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.

Also, according to Taneja, “fundamental changes are occurring now that will forever change how I/O is done. The performance and productivity gains you’ll see won’t just be incremental, they’ll blow your mind.”
Again, we agree. We speak with customers everyday about I/O performance bottlenecks. Interestingly, though not surprising, speed isn’t their only concern. High availability is also top of mind.

There is a new revolution taking place in solid-state SAN storage focused around speed, availability and media choice. Kaminario was founded to develop a new kind of high-performance all solid-state SAN storage solution that addresses traditional SAN storage’s limitations. We have taken a lead in this emerging market with the new Kaminario K2 family of all solid-state SAN storage solutions. They are blazingly fast and are built with best-of-breed industry standard components and leading edge solid-state memory technology (from Fusion-io) and an innovative Scale-out Performance Storage Architecture (SPEAR).

The take away message from Taneja is that now is the time to evaluate your storage’s I/O performance and how it is impacting your business. Educate yourself about Flash and DRAM solid-state media and learn about the difference these technologies can make relative to the cost and performance of your business applications. Kaminario also offers a complimentary I/O bottleneck analysis for Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft databases. Click here for more information about the performance analysis.

“It’s high time we solved the I/O problem. HDDs have been the mainstay in data storage shops for as long as one can remember,” Taneja said.

If your applications and databases are suffering from I/O bottlenecks, check us out at www.kaminario.com.

Tags: Database Performance, DRAM, ERP, Flash, I/O, latency, Microsoft, Oracle, SAN, SAP, Search Storage, Solid State Storage, SSD, Taneja Group, TechTarget