Archive for November, 2011
Posted November 30th, 2011
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Sometimes There’s No Other Way
TWO COMPANIES THAT SOLVED THEIR PERFORMANCE ISSUES WITH SSD.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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SSD is often talked about as a performance solution for online transaction processing, high performance computing, and applications where cost per IOP is sometimes more important than cost per GB. However, SSD is about much more than that. There are times when there’s simply no other reasonable way to solve an I/O performance problem. There are two case studies on the Kaminario site you should check out if you want to know the breadth of what SSD can accomplish, particularly when you have the freedom of choice theK2 provides.
The first case study is about the Israel Electric Company (IEC), which provides electricity for more than 2.5 million Israelis in all sectors of the economy. The IEC has been replacing a hodge podge of different IT systems with a single SAP ERP solution. Shortly after the first round of ERP modules went live, users started complaining of performance issues with lots of transactions, queries, and reports, despite IEC’s use of some of the most powerful servers, disk storage systems, and databases on the market. A thorough analysis revealed I/O performance as main culprit, which brought the IEC to Kaminario and a K2 filled with DRAM. The result was an improvement in transaction speed by up to 25 times–10 times on average–and latency by up to 7 times, even during resource intensive operations that would formerly slow things down to a crawl. Imagine the productivity improvements.
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Tags:ActiveTrail, DRAM, ERP, Flash, Flash SSD, I/O Performance, IEC, Israel Electric Company, Kaminario, OLTP, Online Transaction Processing, SAP, SQL Server, SQL:Server Instances, SSD, transaction speed
Posted in SSD Case Studies | No Comments »
Posted November 22nd, 2011
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The Write Stuff
THERE’S MORE TO WRITES THAN MEETS THE EYE
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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In a recent Information Week blog posting entitled Improve Write Performance with SSD, George Crump examines how writes are handled in most mainstream caching and automated storage tiering solutions. He points out that despite the presence of fast SSD in many of these solutions, most of them write data to the much slower mechanical hard drive first. Only after the data gets accessed does it have the chance to move into cache or the fast SSD tier for fast reads, but not writes.
Strange, isn’t it? Why don’t most of these solutions take advantage of SSD’s superior write performance? The answer is reliability, according to Crump. The SSD in these products has a higher failure rate than disk and doesn’t offer the redundancy and other reliability aspects of most enterprise disk-based storage solutions.
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Tags:cache, enterprise SSD, George Crump, Information Week, mirroring, OLTP, Online Transaction Processing, power supplies, reads, redundancy, ssd market, storage controllers, Storage tiering, writes
Posted in Hybrid Storage | 1 Comment »
Posted November 22nd, 2011
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Up the Solid State Revolution
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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There is a lot of truth to Chris Mellor’s Register article post Flashing upstarts tempt tech titans’ throbbing disks. Without the baggage of a huge installed base of HDD customers, ‘upstart’ flash storage suppliers can be pretty nimble at creating a new market based on the latest, high performance solid-state storage and also be pretty innovative and creative about their offerings too. The ‘gold’ that Chris refers to is not just in centering storage solutions on flash SSD, but in maximizing the potential that solid-state media brings to the market. Kaminario and others are staging a storage revolution when you consider that they are going up against such a huge establishment of mainstream storage providers, challenging them where they live…right in the HDD.
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Tags:Dell, Flash memory, Flash SSD, HDD, HDS, high performance storage, Kaminario, Solid State Storage, SSD
Posted in SSD Architectures | No Comments »
Posted November 17th, 2011
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SSD: Mainstream, but Still Hot
SSD IS TAKING OFF AND CHANGING THE WAY IT THINKS ABOUT STORAGE.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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The action doesn’t stop in the enterprise SSD market. Last week, SSD hardware and software vendor Virident made two big announcements: The first involved $21 million in new series C funding from Globespan Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Artiman’s Ventures, along with strategic investments from Intel, Cisco and an unnamed storage solutions provider. Note that Globespan Capital Partners and Sequoia Capital are the same investors that participated in Kaminario’s last big funding round in May.
The second is FlashMax MLC, a new server-based PCIe Flash card that Virident claims has built-in RAID, enterprise class reliability, and superior performance. Mind you it’s a server based, Flash-only solution, so it likely doesn’t have the scalability or superfast write potential of a SAN based K2-H packed with Flash and DRAM.
