Disk-flash storage mix biz chief on the SSD situation EMC has confirmed a 3-layer enterprise flash cake composed of server cache, server-area Thunder array and SAN-attached Xtremio technology, but not a new design hybrid flash and disk drive array. Start-up NexGen has such an array. We asked NexGen founder and CEO John Spiers questions about his company's views on solid state …
Does he even know you can get 8GB DDR3 LRDIMM for $70 while SLC is still over $12/GB in existing products.
The only thing that's cheap right now is MLC and it cannot stand being overwritten too many times --
Good thing he's a CEO and not a CTO --
And for his company .. everyone has pcie flash, only a few make it happen (pcie networking and all).
The future of "IOPS" is that we just stop doing them. In-memory database technology is the "future-that's-already-here", and this idea that we need "faster disk IOPS" is ancient history.
Yes, Jim Gray did say "Tape is dead, disk is tape, flash is disk...", but the end of his sentence was "...and DRAM locality is King". Flash-disk hype-sters hear this and desparately need to change the subject.
The days of using block-IO devices (whether spinning rust or Flash) to make random I/O go faster are done.
This is because, ever since Intel's Nehalem EX and now with Sandy-Bridge EP, applications can move I/O intensive data structures into massively large and blindingly fast DRAM. Flash becomes useless in this context, because all we need now is 'disk as the new tape'; large-block sequential writes to checkpoint DRAM to non-volatile storage. And we all know Flash sucks at writes.
Two years from now, VCs who invested in the Flash hypester startups will be wondering how they missed the warning signs. Those of us who actually understood the trends will be chuckling.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
