Posts Tagged ‘writes’
Posted April 17th, 2013
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Delivering on Our Vision for Enterprise Storage
By Dani Golan
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Today is an important day, not just for Kaminario but, we believe, for the entire enterprise storage industry. Today is the day we announce the Kaminario fourth-generation K2 all-flash storage array. What is so important about our fourth-generation product? Here are a few key points:
Breakthrough TCO: With K2 v4 we have been able to increase the density by more than 500% while cutting the price in half. Why is this so significant? Lowering the cost of enterprise-ready solid-state flash storage has been one of the long-time goals of the industry. If you believe, as we do, that solid-state is the future of Tier One storage, then it must be cost-efficient for all applications, not just those requiring the highest levels of performance. And now it is. What’s more, Kaminario’s TCO breakthrough extends the viability of solid-state to a new class of mid-size customers who can now afford unprecedented levels of performance, resiliency and ease of use from their storage infrastructures.
Killer Performance: Even before today’s announcement Kaminario delivered by far the best performance in the industry, with world record SPC-1 results for sustained performance and price/performance. With K2 v4 we now have 400% more read/write bandwidth than our previous versions, with consistently low latency (120-microsecond writes). Topping it off, we still offer industry-leading IOPS performance. K2 v4 delivers significant across-the-board performance advantages over any other solution for any combination of workloads, be they OLTP, OLAP or virtualization. It’s a level of performance consistency that is unparalleled in the industry.
Bulletproof Resiliency: Our proven SPEAR Scale-Out Architecture maintains data integrity through any type of failure. For most workloads the performance levels of our solutions will be minimally impacted—usually less than 10%. We even guarantee that degradation will max out at 25%. What’s more, our snapshots are the most efficient in the storage industry, enabling instant restore and recovery from any snapshot with no impact on the performance of the production environment. Snaps can be taken in just milliseconds, 20 times faster than any legacy SAN system on the market today. We make snapshots sexy.
These are major advances in solid-state that have been more than five years in the making. They move storage technology to a whole new level. Don’t just take our word for it: Take a look at the new architectural white paper or better yet, the independent report.
On a personal note, it is an important day for me, as well as for the entire team here at Kaminario. From the beginning we envisioned a new era in enterprise storage driven by solid-state flash and a true scale-out architecture. As of today, that vision is a reality. What’s next? We can’t wait to tell you…
Tags:application performance, Database Performance, Flash, Flash SSD, IOPS, K2, Kaminario, latency, OLAP, OLTP, reads, Solid State Storage, SSD, Storage Performance, virtualization, writes
Posted in All Flash Storage Array | No Comments »
Posted March 6th, 2013
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Flash Immortal
Discovery could extend Flash life from 10,000 write cycles to more than 100 million
By Kaminario
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An interesting Gizmodo article entitled Hot Flash: The Secret To SSDs That Will Outlast The Universe discusses a new discovery claimed by Taiwanese Flash manufacturer Macronix that by periodically applying intense heat to MLC Flash for milliseconds they can increase its life from 10,000 write cycles to more than 100 million. How does it work? Flash writes erode transistor insulation slowly until eventually the chip is no longer viable. Add a quick jolt of 800 degree-centigrade heat and you can actually heal the insulation for another 5 to 10,000 writes.
No doubt this is an important discovery, but the truth is that the life limitations of flash are greatly exaggerated even today. Flash manufacturers and solution vendors have come up with a raft of technologies, including wear leveling, advanced error correction, and sophisticated digital signal processing, to ensure your Flash device can last almost as long or longer than a typical hard disk.
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Tags:application performance, Database Performance, I/O bottlenecks, IOPS, latency, MLC, OLTP, reads, Storage Performance, writes
Posted in SSD TCO | No Comments »
Posted November 5th, 2012
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The Hybrid Solution: Best of Both Worlds? Not!
THERE ARE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES TO MIXING LEGACY DISK WITH SSD
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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Hybrid is an up and coming enterprise storage architecture, advocated by many legacy storage vendors, that supposedly gives you the best of both worlds: the seasoned storage and reliability architecture of a longstanding enterprise storage leader combined with fast SSD, often from an up and coming SSD startup. One such solution, described in this InfoStor article Gridiron Launches SSD-Accelerated OneAppliance Array, combines NetApp’s E-5400 Series storage array with GridIron’s flash-based TurboCharger Appliance. On its face, this sounds like a great solution, as you get NetApp’s tried and tested high availability, replication, and synchronization features with the fast performance of GridIron’s SSD. However, if you’re considering a solution like this, make sure you ask the right questions.
Is SSD used as a cache or mainstream storage? Many of these solutions, including NetApp’s, use SSD as a cache sitting in front of legacy hard disk storage, not as direct storage. Cache can speed up many applications, but it’s not an ideal solution if you need the absolute highest performance you can get from random, write heavy applications such as online transaction processing (OLTP). First, until the architecture figures out which data to put in the cache you’re going to get slow hard-disk-style I/O performance. Second, with a cache architecture writes are often made directly to hard disk rather than to fast SSD, so write-heavy applications such as OLTP don’t benefit from cache as much as they do from direct SSD storage. Finally, you’re not getting maximum storage efficiency as most of the data in the cache is duplicated on the hard disk.
