory, Intel, IOPS, Solid-state drive, SSD, Virtual machine, VMware
Posted in Briefing Note

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…

The Cost of Over-Provisioning Flash Arrays

Posted on February 5, 2013 by George Crump

All-Flash Arrays have to overcome two key obstacles when trying to gain acceptance as storage systems which can be utilized across a wide number of use cases in the data center. First, they must be durable and secondly, they must…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Data center, Flash memory, Skyera, Solid State, Solid-state drive
Posted in Article

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

Easy, Effective and Efficient Server SSD Caching

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Eric Slack

SSDs (solid state devices) are becoming more mainstream and now ‘placement’ technologies like caching are getting increased attention as users strive to get the most out of their solid state investments. Caching primary disk storage with NAND flash can improve…

Tagged with: Cache, Flash memory, HyperCache, Linux, Solid-state drive, SSD, VeloBit, VMware, Windows
Posted in Product Analysis

Assessing the All-Flash Array Market

Posted on December 27, 2012 by George Crump

All-Flash arrays are storage systems that are 100% solid state and offer a set of storage features like snapshots and replication similar to traditional hard drive based storage systems. The recent leaks of what EMC plans to do with the…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Flash, GreenBytes, Hybrid array, Solid-state drive, SolidFire, Total Cost of Ownership, VM-Aware Storage, ZFS
Posted in Article

Overcoming The Challenges To All-Flash Arrays

Posted on December 20, 2012 by George Crump

All-Flash arrays are storage systems that are 100% solid state and give a complete set of robust features like snapshots and replication, similar to traditional hard-drive based storage systems. While their performance enhancing potential is very appealing, All-Flash arrays have…

Tagged with: All-Flash Array, Computer data storage, Data center, Flash, Hard disk drive, Pure, Solid-state drive, VMware
Posted in Article

What Is Hybrid Storage?

Posted on December 17, 2012 by George Crump

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…

Tagged with: Data deduplication, DRAM, Dynamic random-access memory, Hybrid array, IOPS, Solid-state drive
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…