Articles from SSD

Vacation Post: EMC Clariion CX4 support SSD Drives

Posted by Jason Massie on Tuesday, August 05, 2008 at 9:36 PM to SSD, hardware
111 Views | 0 Comments |

A beach tip from a cousin in law that works at EMC. Here is the press release. I am not going to go into a lot of txt but this is the tipping point. Get ready for a wild ride. Soon 1GB network connections won't be enough! Related posts: SSD

"Disks are dead, they just don’t know it yet"

Posted by Jason Massie on Saturday, July 26, 2008 at 12:10 AM to SSD, hardware
211 Views | 3 Comments |

I have been drooling over following Texas Memory Systems for a couples years and more recently, BitMicro.

I am not comparing the products that the companies sell because they are different products and the measurements are not the same. These bullets are mainly for drool factor and background for a post that I will refer you too.

 

Texas Memory Systems:

RamSan-400 SSD SAN

• The World's Fastest Storage®

• First solid state disk with 4Gb Fibre Channel interfaces.

• First solid state disk with 4x InfiniBand interfaces.

• Over 400,000 random I/Os per second.

• 3000 MB/s random sustained external throughput.

• Full array of hardware redundancy to ensure availability.

 

BitMicro:

E-Disk® Altima™ 4Gb Fibre Channel 3.5" Solid State Drive

• Up to 640GB of storage per disk on 1" drives.
• 1.6TB on 3.5" drives
• 800 MB/sec Full Duplex Burst Rate
• Up to 55,000 IOPS I/O Rate
• Similar offering on u320 SCSI

Now these are numbers from the manufacturers. Lots of missing info like read\write numbers. Numbers for different sizes of reads and writes etc. However, did I say WOW?

I am making this post because I ran across a blog post by Mike Ault on a FriendFeed conversation.

Mike address's these SSD "lies"

1. Solid state drive technology is very expensive
2. Solid state devices are best when directly attached to the internal bus architecture
3. Solid state drives will only be niche players
4. You can get the same IO rate from disks as from SSD

and he ends with this quote:

I am not afraid to say it: SSD technology is here, it is ready for prime time and it is only a matter of time before disks are relegated to second tier storage. Disks are dead, they just don’t know it yet.

We can only hope so :) I highly recommend reading the whole posts here.

I hope Microsoft is watching this technology. Sure, SQL will like a SSD SAN right now but I bet it could be heavily be optimized to run on SSD.

 

edit: link fixed

One drive to rule them all

Posted by Jason Massie on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 at 6:49 AM to SSD
126 Views | 0 Comments |

This stuff is really going to change SQL. Heck, it is going to change computing.

BiTMICRO to Deliver 3.5-inch 4Gbit Fibre Channel Flash Solid State Drive with up to 1.6 TB Capacity and Robust Storage Performance for High-Performance Computing Applications

Latest 3.5-inch E-Disk Altima 4Gb FC solid state drive model promises to grab the attention of the military, scientific, industrial and enterprise markets by delivering unprecedented solid state drive performance with sustained rates of more than 230 MB/s, over 55,000 IOPS and with capacities of up to 1.6TB of pure non-volatile solid state storage

Let's not even consider all of the theoretical changes in SQL Server that will need to be made once this hardware catches on. Let's imagine a RAID 0 array with 10 disks on SQL 2005. That is 2.2GB/s not to mention 16TB of storage in a very small area. Maybe even internal to the server. On top of that, I suspect that the power footprint is much smaller than the current 16TB solutions out there.

The full press release is here.