Posts Tagged ‘DRAM’
Posted July 31st, 2012
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Architecture Matters More than Media Type
WHEN PUSHED TO LIMITS, SPEAR OFFERS NO PERFORMANCE ROADBLOCKS
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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I am pleased that our SPC-1 result announcement is generating online buzz. One of our primary intentions in going through the process was to test the SPEAR architecture’s scale-out capabilities. The SPC-1 put the K2 through a heavy workload over a 24-hour period. It came through with flying colors showing that Kaminario allows you to achieve high-end performance without suffering from bottlenecks of any type.
Some comments have focused on the fact that the K2 configuration included DRAM. So of course, the IOPS were going to be super fast. From our vantage point, the media type matters less than the architecture. We happened to certify the K2-D in this test result, but SPEAR will also enable high-level, scalable storage performance for Flash. That is the beauty of having a powerful and flexible architecture. It provides you with more choices and the ability to adapt as newer memory types emerge.
The transition to all SSD data centers is inevitable, but before it happens, organizations are going to demand that they can get the price/performance they need with the flexibility to scale efficiently. The benchmark we announced yesterday was a big step toward that goal regardless of media type.
If you would like to read another perspective, check out Storage Switzerland.
Tags:application performance, Database Performance, DRAM, DRAM Storage, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash, Flash SSD, I/O bottlenecks, IOPS, K2, Kaminario, SPC-1, Storage Performance
Posted in SSD Architectures | No Comments »
Posted July 30th, 2012
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Kaminario Sits Atop Storage Performance Mountain with Record-Setting SPC-1 Result
SOLID STATE SAN STORAGE PERFORMANCE GETTING MORE AFFORDABLE
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Kaminario today announced independent audit results of the K2’s price performance conducted by the Storage Performance Council. In summary, we blew the doors off the SPC-1 Results, breaking the SPC-1 performance record as the first certified results exceeding one million IOPS, while also cutting the cost-per SPC-1 IOP by more than half. These results are the best in the history of the SPC-1. In addition, the K2 sustained its IOPS levels in a 24-hour SPC-1 test run. 
Sources:
Kaminario K2: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00118
IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller 6.2 with IBM Storwize® V7000 Disk Storage: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00113
HP P10000 3PAR V800 Storage System: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00109
Texas Memory Systems RamSan-630: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1#a00105
Validation for SPEAR —As I see it, this is a big validation for our Scale-out Performance Storage Architecture (SPEAR). SPEAR distinguishes us from others in the industry with its unique ability to orchestrate mixed workloads over a distributed cluster of solid-state storage — all within an environment that supports advanced data protection features. Plus, as a software innovation, SPEAR offers substantial flexibility to adapt to evolving needs. All this leads to better application performance typically between 200 and 2,000 percent.
A testament to the robustness of the SPEAR design is that it sustained the 1.2M SPC-1 IOPS performance over 24 hours, maintaining performance well beyond the 8-hour period achieved by previous SPC competitive tests. This proves that the SPEAR design is a stable and consistent architecture, something that many of our customers who run continuous analytical processing applications can appreciate.
What It Means —High-end solid-state SAN storage performance is getting increasingly affordable. Clearly, solid-state price/performance ratios are getting better and better over similar HDD ratios. Kaminario’s SPC-1 results are not necessarily a total tipping point for SSD, but when you more than double the performance record and cut the cost-per-IOP record by more than half to $0.40 per SPC-1 IOP, it is a significant milestone.
Read the full SPC-1 report at: http://www.storageperformance.org/results/benchmark_results_spc1/#a00118
Kaminario’s continued focus on improving performance at lower cost within a full data protection environment is aimed at mainstream database and OLTP applications in the enterprise data center. Growing application sizes and complexity means that high-performance storage requirements are no longer for niche applications only.
Last January, we proclaimed 2012 the Year of the SSD. Given our outstanding, unsurpassed SPC-1 Result, I can’t help but think that the remainder of this year and all of next year will be even bigger for solid-state storage.
