Skyera’s 99¢ store

Interesting companies at this year's Flash Memory Summit, but the winner of the StorageMojo BuzzGen award is Skyera. That there's little detail on their system may have helped: attendees get to fantasize about the putative magic under the covers. Founded by PhD...

IBM buys Texas Memory Systems

IBM has purchased the oldest and most respected high-end SSD builder in the country: Texas Memory Systems. Founder and CEO Holly Frost has led the company for 34 years. No word on price, but I expect it was not stratospheric. Before the advent of flash memory, the SSD...

On the road again

StorageMojo's crack analyst team is hitting the road: Flash Memory Summit; Intel Developer Forum; and SNIA's Storage Developer Conference. Flash Memory Summit I'll be chairing a tutorial at the Flash Memory Summit on Thursday morning, August 23rd. Topics include:...

F5100 array internals

The Sun Oracle F5100 flash-DIMM array joined Violin Memory's flash array as the storage on the lowest latency TPC-C benchmarks (see The SSD write cliff in real life for that data). Alert reader KD Mann pointed out that the F5100's flash DIMMs are simply ". . . a SATA...

Time in

It was a break, not a vacation. I'm planning one of the latter this week in San Diego. If there's someone in the SD neighborhood I should talk to, please comment. Otherwise I'll be lounging in the cool ocean breezes, iced drink in hand. Love the desert, and trips to...

Time out

After more than 6 years of relatively steady writing, I'm taking a break. No cell phone. No computer. No Internet. Until June 25th. There will be comment moderation, so please comment subject to the usual "Courteous comments welcome, of course" proviso. The...

Hot-swap in a non-SSD flash array

As a movie buff I'm surprised by people who say something like "I saw The Godfather when it came out, so I don't need to see it again." One of the pleasures of re-watching a movie is seeing how memory of the movie differs from the movie itself: what did memory change,...

The SSD write cliff in real life

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 blocks are...