Storage Archives - Page 2 of 2

SR-71mach5 SpeedServer

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Keith Josephson — 1 Comment ↓

ION recently launched it’s flagship SR-71mach5 SpeedServer™ which continues to deliver on the SR-71 legacy of all-SSD storage for “disk-impossible performance”. This new server incorporates new technology throughout yielding more processor cores, more and faster memory and much more random I/O performance. Standard processors in the “mach5” are two 12-core 2.6GHz Intel® Xeon® E5-2690 V3, but the full Xeon E5-2600V3 processor lineup is available. Continue reading SR-71mach5 SpeedServer→

Open-E DSS V7 iSCSI Targets on SR-71mach4 SpeedServer™

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Keith Josephson — No Comments ↓

Open-E posted it’s certification of the ION SR-71mach4 SpeedServer on 23 June 2014. The Open-E Certification process focuses on functionality and stability, efficiency and usability. Additional benchmark by ION testing demonstrated iSCSI target performance with Open-E DSS V7 doing random I/O at almost 8GBps or up to 375,000 IOPS or latency as low as 0.42ms. All-SSD iSCSI targets enable a wide range of high-performance Continue reading Open-E DSS V7 iSCSI Targets on SR-71mach4 SpeedServer™→

Open-E DSS V7 iSCSI Targets on SR-71mach4 SpeedServer™

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Keith Josephson — No Comments ↓

Server Economics

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Keith Josephson — 1 Comment ↓

Not every server needs 20 cores of Intel Xeon processor or 128GB RAM or 36TB RAID storage. There are certainly applications that deserve a dedicated server with two or four cores, a few gigabytes of RAM and a small boot drive. But are there decisions where a little more planning and expense before deployment extends the life of a server – or adds a Continue reading Server Economics→

Storage Sizing for Capacity and Performance

Posted on September 3, 2013 by Keith Josephson — 1 Comment ↓

Or, How Many Eggs in One Basket? Huge storage systems are available today supporting large numbers of disks, allowing the creation of massive storage resources. Storage Servers and storage enclosures suporting up to (60) 3.5″ disk drives are now common. Filling those bays with 6TB disks yields a system with 360TB raw capacity – one third of a petabyte! That is now an easy Continue reading Storage Sizing for Capacity and Performance→

Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 5, Almost?

Posted on August 24, 2013 by Keith Josephson — No Comments ↓

The title of this series of posts is “Spinning Rust is Dead”. Well, actually it is “Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead”. Why, given all of the facts, do I say “almost“? Disks are really good at one thing: storing a LOT of data. So for backup, archival, or storing many terabytes of data that gets accessed only occasionally, disks are good. Data centers should Continue reading Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 5, Almost?→

Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 4, SSD Power and Reliability

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Keith Josephson — No Comments ↓

“But wait,” you say, “price and performance aren’t everything!” Really? You are correct. Reliability counts when your data is sitting on the drive. To start with, think about microscopic magnetic heads flying back and forth over platters spinning at 7,200 rpm to 15,000 rpm. Need I say more? We can compare manufacturer’s MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) numbers, but nobody really knows how they Continue reading Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 4, SSD Power and Reliability→

Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 3, SSD Price vs. Performance

Posted on August 22, 2013 by Keith Josephson — No Comments ↓

Finally, we get to the question, “What replaces hard disk drives?” As many people already know, the answer is solid state disks or SSDs. SSDs are made today to fit the shape, size and interfaces used by hard disk drives (HDDs), but they consist mostly of Flash memory instead of spinning rust, plus a controller and some RAM for buffering, just like a rotating Continue reading Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 3, SSD Price vs. Performance→

Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 2, Disk Drive Physics

Posted on August 21, 2013 by Keith Josephson — No Comments ↓

That brings us back to spinning rust. To understand the limitations of rotating hard disk drives, it is important to understand the technology. With a basic grasp of how a disk drive works, the mechanical limitations quickly become obvious. If you are accessing data sequentially in big long chunks, where the disk can read an entire track, move over just one track and read Continue reading Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 2, Disk Drive Physics→

Spinning Rust is (Almost) Dead, Part 1, The Pace of Technology

Posted on August 20, 2013 by Keith Josephson — 2 Comments ↓

“Spinning rust?” you may say? Yes, rust, or another iron oxide, is the ferromagnetic coating on the platters spinning inside every hard disk drive. To read and write your data an actuator arm, driven by a separate motor moves a tiny recording head over each platter surface, flying on a microscopic layer of air to change the magnetic polarization one bit at a time. Continue reading Spinning Rust is (Almost) Dead, Part 1, The Pace of Technology→