Posts Tagged ‘Project Lightning’
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 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 February 23rd, 2012
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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
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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.
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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 February 9th, 2012
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Project Lightning: Perfect Storm or Sturm und Drang?
EMC’S ANNOUNCEMENT IS IMPORTANT, BUT NOT A GAME CHANGER.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Scan all the news and blogs about EMC’s Project Lightning and Thunder announcements this week and you certainly get a lot of sturm und drang. Bloggers are shouting everything from EMC announcing another “me too technology” to the entry of a major market disrupter that will put a lot of cool SSD startups like Kaminario out of business.
I’m sure you expect me to say there isn’t much to this announcement, but, frankly, we’re talking about EMC so I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t matter. As Steve Duplessie says in The Bigger Truth, “EMC could put a wad of gum in a box and sell $300M worth.” Before you decide that Lightning and Thunder represent the perfect storm that will overwhelm all those other SSD solutions out there, here are a few things to keep in mind:
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Tags:application awareness, cache, DRAM, EMC, FAST, Flash, FusionIO, hard disk, HDD, K2, Kaminario, Project Lightning, Project Thunder, reads, SSD, Steve Duplessie, Storage Soup, Storage tiering, The Bigger Truth, The Storage Architect, VFCache, Wikibon, write-through cache, writes
Posted in Hybrid Storage | No Comments »
