A tiered storage model is different from caching

Storage tiering has taken on added significance in recent years because of the emergence of solid-state drives (SSDs) in enterprise storage. It has also come to be confused with caching, which plays a significant role with SSDs. In this podcast, Evaluator Group senior strategist Randy Kerns drills into the specifics of a tiered storage model, explains the differences between tiering and flash caching, and looks at the benefits that tiering brings to hybrid arrays combining flash and spinning disk.

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PernixData extends flash hypervisor platform

Server-flash aggregation software provider PernixData Inc. this week added native support for VMware Inc. vSphere 5.5 and the vSphere web client with its newest product release at the VMware Partner Exchange 2014 in San Francisco, Calif. The startup also launched the PernixDrive technology storage alliance for interoperability with flash hardware devices.

PernixData’s FVP software aggregates server-side flash across storage and computing devices and decouples flash capacity from performance. PernixData calls FVP a flash hypervisor because it lets users cluster flash resources to VMware features such as vMotion and high availability (HA), and create a scale-out flash strategy. FVP is deployed within the VMware hypervisor, not as separate software, so no changes are made to deployed virtual machines (VMs), servers, or primary storage.

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Storage Products of the Year 2013: Storage Infrastructure Product of the Year

QLogic Corp.'s first product release from its Mt. Rainier server-side PCI Express (PCIe) flash cache-pooling technology is our 2013 storage infrastructure Product of the Year. Our judges scored the QLogic FabricCache 10000 Series host bus adapter (HBA) highest in innovation and performance among the four category finalists to give QLogic the top prize for a second year in a row.

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Pure Storage Forever Flash program aims at lowering support charges

All-flash storage array provider Pure Storage Inc. today launched its Forever Flash program, which provides free controller upgrades when renewing maintenance and support contracts and allows organizations to reset contracts when upgrading or expanding hardware.

Matt Kixmoeller, Pure Storage's vice president of products, said the Forever Flash program is designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) for the Pure Storage FlashArray by addressing two storage-industry practices that can significantly increase the operating and capital expenses associated with storage arrays. One is the out-year maintenance bill that customers get hit with when their initial maintenance contract expires. The other is the time and expense of forklift upgrades.

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American Megatrends launches flash array that can be all-SSD or hybrid

American Megatrends Inc. today rolled out the StorTrends 3500i solid-state drive (SSD) array, which includes both SSD caching and tiering in a single appliance, as well as automatically tuned volumes.

The 3500i is a 3U 16-bay system available fully loaded with flash or as a hybrid configuration of solid-state drives (SSDs) and Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) hard disk drives. An all-flash configuration scales to 32 TB inside the box, and the system can store 56 TB of raw capacity in a hybrid configuration. Additional capacity can be added up to 256 TB with expansion shelves. The 3500i supports 200 GB, 400 GB and 2 TB multi-level cell flash SSDs; 300 GB, 450 GB and 600 GB 15,000 rpm SAS hard drives; and 500 TB, 1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB 7,200 rpm nearline SAS drives.

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IBM rebrands SanDisk and Diablo's ULLtraDIMM memory channel storage

SanDisk Corp. and Diablo Technologies Inc. took a step toward getting their ULLtraDIMM solid-state drive (SSD) memory channel storage cards established as a data center staple by winning an OEM deal with IBM.

SanDisk and Diablo revealed this week that IBM rebranded ULLtraDIMM as its eXFlash memory channel storage component that was part of its Jan. 16 flash launch. The eXFlash is available with IBM X6 System x and Pure Systems servers.

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Slack: How NAND flash degrades and what vendors do to increase SSD endurance

Solid-state drives (SSDs) and PCI Express (PCIe) flash cards are becoming commonly adopted in storage products and servers, but questions remain about flash storage's endurance and life span. In this podcast, Storage Switzerland senior analyst Eric Slack discusses the technical aspects of how NAND flash storage degrades and what vendors are doing to increase SSD endurance.

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Storage Products of the Year 2013: Storage Infrastructure Finalists

Data storage infrastructure might be the least sexy yet most important category in the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com 2013 Products of the Year award competition, and this year we have four strong finalist products. However, only one award will be given in the category this year.

These products put the "network" in networked storage and often figure in the first steps to improved storage performance across the environment. The products eligible for consideration in this category include switches, host bus adapters (HBAs), network interface cards, security devices, converged network adapters, virtual networking and I/O products, and WAN-optimization products.

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