by Robin Harris | Tuesday, October 23, 2012 | Architecture, Cloud computing & storage |
Research (see Nightmare on DIMM street) a few years ago found that DRAM error rates were hundreds to thousands of times higher than vendors had led us believe. But what is the nature of those errors? Are they soft errors – as is commonly believed – where a...
by Robin Harris | Wednesday, September 26, 2012 | Architecture, Cloud computing & storage |
Storage is cheap and getting cheaper. But at scale it will never be free. At scale – today, petabytes; in a decade, dozenss of petabytes – even a few per cent savings amounts to real dollars. Strategies that made sense 10 years – such as triple...
by Robin Harris | Monday, August 13, 2012 | Architecture, Backup, Enterprise, Management |
“Call home” support has been standard in large arrays for 15 years. But Nimble Storage has kicked it up a notch with their advanced telemetry data from installed systems. It gives new meaning to the term “after-sale support.” Talk to me Their...
by Robin Harris | Monday, July 23, 2012 | Architecture, Cloud computing & storage, Clusters, Future Tech |
The post-RAID (noRAID) era has begun. While RAID arrays aren’t going away, the growth is elsewhere, and corporate investment follows growth. Why now? There are now architecturally superior alternatives to RAID that are lower cost. But you could argue that the...
by Robin Harris | Thursday, June 7, 2012 | Architecture, SSD/Flash/NVRAM |
Flash drives are known to have latency issues. The requirement to erase and program large blocks – even for small writes – means that if the drive runs out of free blocks a 50+ ms delay is possible while garbage collection works to provide one. Since free...
by Robin Harris | Tuesday, May 29, 2012 | Architecture, SSD/Flash/NVRAM |
Over at Network Computing my friend Howard Marks took StorageMojo to task for questioning using commodity SSDs in solid state storage arrays. In his response he made several points about latency, bandwidth, cost and reliability. Latency [Robin] says that SAS/SATA...
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