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.
Posts Tagged ‘mission critical’
 |
Single-Storage-Vendor Solution or Best of Breed?BEST OF BREED CAN PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario |
 |
Performance Management At a GlanceOPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE WILL BE JOB ONE IN 2012 By Eyal Markovich |
In his January 18 Information Week storage blog, Biggest Storage Trend of 2012, George Crump predicts that storage performance management will likely be the biggest concern of IT in 2012. Performance management includes directing applications to the right storage infrastructure, monitoring storage performance in real time, and making quick adjustments when necessary to ensure your mission critical business processes run smoothly and quickly.
The increasing importance of performance management comes not only from the proliferation of speed- and latency-sensitive business processes and database applications, but from the fast rise of SSD that can actually provide that performance at a reasonable price. Crump points to the need for tools that provide quick, valuable, real-time insight to ensure that performance requirements are met consistently with the best bang for the buck.
The recognition of that need is behind the streamlined and information-rich architecture and interface of Kaminario’s management and performance analysis software for the K2 product line.
|
Why Not Both?DEPENDING ON YOUR APPLICATIONS YOU MAY WANT TO CONSIDER USING FLASH AND DRAM By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario |
In my last entry I talked about flash workarounds and the other SSD media—DRAM—that is sometimes forgotten in all the discussions about SSD. When looking for a solution for your application I/O bottlenecks, it’s important to understand the pros and cons and of both types of SSD—DRAM AND flash. Then choose the solution—or solutions—that best fit your applications.
Flash has been getting a lot of the buzz lately because of its nonvolatility and its price, which has declined dramatically in the past five years just as performance has improved. Flash is about a third the cost of DRAM and its performance is far superior to that of disk, with 100K to 600K IOPS and latency below 300 microseconds.
It’s important to understand, however, that the read and write performance of flash are very different. Why? Flash requires all data in a cell to be erased first before it can be rewritten to–and that takes time. Flash also has a limitation in numbers of writes before its performance begins to degrade and it starts to fail, so vendors use all kinds of workarounds to maximize its longevity and performance over time.
