Blog Archives

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

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

VMware Aware SSD Caching

Posted on August 31, 2012 by George Crump

While there are a number of software caching solutions each has potentially significant weaknesses. They are either owned by a hardware vendor, which can limit choice or they don’t fully support the hypervisor or guest OS that the customer is…

Tagged with: AutoCache, Cache, Hypervisor, Operating system, PCI Express, Proximal Data, Solid-state drive, VMware, VMware vSphere, VMworld
Posted in Blog

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

Nimble Solves The Scale-Up or Scale-Out Dilemma

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Eric Slack

Nimble has recognized the challenge of growing storage systems in a performance-critical environment. With traditional, scale-up storage architectures, as more disk capacity is added storage controllers can become the bottleneck, causing performance to suffer. In scale-out storage systems, an appliance…

Tagged with: Hard disk drive, Nimble, Scalability, Solid-state drive, SSD
Posted in Briefing Note

Increasing VM Density With Server Side Caching

Posted on July 23, 2012 by George Crump

Increasing the number of virtual machines (VMs) per host is a critical next step in the design of virtualized server infrastructures so that the growth of virtual hosts does not begin to eat at the original ROI of the virtualization…

Tagged with: AutoCache, Cache, PCI Express, Proximal Data, Solid-state drive, SSD, Virtual machine, VMware, VMware vSphere
Posted in Product Analysis

High Performance Storage For The SMB

Posted on March 30, 2012 by George Crump

As the Small to Medium Size (SMB) data center continues to increase its level of virtualization, it is being faced with performance demands – not unlike the enterprise – that result from multiple virtual machines per physical host. In fact,…

Tagged with: Drobo, ISCSI, OCZ, SMB, Solid-state drive, SSD, Virtual machine
Posted in Briefing Note