Posts Tagged ‘hybrid’
Posted November 5th, 2012
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The Hybrid Solution: Best of Both Worlds? Not!
THERE ARE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES TO MIXING LEGACY DISK WITH SSD
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Hybrid is an up and coming enterprise storage architecture, advocated by many legacy storage vendors, that supposedly gives you the best of both worlds: the seasoned storage and reliability architecture of a longstanding enterprise storage leader combined with fast SSD, often from an up and coming SSD startup. One such solution, described in this InfoStor article Gridiron Launches SSD-Accelerated OneAppliance Array, combines NetApp’s E-5400 Series storage array with GridIron’s flash-based TurboCharger Appliance. On its face, this sounds like a great solution, as you get NetApp’s tried and tested high availability, replication, and synchronization features with the fast performance of GridIron’s SSD. However, if you’re considering a solution like this, make sure you ask the right questions.
Is SSD used as a cache or mainstream storage? Many of these solutions, including NetApp’s, use SSD as a cache sitting in front of legacy hard disk storage, not as direct storage. Cache can speed up many applications, but it’s not an ideal solution if you need the absolute highest performance you can get from random, write heavy applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP). First, until the architecture figures out which data to put in the cache you’re going to get slow hard-disk-style I/O performance. Second, with a cache architecture writes are often made directly to hard disk rather than to fast SSD, so write-heavy applications such as OLTP don’t benefit from cache as much as they do from direct SSD storage. Finally, you’re not getting maximum storage efficiency as most of the data in the cache is duplicated on the hard disk.
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Tags:availability, cache, DataProtect, E-5400 storage array, enterprise storage, GridIron, hybrid, InfoStor, K2, Kaminario, legacy storage vendors, NetApp, OLTP, Online Transaction Processing, reads, replication, snapshot, SSD, storage controller, synchronization, TurboCharger, writes
Posted in Hybrid Storage | No Comments »
Posted May 7th, 2012
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Array Rumble at Storage Tech Field Day
SSD ARRAY VENDORS FACE OFF OVER SOLID-STATE STORAGE ARCHITECTURES
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Another interesting seminar at Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Day, hosted by Nigel Poulton, addressed the best architecture for an SSD array. Participants included Thomas Isakovich, CEO and Founder of Nimbus Data Systems, Umesh Maheswhari, CTO and founder of Nimble Storage, Jonathan Goldick, software CTO at Violin Memory, and Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire. It was a pretty lively debate, with Goldick grinning broadly through much of it and taking jabs at the others. One couldn’t help but wonder what he was grinning about.
The truth is, there was a lot of disagreement over the best array architecture and sometimes the argument got a tad heated and personal, much to the delight of the audience. However, there were three things everyone could agree to. First, the best architecture is one that provides an ideal balance of scalability, share ability, reliability, and performance, not performance alone. Second, for all but the few most performance- and latency-sensitive applications, it’s more important to provide consistent, predictable performance for an array of applications, than to provide the absolute best performance. And third, the best architecture is a mix of commodity hardware and a software architecture designed from the ground up for SSD. Sound familiar? Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:architecture, cache, Dave Wright, deduplication, disk, Flash, hybrid, Jonathan Goldick, Kaminario, latency, Nigel Poulton, Nimble Storage, Nimbus Data Systems, off-the-shelf hardware, scale-out architecture, SolidFire, SSD, SSD array, Stephen Foskett, Tech Field Day, Thomas Esakovich, tiering, Umesh Maheshwari, Violin Memory Systems
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | 2 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 January 25th, 2012
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Notes from the Trenches
ENTERPRISE IT IS DOING ITS HOMEWORK ON SSD.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Recently, I had the pleasure of listening to Kevin Colton, one of our solutions consultants, speak with some of our new hires about Kaminario’s market, its customers, and customer concerns and pain points. It was interesting hear a bit of what’s actually happening out there in the trenches, so I thought I’d share some of it with our readers.
According to Kevin, the tone of the market has shifted noticeably in the past 18 months. Before that time, Kevin was spending a lot of time with potential customers to demonstrate how the K2 could solve their I/O latency and performance issues. The interest was there, but there was also hesitance, as most IT departments were still “doing their homework” on SSD solutions and concerned about reliability, wear leveling, and other similar issues.
In the past several months, the high performance storage market has started to flip. Having finished their homework, enterprise customers are now approaching Kaminario in increasing numbers. Price is still a concern, particularly with DRAM SSD solutions, but falling prices, a better awareness of where SSDs make economic sense, and the SSD freedom of choice the Kaminario K2 all solid-state (Flash and DRAM) SAN storage provides have alleviated those concerns.
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Tags:analytics, batch processing, business intelligence, clustering, controllers, CRM, data warehouse, DRAM, electric utilities, email marketing, ERP, financial firms, heatthcare, hybrid, I/O, I/O Performance, insurance companies, K2, Kaminario, latency, manageability, metadata, N+1, reliability, research database, risk analysis, SAN storage, Scalability, service providers, SSD, telecommunications, university, usability, wear leveling
Posted in SSD Case Studies | 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 August 17th, 2011
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The Rumors of DRAM’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
DRAM IS ALIVE AND KICKING
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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The notion that flash is causing trouble for the DRAM market has been in the media for several months now, but it really took off with a July, 2011 study by Objective Analysis that concluded that in most cases NAND flash provided a greater PC performance boost per dollar than DRAM. The study tested many different PC configurations of DRAM and flash with more than 300 benchmarks and found its conclusion valid in just about every configuration. Over time the price difference will widen, says the report, and flash will become the memory form factor of choice on most PC’s.
Why? Even though the performance of DRAM is superior to that of flash, the difference is negligible to the PC user and becomes even more negligible when you can cram in lots more flash for the same number of dollars as DRAM.
Subsequent articles, blogs, and other analyses have come close to declaring DRAM all but dead, not only in PC’s, but in servers as well.
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Tags:analytics, database, DRAM, DRAM market, enterprise application performance, Flash, hybrid, I/O, IOP, latency, NAND, Online Transaction Processing, reads, SAN, SSD, SSD SAN, writes
Posted in SSD Architectures | No Comments »
