Archive for April, 2012
Posted April 30th, 2012
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Welcome to the Party, EMC
EMC’S LIKELY ACQUISITION OF XTREMEIO VALIDATES SSD AS A TIER 1 STORAGE SOLUTION
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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The press has picked up on indications that EMC is about to acquire future SSD array vendor XtremeIO. This is an interesting development coming on the heels of EMC’s Project Lightning and Thunder announcements. As everyone knows, EMC is the mother of all disk storage vendors and has, until now, touted SSD primarily as a cache solution fronting and accelerating scores of legacy EMC disk storage arrays. Project Lightning and Thunder reflect this strategy, with Lightning providing a server based PCI SSD read cache solution and Project Thunder looking to do the same thing with a storage array.
XtremeIO is in prerelease semi-secretive mode right now, but has said clearly that it aims to produce pure SSD arrays to compete with the likes of Kaminario, Violin Memory, and all the other usual SSD array suspects. An EMC acquisition of such a vendor indicates that holes have developed in EMC’s SSD cache armor and the disk storage giant feels forced to validate SSD arrays as a large, viable, growing market competing with disk. It will be interesting to see how EMC integrates XtremeIO’s technology into its strategy without eating into its bread and butter disk array product line.
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Tags:cache, data protection, DataProtect, DRAM, EMC, enterprise storage, Flash, high availability, K2, Kaminario, mainstream storage, PCI, performance, Project Lightning, Project Thunder, Pure Storage, RAID 10HD, read cache, Scalability, SSD, SSD array, storage arrays, tier 0, Tier 1, Violin Memory, XtremiIO
Posted in Hybrid Storage | No Comments »
Posted April 23rd, 2012
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Built for Speed and Endurance
FLASH WEAR IS AN ISSUE THAT IS FADING FAST
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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You’ve probably heard about the endurance limitations of Flash–particularly MLC–and the hoops manufacturers jump through to lengthen life expectancy. If you really want to understand what this issue is all about and how SSD vendors handle it, check out Eric Slack’s Storage Switzerland post entitled Why Flash Wears Out and How to Make it Last Longer.
Slack provides a very thorough explanation of how and why NAND Flash degrades, why MLC degrades faster than SLC, what actually happens during that degrading process, and all the tricks SSD manufacturers employ to slow it down. Techniques include sophisticated error correction, spare blocks of NAND flash that take over when one block degrades, and wear leveling, which distributes write operations across available blocks to ensure that a single block doesn’t wear out prematurely. Vendors also embed advanced technologies, such as digital signal processing, in their SSD controllers to reduce bit errors and reduce the workload on the error correcting (ECC) engine, and employ sophisticated read level adjustments to recognize data on a degraded Flash block. Some SSD controllers can also make sophisticated adjustments to the way a cell is read and written to minimize wear.
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Tags:digital signal processing, DRAM, DSP, ECC, Eric Slack, error correction, Flash, Flash endurance, Fusion-io, K2, Kaminario, MLC, NAND, PCIe, RAID, RAID 10HD, SLC, SSD, SSD controller, Storage Switzerland, TCO, wear leveling
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | No Comments »
Posted April 16th, 2012
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Does Your SSD Array Protect Your Data?
ASK YOUR STORAGE VENDOR THESE QUESTIONS
By Kaminario
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Does your array have a single point of failure?
Single points of failure are a liability for your HA solution. Some storage arrays still have them especially if they have only one controller. If that is the case, you might need two systems mirrored to prevent complete outages. Depending on the implementation, there could also be single points of failure in servers or Flash cards.
Kaminario K2 is fully N+1 redundant. There is NO single point of failure allowing the K2 to withstand any single failure.
Are your hardware components including Flash hot-swappable?
Can you swap a FRU (Field Replaceable Unit) while the system is operational? Many vendors claim their arrays are hot-swappable but they are not usable during the swap unless it is fully mirrored. Those products require downtime to allow opening a server so Flash cards can be exchanged. This process increases the time needed to return to full speed.
All hardware FRUs in the Kaminario K2 are hot swappable. Kaminario demonstrated this capability in a video.
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Tags:data protection, Disk latency, Flash, Flash SSD, high availability, IOPS, K2, Kaminario, OLTP, Storage Performance
Posted in Data Protection | No Comments »
Posted April 8th, 2012
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Murphy’s Law and Home-Grown SSD HA
BAKED IN BEATS WRAP AROUND
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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In his recent StorageSearch blog, High Availability Enterprise SSD’s, Zsolt Kerekes discusses why building a do-it-yourself HA solution typical of data center Fibre Channel or IP SAN hard disk array installations is not a viable option for an enterprise SSD array. The reasons, according to Zsolt, boil down to performance, flexibility of use, risk, complexity, and scalability. I would add Murphy’s Law.
Zsolt points out that any home-grown HA solution sitting in front of an SSD storage controller is likely to introduce considerable latency and time to the recovery process. When it comes to the mission critical applications typically running on SSD arrays, such as online transaction processing, time really is money and simply not something you want to sacrifice. “Wrap around” HA, as Zsolt calls it, also introduces architectural complexity and controller configuration issues that can gum up the works.
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Tags:cluster, data center, data corruption, DataProtect, enterprise SSD array, Fibre Channel, high availability, IP SAN, K2, Kaminario, latency, Murphy's Law, N+1, Online Transaction Processing, outage, SSD, Storage, storage node, StorageSearch, Zsolt Kerekes
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | No Comments »
Posted April 3rd, 2012
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SSD: The Server Terminator
SSD ELIMINATES MORE THAN I/0 BOTTLENECKS
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Most of you know that SSD is a great way to eliminate I/O bottlenecks, but did you know that it can also eliminate servers in the data center–with all the requisite hardware, power, cooling, and real estate savings?
In SSDs and Server Consolidation, Jim Handy of Objective Analysis demonstrates how the use of SSD eliminates the need for server-hungry I/O acceleration techniques, such as running the Open Source caching program memcached on its own server or sharding, which splits large databases into smaller parallel data sets running on multiple servers.
Add SSD, either as local or shared storage–including the Kaminario K2 mentioned in Jim’s blog (Thanks Jim)–and you can get the same or better performance results without all that unsightly excess server hardware. And you get less complexity and better reliability to boot. I’ll be back.
Tags:caching, cooling, databases, hardware, I/O bottlenecks, Jim Handy, K2, Kaminario, memcache, Objective Analysis, Open Source, power, server, sharding, SSD
Posted in Hybrid Storage | No Comments »
Posted April 2nd, 2012
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Reflections on a Launch
A MONTH HAS PASSED SINCE KAMINARIO INTRODUCED DATAPROTECT
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Analyst and Media Reaction to the DataProtect Launch
It has been just over a month since Kaminario launched the DataProtect™ high availability and data protection capabilities for the Kaminario K2 product line. Analyst and media reaction has been very positive — highlighting the advantages and challenges that we have ahead.
After reviewing the DataProtect coverage, three messages stood out:
- High availability and data protection features such as DataProtect are needed for SSDs to be accepted as a HDD replacement in the data center;
- Kaminario is moving beyond the high-performance storage niche segment and aiming squarely at primary storage;
- DataProtect gives Kaminario some advantages but market competition is very aggressive.
Just to recap the coverage highlights, I’d like to share a selection of comments that capture much of the feedback we have observed.
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Tags:application performance, data protection, DataProtect, Disk latency, DRAM Storage, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash, Flash SSD, High Availablity, IOPS, K2, Kaminario
Posted in Data Protection | No Comments »
