SSD activity continues to go virtually round and round

Storage I/O trends

Solid State Disk (SSD) (both FLASH and RAM based) activities and discussions continue to go round and round (pun intended) with announcements (here, here, here, here, here, and here and among others) of various improvements and evolution for technologies focused from the consumer to the small office home office (SOHO) to small medium business (SMB) to enterprise with technologies from vendors including Intel, Sandisk, Seagate and many others.

Recent innovations are looking to address write performance issues or challenges associated with FLASH based SSD, which while better than magnetic hard disk drives (HDD), are slower than their RAM based counterparts.

Other activity includes extending the useful life or duration of how many times a FLASH based device can be rewritten or modified before problems arise or performance degrades. Yet another activity is Sandisk introducing “virtual RPM” (vRPM) metrics to provide consumers an indication of relative revolutions per minute (RPM) of a non-rotating SSD device to make comparisons to help with shopping decisions makings. Can you say SSDs going round and round and round at least in a virtual world? Now that should make for some interesting “virtual benchmarking” discussions!

Meanwhile industry trade groups include the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) are gathering momentum to address marketing, messaging, awareness, education as well as metrics or benchmarks among things normally done around industry trade group camp fires and camp outs.

So, as the HDDs spin, so to does the activity in and around SSD based technologies.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

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