Posts Tagged ‘RAID’
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 25th, 2012
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Following Up on GridIron’s Response
CONTINUING THE ORACLE PERFORMANCE DISCUSSION
By Eyal Markovich
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Last week, a GridIron representative published a response to my original post about solving Oracle performance problems. The response includes some valid points but shows that the author is not familiar with the Kaminario K2’s full capabilities.
GridIron: There is no such thing as non-disruptive deployment of new storage arrays. In a production environment, halting a system to perform data migration, validate that migration and then restart the environment can be time and resource intensive. Converting existing scripts and operating procedures to use a new vendor’s snapshot features can be equally complicated and risky. With GridIron’s transparent network-based deployment, no changes are required to business processes or applications and there is no data migration involved – it is truly non-disruptive!
Kaminario Response: Yes, in many cases, customers will plan a downtime window for uploading data to Kaminario. In cases where such downtime is unavoidable, a customer can dynamically build a mirror (ASM or OS). When the mirror is completed, the customer can decide whether to drop the old storage or keep it. GridIron claims they are a truly non-disruptive solution, but I wonder what happens when their boxes fail. Based on a GridIron document, a failed unit can be bypassed through simple zoning changes in the Fibre Channel fabric. Applying Fibre Channel zoning in an active system may affect the entire fabric and it is not a recommended operation. To avoid this, customers will need some mirroring solution with two GridIron boxes (one acting as a mirror) and sophisticated configurations to make their solution truly HA. This seems very expensive, and I am not sure how feasible it is.
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Tags:application performance, database, GridIron, I/O bottlenecks, IOPS, K2, Kaminario, Oracle, RAID, RDBMS Performance, Storage Performance
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 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 March 5th, 2012
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Log file sync wait
By Eyal Markovich
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In the series of Oracle storage wait events I have covered so far, five different events are related to the storage: “db File Sequential Read”, “db File Scattered Read” wait events, “Direct Path Read”, “Direct Path Read/Write temp” and “Free Buffer Wait”. In this post, I will describe the log file sync wait event, which in many cases is caused by poor storage performance. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:application performance, Database Performance, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash SSD, K2, Kaminario, latency, log file sync, OLTP, Oracle databases, RAID, RDBMS Performance, solid-state SAN storage, SSD appliances, Storage appliances
Posted in Oracle Database Performance | No Comments »
Posted February 29th, 2012
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What You Need to Know About SSD HA and Data Protection
ALL HA SOLUTIONS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Folks from EMC and IBM started Kaminario because they felt passionately that any SSD device worth its name must have an architecture designed from the ground up for fast SSD, not a slow legacy disk architecture tweaked for SSD.
Enterprise mission critical applications need bulletproof reliability as well because any interruption or data loss, even for an hour, can squash not only productivity, but revenue. So Kaminario designed DataProtect’s high availability (HA) and data protection features from the ground up for fast SSD once again.
This is important to remember because many SSD solution vendors claim enterprise-class HA and data protection features, including all kinds of redundant components. But when they start with their HA and data protection checklist you should ask the following questions.
Is HA non-disruptive? Take a look at this Kaminario K2 High Availability Demonstration on the Kaminario Web site. What happens when someone pulls an entire storage node out of the K2? Well, not much and a whole lot. In a matter of seconds, SPEAR’s clustered N+1 architecture detects the outage, starts to fail over to a spare data node, reconfigures the array around the outage, and returns performance to its previous level, all with no data or access loss. Can those other SSD vendors do that? Keep in mind that in a dual-controller configuration typical of other SSD solutions, performance will suffer significantly when one controller drops out and will stay that way until it is replaced. Watch our demonstration video again. Do you want anything less for your revenue critical apps? All of the K2’s storage nodes are also hot swappable, so replacing a node will be non disruptive as well.
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Tags:DataProtect, disaster recovery, DR, enterprise, Flash, HA, high availability, K2, Kaminario, mission critical applications, N+1, RAID, RAID 10HD, RAID 4, RAID 5, reliability, replication, snapshot, SPEAR, SSD, SSD wear, storage node, write intensive
Posted in Data Protection | No Comments »
Posted September 28th, 2011
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The Best of Both Worlds
THE KAMINARIO/FUSION-IO PARTNERSHIP GIVES YOU THE BEST OF PERFORMANCE AND AVAILABILITY
By Eyal Markovich
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PCI Express SSD cards are the rage in IT departments looking for super fast, low latency application reads and writes. Why? PCIe Flash products take advantage of direct memory access over the PCIe bus, which is typically much faster than an external fibre channel or iSCSI connection. If you’re looking for maximum read and write performance in a single server, these solid state drive (SSD) solutions can fit the bill nicely. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags:clustering, DRAM, enterprise, Flash, Fusion-io, high availability, K2, Kaminario, Microsoft Cluster, OLTP, Oracle RAC, PCI Express SSD, RAID, read performance, SAN, Scalability, SPEAR architecture, SSD, transaction logs, wear leveling, write performance
Posted in Hybrid Storage | No Comments »
Posted June 27th, 2011
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Ain’t it Hot, Hot, Hot
SSD IS HOT, BUT DO YOUR HOMEWORK SO YOU DON’T GET BURNED.
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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There’s been a lot of buzz in the SSD market in the past few months, including a public offering, multiple instances of major new funding, and commitments to SSD from the big storage vendors. Fusion-io, maker of Flash memory PCIe server cards, completed its initial public offering on June 9, closing at $22.50 a share and raising $237 million. Kaminario closed a $15 million series C funding round. Violin Memory, maker of flash memory arrays and caching systems, closed a $40 million Series C funding round shortly after raising $35 million in February. Pure Storage raised $28 million in venture capital even though its solution is still in private beta testing and has yet to be revealed. EMC has made a commitment to boosting several of its arrays with flash and of course Oracle bases its Exadata appliance on Flash. Anyone how knows anything about this market is probably already weary of hearing the phrase, “Flash is the new disk and disk is the new tape.”
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Tags:analytics, big storage vendors, business intelligence, caching, DRAM, Flash memory, I/O Performance, Online Transaction Processing, online transactions, PCIe cards, public offering, RAID, reads, ssd form factors, ssd market, storage arrays, writes
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | No Comments »