Tags:application performance, Database Performance, DRAM, DRAM Storage, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, I/O bottlenecks, IOPS, K2, Kaminario, latency, OLTP, SPC-1
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | No Comments »
Posted June 11th, 2012
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StorageSearch Post Helps Readers Evaluate SSDs
KEREKES EXAMINES SYMMETTRIES IN SSD DESIGN
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Long-time StorageSearch readers like me know that Zsolt Kerekes writes a lot about SSD design. He frequently comments on what he calls symmetries. It is the notion that some SSD features/characteristics can yield excellent performance in certain scenarios but not in others. Symmetries can also be performance tradeoffs such as speed versus wear.
Kerekes argues that symmetries are a method to “comparatively describe or evaluate any type of SSD using any memory technology and any type of interface.” In an extensive piece, he describes 11 SSD symmetries including ones about read/write, applications, scalability and age. I think the article is a good resource for organizations considering SSD technology for their data center. The article raises many questions that should spur good customer/vendor discussion. Take a look.
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Tags:application performance, DRAM, Flash, K2-H, Kaminario, Kerekes, SSD, Storage Performance, StorageSearch
Posted in SSD Architectures | No Comments »
Posted June 4th, 2012
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Solid-State Storage TCO and Simplicity
GETTING MORE OUT OF YOUR SSD INVESTMENT
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Two blog posts have appeared in the past month with similar interesting themes. In the Storage Soup blog, TCO vs. ROI: Remember transition costs, Randy Kerns discusses the importance of total cost of ownership (TCO) in any storage decision and the role of transition costs, product lifespan, and operational and administrative costs in TCO calculations. Similarly, in the Wikibon blog, Simplicity and transparency are becoming standard features in storage, Scott Lowe talks about the growing importance of product simplicity in taming the storage beast. I particularly like this quote: “IT organizations need to spend less time touching the infrastructure and more time on the business.”
These are important factors to consider when deciding whether to take the SSD plunge, because many people still have the perception that SSD arrays like the Kaminario K2 are expensive. When you consider TCO and simplicity, however, they start to look more like bargains.
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Tags:cooling, data center, data migration, disk, DRAM, Flash, K2, Kaminario, LUNs, management interface, parallelization, power, RAID, Randy Kerns, ROI, scale, Scott Lowe, simplicity, snapshots, SPEAR, spindles, SSD, Storage Soup, TCO, total cost of ownership, Wikibon
Posted in SSD TCO | No Comments »
Posted May 2nd, 2012
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Kaminario’s Dani Golan Speaks at Tech Field Day
SOLID-STATE STORAGE IS THE NEXT BIG IT REVOLUTION
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Last week, Kaminario CEO Dani Golan presented at Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Day in San Jose. The event afforded us the opportunity to have conversations with several data storage bloggers including Howard Marks, Nigel Poulton, Chris Evans, Ray Lucchesi, Robin Harris and Hans DeLeenheer to name a few.
I was fortunate to be in the room, and the feedback I heard is gratifying. In fact, DeLeenheer published his thoughts about Kaminario in his blog and said we were worth watching.
In addition to providing a K2 product overview, Golan shared insights about the SSD market and where Kaminario fits. “Solid-state storage is the biggest storage revolution in the last 30 years…one of the biggest in IT since virtualization.”
One of the effects of this revolution is that definitions for high end, mid range and low end are being turned on their head. Improving price/performance and increasing application requirements make it tough to distinguish among tier 0, tier 1, tier 2 etc. I would argue “that our software stack is far superior to a $3 million high-end [HDD] array,” Golan said.
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Tags:Database Performance, Disk latency, DRAM, DRAM Storage, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash, Flash SSD, Foskett, IOPS, Kaminario, Tech Field Day
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | 1 Comment »
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 March 21st, 2012
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Keep those SSD’s Coming!
NEW PRODUCTS ARE HITTING THE MARKET DAILY
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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The SSD market has been bubbling up since the beginning of the year with a lot of new players, products, and technologies flowing into the market like a mighty stream. It’s exciting and interesting to see how many companies are getting into the act and the different market categories beginning to take shape.
Let’s start with server-side SSD cache solutions, given that storage giant EMC has made a big splash there with its Project Lightning VFCache product. Server-side cache-supposedly saves the customer some money and protects an existing disk storage investment—which is probably why EMC is all hot over it. The theory is that by using SSD as a cache for the most heavily accessed data, you get a good balance between cost and performance. You also get to take advantage of fast PCI performance. But unlike a pure PCI SSD solution, a server-side SSD cache can pull data from the entire storage environment, rather than just a single server. The positives make sense, but the drawback is that most of these solutions are read-only caches, so you do nothing for fast writes, and they add more complexity to your storage environment than an all-SSD solution. In this category, new solutions from OCZ, and Fusion-io have also shipped recently.
