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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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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OCZ bankruptcy may yet ignite bidding war

Industry experts see solid-state drive (SSD) vendor OCZ Technology Group Inc.'s bankruptcy and pending asset sale to Toshiba as a continuation of the consolidation that has gone on throughout the past year rather than a bad omen for the flash business.

"I don't consider this anything but business as usual," said Arun Taneja, the founder and consulting analyst of the storage industry consulting firm Taneja Group.

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Tegile flash hybrid array accelerates dental school's virtual app

When the University of Colorado School of Dental Medicine (UC SDM) found the latency of its newly installed virtual application environment unacceptable, its IT team decided flash was called for and looked into whether it required an all-flash or hybrid array.

The final decision was a hybrid system -- the Tegile Systems Zebi HA2100EP.

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Skyera plans to pack 500 TB into 1U flash array

Skyera Inc. this week said it would expand its all-solid-state storage array portfolio next year with skyEagle, which will hold 500 terabytes (TB) of raw flash storage in a 1U array.

Skyera claims skyEagle can deliver 20 Gbps throughput and 5 million IOPS, and the product is priced at $1.99 per gigabyte for read-intensive applications.

SkyEagle will be startup Skyera's second all-flash array. The company released the skyHawk array with a mix of 19 nm and 20 nm NAND flash in April 2012. The skyHawk array was priced at $2.99 per gigabyte. Like the skyEagle system, the skyHawk utilizes consumer-grade multi-level cell technology and manages it with its proprietary flash optimization software the company claims can extend the life of flash by 100 times.

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SolidFire launches its largest all-flash storage array with SF9010

Solid-state array provider SolidFire announced the addition of the SF9010 model to its line of all-flash storage arrays, with 2.5-inch 960 GB Samsung SSDs and an effective price below $3 per GB and $1 per IOPS. The company also announced a $31-million series C round of financing led by Samsung.

A single SF9010 node is a rackmount 1U form factor unit with 256 GB of memory and 9.6 TB of raw all-solid-state drive (SSD) capacity that provides 75,000 IOPS. With SolidFire's in-house thin provisioning and deduplication technologies, and industry standard compression algorithms, Jay Prassl, SolidFire's vice president of marketing, said a single node's effective capacity is close to 34 TB. He said the SF9010 can run in a 100-node cluster, bringing effective capacity to 3.4 PB.

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Flash storage arrays take center stage at Storage Decisions

Solid-state storage was a hot topic at the Storage Decisions Conference in Chicago last week, as expert presenters explained its benefits while warning attendees not to go overboard in deploying expensive flash storage arrays.

Presenters suggested instead using flash as a tool in a sound, economical storage strategy that also includes spinning hard disk drives, tape archiving and cloud services.

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Micron ships first MLC PCIe flash card

Micron Technology Inc. has expanded its flash product line with its first MLC PCIe Express NAND card, two years after launching its first SLC PCIe flash card.

The P420m multi-level cell (MLC) card should help Micron sales because MLC cards are more commonly deployed than single-level cell (SLC) in the enterprise. MLC cards are cheaper than SLC and software enhancements have improved MLC's reliability and performance. Micron was slow to the MLC market, as most of its major competitors already have MLC PCIe flash cards.

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Tintri adds asynchronous replication for virtual machines

Virtual machine-aware storage vendor Tintri Inc. is adding the ability to asynchronously replicate individual virtual machines between its VMstore arrays with version 2.0 of its operating system.

Tintri's ReplicateVM feature builds on its cloning and snapshot capabilities, and allows customers to replicate virtual machines (VMs) to another array or multiple arrays.

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Micron brings out 2.5-inch SAS SSD, anticipates decline of SATA SSD

Looking to go where the market appears to be heading, Micron has added a 6 Gbps Serial-Attached SCSI drive to its solid-state storage lineup with the release of the P410m solid-state drive. The 2.5-inch, 7 millimeter SAS drive is available in 100 GB, 200 GB and 400 GB capacities.

The P410m uses 25 nanometer multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash, and is the Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) version of Micron's P400m SATA interface solid-state drive (SSD). It is Micron's first SAS SSD and uses the company's XPERT performance and reliability technology, which includes on-board power-loss protection, and a redundant array of independent NAND (RAIN), the flash equivalent of a RAID.

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Intel re-brands, expands SSD caching software picked up from Nevex

Intel Corp. today released a Linux version of the solid-state caching software it acquired from startup Nevex last year, rebranding the application as Intel Cache Acceleration Software. The software is a companion to Intel solid-state drives and PCI Express cards.

Cache Acceleration Software (CAS) for Linux 2.0 is the first new caching application released by Intel since it acquired Nevex last October. At the time of the acquisition, Nevex had a CacheWorks application for Windows, but the Linux version was still in beta. Intel released CacheWorks 2.0 -- already in the works when the acquisition closed -- last December. That product is now called CAS for Windows 2.0.

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Nutanix offers scale-out storage options for its Complete Cluster

Nutanix Inc. today released a new series of its scale-out storage and compute cluster products, and updated its Nutanix Operating System. The new NX-3000 series lets customers scale storage and compute separately with performance nodes, and software advances include compression and replication for disaster recovery.

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Tucci at Oracle OpenWorld: Cloud transition will prove disruptive

Private cloud storage, cloud computing and virtualization will be the keys to dealing with the massive data deluge hitting the IT world, EMC Corp. CEO Joseph Tucci said Monday in his Oracle OpenWorld keynote address in San Francisco.

The theme of EMC World 2011 in May was “cloud meets Big Data,” and Tucci and EMC president Pat Gelsinger brought those topics to Oracle customers this week. Tucci and Gelsinger didn’t make any stunning announcements during their keynote presentations, but they did reiterate EMC’s commitment to the cloud, VMware’s virtualization platform and solid-state storage.

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