Blog Archives

How to Make Reliable SSDs – Reliable NAND Flash

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Eric Slack

“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…

Tagged with: DRAM, ECC, Flash memory, Micron, Multi-level cell, RAID, Solid-state drive, SSD
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

Automated Caching for the Virtualized Data Center

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Colm Keegan

Many industry observers estimate that the server infrastructure in a typical data center environment is approximately 50% virtualized. As virtual machine (VM) density increases, conventional storage platforms are wilting under the pressure of managing highly randomized storage IO patterns. Indeed,…

Tagged with: Cache, Flash, Hypervisor, Intel, PCIe, SATA, SSD, Virtualization
Posted in Article

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,…

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

Affordable High Performance PCIe SSD

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Colm Keegan

Server Side Flash Acceleration Application owners that have not deployed server side SSD have generally relied on storage administrators to address I/O issues. Despite their best efforts, storage admins are a resource in high demand and as a result, they…

Tagged with: Cache, Flash, Intel, NAND, PCIe, SSD, Virtual
Posted in Blog

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…