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Tags:cache software, data compression, data deduplication, DataProtect, DRAM, EMC, EMLC, Flash, FlashSoft, Fusion-io, Greenbytes, HP, hybrid, IBM, K2-H, Kaminario, Nexsan, OCZ, PCI, Project Lightning, Pure Storage, RamSan, replication, SanDisk, SAS, serial ATA, snapshot, SSD, SSD cache, Texas Memory Systems, unified storage, VeloBit, VFCache, XIV Gen 3
Posted in SSD Architectures | 1 Comment »
Posted March 8th, 2012
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Array Vendors: Get out of SSD’s Way
ARRAY VENDORS THAT USE DISK-FORM-FACTOR SSD’S JUST DON’T GET IT
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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In his blog entry entitled Are SSD-based arrays a bad idea? Robin Harris argues that packing arrays full of disk-form-factor SSD’s is counterproductive. Why? He cites several reasons, including latency, bandwidth, reliability, and cost, but mostly it boils down to squeezing a fast storage media into a slow architecture—much like driving a race car through rush hour traffic or putting wings on a bicycle. Cost and reliability come into play as well, because shoving flash into a disk form factor is less space efficient, less reliable, and more expensive than mounting it on a board.
Enterprise SSD is a young, rapidly evolving market and will continue to evolve until the industry agrees on the perfect SSD architecture and creates standards around it. Expect that to take several years. In the meantime we at Kaminario believe we have come pretty close. We agree with Harris that board-mounted flash makes a lot of sense for reasons of cost, performance, and reliability. That’s why we pack the K2 full of board-mounted PCI flash cards and DRAM. We also hold down cost with our N+1 HA architecture, RAID 10HD data protection (See What You Need to Know About SSD HA and Data Protection and Why Kaminario’s DataProtect is a Big Deal), and the use of industry standard components, the PCIe bus, and market leading Fusion-io technology.
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Tags:bandwidth, data protection, disk form factor, DRAM, enterprise SSD, Flash, FusionIO, high availability, K2, Kaminario, latency, PCIe, RAID, reliability, Robin Harris, SPEAR, SSD, SSD array, Storage Mojo
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | 1 Comment »
Posted February 26th, 2012
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Why Kaminario’s DataProtect is a Big Deal
TIME TO TALK MORE ABOUT MAINTAINING DATA RELIABILITY and SSD PEFRORMANCE
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Kaminario today announced DataProtect™ which adds enterprise high-availability and data protection capabilities to our K2 line of all-solid-state SAN storage. The details are published on our Website including a highlight video, but I wanted to take a moment to share my thoughts about why the news is significant.
An architecture purpose-built for SSDs From its earliest days, Kaminario has believed that to get the most from solid-state media, you need a storage architecture purpose-built for SSDs. This notion applies to data reliability capabilities such as high availability (HA) and data protection as well as performance. When your applications are screamingly fast, your HA and data protection operations, including snapshots and replication, need to be able to keep up. The ideal SSD architecture should also be fully automated and support non-disruptive operations, so when there is a failure, your data is safe and accessible.
Performance is not enough While many organizations purchase SSDs for performance, more and more are saying that performance is not enough. You’ve got to be fast, but you have to be safe. Speed is absolutely important, but there is no question customers are making data reliability capabilities a growing purchase-decision factor. Concurrently, innovation around data reliability is accelerating faster than innovation around SSD performance, in my opinion. It continues today with DataProtect. Kaminario is raising the data reliability bar within all solid-state storage and now offers customers the most comprehensive HA and data protection software stack available.
Today’s announcement is an indication as to what you will see from us moving forward. The intelligence built into SPEAR allows us to continue to expand HA and data protection benefits to make our storage fast, safe, easy, and cost effective. It may not happen this year or next, but eventually all solid-state media will be the standard for primary storage in enterprise data centers. So that is where our compass is pointed.
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Tags:application performance, Database Performance, DataProtect, DRAM, DRAM Storage, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash SSD, I/O bottlenecks, K2, Kaminario, SSD, SSD appliances, Storage Performance
Posted in Data Protection | No Comments »