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Tags:Archival Storage, Archived Storage, Artiman's Ventures, backups, Cisco, Classic Storage, Copied Storage, data warehouses, ESG, FlashMax, Globespan Capital Partners, hybrid, Intel, K2, Kaminario, PCIe, Performant Storage, SAN, Sequioa Capital, Series C Funding, ssd market, Steve Duplessie, Virident
Posted in SSD Architectures | No Comments »
Posted November 16th, 2011
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StorageMojo White Paper Assesses Flash and DRAM Solid-state SAN Storage on Database Performance
By Kaminario
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Written by Robin Harris of StorageMojo, an independent analyst firm focused on emerging IT technologies, “Database Performance and the Kaminario K2 All Solid-State SAN Storage” discusses how storage systems are not keeping up with today’s applications’ requirements for data intensive workloads and points out that “as numerous performance benchmarks and customer experience show, solid-state storage, especially that using a mix of media, is simply the fastest mass storage available.” Click here to read the entire report.
Tags:database, Database Performance, DRAM, DRAM SSD, Flash, Flash Solid-state storage, Flash SSD, Kaminario, MCL Flash, Robin Harris, SANs, Solid-state SANs, StorageMojo
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | No Comments »
Posted November 10th, 2011
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Storage Column Highlights I/O Performance Issues
TANEJA: HIGH TIME WE SOLVED THE I/O PROBLEM
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Storage Magazine published a column recently by Arun Taneja, founder of the respected industry analyst firm Taneja Group, titled I/O performance in need of a fix.
The story discusses the I/O performance challenges that rapid data growth, advances in server technologies and compute-intense applications like ERP and transactional databases are causing in traditional storage. Taneja points out that solid-state technology is seen as the answer, yet controllers in traditional storage arrays aren’t designed to handle speedy SSDs.
We agree. Putting SSDs in traditional storage is like putting a jet engine in an automobile. You may have the power of a jet, but you’re only going to be able to go as fast as the rest of the car’s infrastructure will allow. Everything else is wasted and possibly destructive. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:Database Performance, DRAM, ERP, Flash, I/O, latency, Microsoft, Oracle, SAN, SAP, Search Storage, Solid State Storage, SSD, Taneja Group, TechTarget
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | No Comments »
Posted November 8th, 2011
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Everything You Always Wanted to Know About SSD But….
A NEW REPORT FROM STORAGE STRATEGIES NOW TELLS IT ALL
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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It’s easy to get overwhelmed trying to grasp the rapidly growing and evolving SSD market, particularly with the constant announcements of new products, players, and architectures, and the competing claims of vendors and technology proponents. If you’re finding the whole SSD business a bit hard to follow then you should take a look at the recently released report from Storage Strategies NOW entitled Solid State Drives and High Speed Memory: Adoption, Practice, and Deployment, partially sponsored by Kaminario.
The report contains 58 pages of survey results, market projections, technology and vendor comparisons, architectures, best practices, testing information, and case studies from an analyst firm that was following the SSD market years before everyone and his cousin was talking about it. It’s full of good information and, despite a length that may seem intimidating, is an easy, quick read. You’ll find clear, concise answers to just about all your questions about Flash, DRAM, SLC, MLC, caching, tiering, wear leveling, interfaces, and more, as well as an interesting use case involving Digital Trowel’s use of the Kaminario K2 to accelerate the cleaning and matching of more than 10 billion records.
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Tags:caching, database, DRAM, Flash, high performance computing, high-speed memory, interfaces, K2, Kaminario, MLC, OLTP, SLC, SSD, SSD architecture, ssd market, Storage Strategies NOW, tiering, transactional structured data, wear leveling
Posted in SSD TCO | No Comments »
Posted November 1st, 2011
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Sure It Kicks, But is it Enterprise Ready?
WHEN SHOPPING FOR ENTERPISE SSD SOLUTIONS, BUYER BEWARE
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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An interesting StorageSearch Blog entitled what will be the tone of the SSD market in 2012? says it all. “ The user mood is changing from – can I afford to use SSDs? – to a realization that – I can’t afford not to use SSDs. SSD makers are confident – because they can see better than anyone outside the industry – that 2012 is going to be a Kick Ass Year for Enterprise SSDs.”
You’ve probably noticed the parade of enterprise SSD introductions in the past few months from these confident vendors and will probably see a lot more in 2012. When you evaluate all these new products for your organization however, be careful not to focus too hard on the word “SSD” at the expense of the word “enterprise.” Sure, just about any SSD product will deliver very good to stellar performance, but anyone who has any experience with this medium knows that performance isn’t the whole story.
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Tags:availability, DRAM, enterprise, Flash, flexibility, I/O hot spots, Kaminario, latency, low latency, mechanical disks, reads, restores, Scale-out performance Storage Architecture, SSD, ssd market, storage architecture, storage nodes, writes
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | 1 Comment »
