Flash isn’t tier zero
A panel discussion on enterprise SSDs at the Flash Memory Summit came to an almost unanimous conclusion: NAND flash is best seen as an extension to DRAM and a layer between DRAM and disk - not as the guts of a disk drive replacement. I don't think the guy from Seagate...
StorageMojo at Flash Memory Summit
If you are attending the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara on Tuesday and Wednesday please say hello. Tuesday morning I will be sprinting between my two concurrent sessions. In Forum F1B: Laptop Design session I'll be giving a 25 minute presentation titled "Can The...
Power-play, power work
Steve Denegri, author of The Data Center's Green Direction Is A Dead End turned me onto an interesting Microsoft blog post. Titled Changing Data Center Behavior Based On Chargeback Metrics the post breaks down data center costs at Microsoft. The author, Christian...
Green-plated storage
Stepping beyond marketing green-washing, the folks at Wikibon have done something. Tomorrow morning they'll announce, along with California-based PG&E, Conserve IT, . . . a first-of-its-kind service that accelerates the qualification of storage products for energy...
Seattle scalability conference videos
No, not here on StorageMojo. Over on Anil Gupta's blog Network Storage. Scroll down. I liked the transactional memory preso and found Maidsafe intriguing. Perhaps one of StorageMojo's smarter readers can explain the latter to me. I didn't get the Nemo preso, but maybe...
The Data Center’s Green Direction is a Dead End
Is the data center doomed? Or just the IT industry? That's what the following article, by Steve Denegri - star industry financial analyst - asks. Steve's thesis: the IT industry is entering a period of energy scarcity that, in other industries, has meant that revenue...
Samsung follows StorageMojo’s lead – finally!
Samsung announced a 500,000 R/W cycle on their server-grade NAND flash. I thought that was pretty smart - even though the "several month" project didn't sound like it involved a lot of engineering. Then Flash analyst extraordinaire Jim Handy, who runs Objective...
The virtual machine I/O blender
I'm at the SNIA Symposium this morning. Hence the short post. What is the impact of virtual machines on I/O? Engineers have spent decades optimizing the OS, drivers, caching, controllers and disks for specific workloads. Observed behavior such as locality of reference...
Write off-loading enterprise storage
It isn't clear how serious the enterprise storage vendors and and their customers are about reducing energy consumption. A server may have 4-8 cores, consuming 50 W when idle, attached to 8, 16 or even 24 drives each pulling 8 W at idle. High end it drives, whose...
Design Tradeoffs for SSD Performance
A new Usenix paper looks at NAND flash SSD performance. From a team at Microsoft Research and the University of Wisconsin, including Ted Wobber who worked on last year's A Design for High-Performance Flash Disks [see Flash chance for the StorageMojo take on that...
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