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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

SNW Spring 2008

The Spring 2008 edition of SNW was this past week in Orlando FL and I spent a couple of days there for some briefings as well as give a presentation.

From an attendance standpoint, certainly it did not feel or look like one of the largest SNW events that I have been to over that past several years and yes there were in fact some real IT personal there, however nothing like on the scale of what you would see at a Storage Decisions, VMworld or any of the other customer/IT personal focused show.

However keeping in mind that SNW is first a vendor and SNIA event that just happens to have some IT customers attending. This edition of SNW seemed more sparse given the size of the venue and how spread out things were along with the high degree of over-subscription or number of concurrent sessions (which had from 7 to up to 8 sessions at the same time) that are trying to be squeezed into a small timeframe with a relatively small audience compared to other events.

For me it was time well spent with the great meetings and ad-hoc discussions that I had in the short period while in Orlando even with the decline in attendance compared to past years. There is a shift going on and there are certainly many other large events to compete with SNW for attendees and participants many of which particularly for IT customers seem to be growing in popularity.

IMHO its time for the SNW show organizers to take a good look at the model of SNW Europe for some ideas on how to tweak and tune the US-based event especially if they want to continue to do a twice a year event.

Here’s a link to download a copy of my presentation Beyond Green-wash: Power, Cooling, Floor-space, Environmental (PCFE) and green Issues, Trends and Solutions from SNW.

On the StorageIO website you can find links to industry Trends and Perspective white papers as well as other content addressing PCFE and green related issues including MAID, Intelligent Power Management and MAID 2.0, SSD, Virtualization and Data Footprint Reduction among others.

Drop me a note or comment about what you are encountering or your thoughts or any interesting findings about IT data center PCFE and green issues and check out storageioblog.com if you have not recently done so.

Ok, nuff said, for now…

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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved