Posts Tagged ‘IBM’
Posted December 19th, 2012
 |
2012 Year in Review: SSD Grows Up
By Dani Golan
|
2012 was the year SSD started moving from niche status into the enterprise mainstream, building up the seasoning and enterprise-class features it needs to take off in the years ahead. It’s obvious that enterprise IT is taking notice, feeling more comfortable with the technology, and becoming more aware of its benefits and best uses.
Here are some of the trend highlights we noticed over the past year.
Sales continued to grow – SSD sales continue their upward trajectory. According to IDC, the market for enterprise SSDs will continue to grow to $5.5 billion in 2015. SSD shipments in general reached 12.9 million units in the first half of 2012 and are expected to reach 28 million in the second half, according to HIS iSuppli Memory and Storage Service.
SSD continues to close the price gap with HDD – Flash pricing continues to become more competitive with hard disk storage, and the gap is narrowing. SSD prices continued to fall this year, with the bare media cost falling well below $3 per gigabyte in 2012, compared with almost $9 per gigabyte in 2010. Adding to the lower cost are the cooling and real estate advantages of an SSD array compared with hard disk storage.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:Anobit, data protection, EMC, Flash SSD, flash storage, FlashSoft, high availability, hybrid storage, IBM, IDC, Kaminario, NetApp, SanDisk, solid state devices, Solid State Storage, SSD architectures, SSD Solutions, Storage Performance, Texas Memory Systems, XtremIO Apple
Posted in SSD Solutions | No Comments »
Posted August 15th, 2012
 |
Single-Storage-Vendor Solution or Best of Breed?
BEST OF BREED CAN PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
|
In a recent blog entitled Pros and Cons of Buying a One-Vendor Storage Solution, Randy Kerns outlines the arguments for and against sticking with one storage vendor. Pro arguments include the simplicity of dealing with a single storage vendor vs. several for troubleshooting and support and the reduced costs that may come from rolling the price of a new technology into a bigger volume purchase. He also argues that single-vendor solutions have the advantage of easy integration. For cons, Kerns simply mentions possible higher cost from a more expensive vendor and the possibility of not getting the best solution. He concludes by predicting that single vendor solutions will predominate, thanks to lower complexity and reduced training and administration costs.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:ActiveTrail, best of breed, Compellent, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Kaminario, mission critical, NetApp, PedMed, performance bottleneck, Randy Kerns, revenue producing, SAN, single storage vendor, SPC-1, SSD, Test America
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | No Comments »
Posted March 21st, 2012
|
Keep those SSD’s Coming!
NEW PRODUCTS ARE HITTING THE MARKET DAILY
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
|
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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 February 23rd, 2012
|
Hey IBM Power System Users, You Have a Choice
THE K2 HAS FULL AIX SUPPORT AND A LOT OF ADVANTAGES COMPARED TO THE USUAL SUSPECTS.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
|
EMC made a big splash early this month with its Project Lightning announcement, but at just about the same time IBM made a quieter announcement, packing an SSD cache into its XIV storage system to help with demanding workloads such as analytics, cloud computing, and virtualization. In fact IBM made a point of claiming that TCO for the XIV generation 3 was 69 percent lower than with the equivalent EMC system.
It’s easy to get caught up in the clash of the titans, especially if you’re running databases on AIX-based IBM Power Systems, as the AIX storage options out there are limited. However, AIX users have a choice beyond the usual suspects: Kaminario’s K2 is one of the few pure SSD array solutions with full support for AIX. Here are some reasons you may want to consider the K2 for your I/O-intensive Power System workloads.
The K2 is a Pure SSD Solution – As with EMC’s Project Lightning, IBM’s XIV system uses SSD as a kind of cache band-aid for slow disk storage, moving data in and out of cache according to complex algorithms. The disadvantage: As with Project Lightning, the IBM cache is for reads only, so you won’t get the fast writes you get with the K2; you won’t get the performance until the right data is moved into the cache; you’re likely to get some cache misses; and all that cache data is duplicated on disk storage, which is not the most efficient solution.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:AIX, analytics, cache, cloud computing, database, David, disk controller, EMC, Goliath, I/O, IBM, IBM XIV, K2, K2 Hybrid, Kaminario, OLTP, performance bottleneck, Power Systems, Project Lightning, reads, SPEAR, SSD, SSD array, TCO, virtualization, write-intensive workloads, writes
Posted in Hybrid Storage | No Comments »
Posted October 14th, 2011
|
SSD Sprawl: Don’t Worry. Be Happy
NOTHING BEATS SAN-BASED SSD FOR EFFICIENCY AND HIGH UTILIZATION.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
|
A September 21, 2011 IBM/Zogby International study shows a lot of pent up demand for solid state drives (SSD). Nearly half (43 percent) of IT decision makers surveyed said they were already using SSD or had plans to use it in the future and 75 percent said that speeding delivery of data was the motivation for using SSD technology. According to IBM’s press release, “Customers are embracing high-performance solid-state disks to support growing data storage demands driven by cloud computing and analytics technologies.”
Interesting results, but perhaps even more interesting is the press coverage that is already warning IT about the dangers of SSD sprawl, similar to the server, virtual machine, and hard disk sprawl IT departments wrestled with in the past. In fact, Storage Soup, a SearchStorage.com blog has an entry entitled Are You Ready for SSD Sprawl?
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:DRAM, Flash, IBM, IT, IT decision makers, K2, K2-H, Kaminario, PCI, SAN, server sprawl, SPEAR operating system, SSD, SSD sprawl, Zogby International
Posted in SSD Architectures | No Comments »
