Posts Tagged ‘TCO’
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 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 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 »