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Tags:availability, cache, DataProtect, E-5400 storage array, enterprise storage, GridIron, hybrid, InfoStor, K2, Kaminario, legacy storage vendors, NetApp, OLTP, Online Transaction Processing, reads, replication, snapshot, SSD, storage controller, synchronization, TurboCharger, writes
Posted in Hybrid Storage | No Comments »
Posted June 25th, 2012
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Kaminario Will Always Be All Solid-State SAN Storage
THOUGHTS ON A POST BY RUBEN SPRUIJT
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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One of the challenges of offering a unique product is that sometimes it can be difficult for outsiders to classify it with other solutions in the market. So we see, from time to time, published articles that either put the K2 in the wrong bucket or don’t describe the K2’s capabilities completely.
Such is the case with a recent blog by Ruben Spruijt that discusses different types of SSD solutions including hybrid file systems, Flash-only arrays and server-side Flash. While it is true that the Kaminario K2 offers a single enclosure for blade servers connected with Flash, it is not accurate to include the K2 in the server-side Flash category. Spruijt does not specifically call out Kaminario as a server-side SSD solution, but it appears that way from the mention.
Kaminario Makes All Solid-State SAN Storage — Absent a category for all solid-state SAN storage to include Flash and DRAM, Spruijt should have mentioned the K2 in his Flash-only array discussion. As my colleague Eyal Markovich said, “server-based PCIe cards are, by nature, local to the server, so they cannot serve as part of a server cluster. That means they’re out as an SSD solution for running Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) or an SQL Server instance as part of a Microsoft Cluster. Since the K2 is SAN-based, it fully supports these clustering configurations.” This is just one example why readers should understand that the K2 is a solid-state SAN storage array versus a server-side SSD solution.
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Tags:application performance, database, Database Performance, DataProtect, Disk latency, Flash, Flash SSD, high availability, I/O bottlenecks, IOPS, K2, Kaminario, Storage Performance, writes
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 »
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 »
Posted January 16th, 2012
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Free Buffer Wait
By Eyal Markovich
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So far in the series of Oracle storage wait events we have covered several common events such as “db file sequential read”, “db file scattered read” wait events, direct path read and Direct path Read/Write temp. In this post, I will describe another wait event that in many cases is caused by weak storage performance.
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Tags:application performance, Database Performance, DBWR, DRAM, Flash, Free Buffer Wait, I/O bottlenecks, I/O Performance, I/O wait, Kaminario, Oracle, reads, SSD, writes
Posted in Oracle Database Performance | No Comments »
Posted November 22nd, 2011
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The Write Stuff
THERE’S MORE TO WRITES THAN MEETS THE EYE
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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In a recent Information Week blog posting entitled Improve Write Performance with SSD, George Crump examines how writes are handled in most mainstream caching and automated storage tiering solutions. He points out that despite the presence of fast SSD in many of these solutions, most of them write data to the much slower mechanical hard drive first. Only after the data gets accessed does it have the chance to move into cache or the fast SSD tier for fast reads, but not writes.
Strange, isn’t it? Why don’t most of these solutions take advantage of SSD’s superior write performance? The answer is reliability, according to Crump. The SSD in these products has a higher failure rate than disk and doesn’t offer the redundancy and other reliability aspects of most enterprise disk-based storage solutions.
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Tags:cache, enterprise SSD, George Crump, Information Week, mirroring, OLTP, Online Transaction Processing, power supplies, reads, redundancy, ssd market, storage controllers, Storage tiering, writes
Posted in Hybrid Storage | 1 Comment »
Posted November 1st, 2011
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Sure It Kicks, But is it Enterprise Ready?
WHEN SHOPPING FOR ENTERPISE SSD SOLUTIONS, BUYER BEWARE
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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An interesting StorageSearch Blog entitled what will be the tone of the SSD market in 2012? says it all. “ The user mood is changing from – can I afford to use SSDs? – to a realization that – I can’t afford not to use SSDs. SSD makers are confident – because they can see better than anyone outside the industry – that 2012 is going to be a Kick Ass Year for Enterprise SSDs.”
You’ve probably noticed the parade of enterprise SSD introductions in the past few months from these confident vendors and will probably see a lot more in 2012. When you evaluate all these new products for your organization however, be careful not to focus too hard on the word “SSD” at the expense of the word “enterprise.” Sure, just about any SSD product will deliver very good to stellar performance, but anyone who has any experience with this medium knows that performance isn’t the whole story.
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Tags:availability, DRAM, enterprise, Flash, flexibility, I/O hot spots, Kaminario, latency, low latency, mechanical disks, reads, restores, Scale-out performance Storage Architecture, SSD, ssd market, storage architecture, storage nodes, writes
Posted in SSD Storage Performance | 1 Comment »
Posted October 26th, 2011
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Direct Path Read
By Eyal Markovich
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In previous posts, “db file sequential read” and “db file scattered read” wait events, I explained two common wait events that are associated with I/O Wait. In this post I will describe another common wait event that in many cases is caused by a weak storage performance.
Direct path read is an access path in which multiple Oracle blocks are read directly to the Oracle process memory without being read into the buffer cache in the Shared Global Area (SGA). This event is usually caused by scanning an entire table, index, table partition, or index partition during Parallel Query execution (although 11g support “direct path read” on serial scans). The following SQL statement illustrates a parallel query scanning a table:
| Sample SQL Query:Select /*+ Parallel(emp 4) */ * from Employee emp;
Execution Plan:
SELECT STATEMENT
PX COORDINATOR
PX RECEIVE
PX SEND RANGE
PX BLOCK ITERATOR
TABLE ACCESS FULL EMPLOYEE |
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Tags:direct path read, I/O wait, index, index partition, IOPS, Kaminario, Oracle, Oraclee process memory, parallel queries, parallel query execution, reads, Shared Global Area, SQL statement, storage latency, Storage Performance, table partition, throughput, wait events, writes
Posted in Oracle Database Performance | No Comments »
