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Access "Status report: Solid-state storage"

Phil Goodwin, Contributor Published: 13 Oct 2012
Finding a home for Flash

This article is part of the March 2012 issue of Finding a home for Flash

Solid-state storage has carved out a niche in the storage ecosystem, establishing itself as a viable alternative for high-performance applications. Solid-state disk is, of course, nothing of the sort. Whereas a disk is a round, flat object, solid-state storage is really just memory chips. That may seem like a silly semantic distinction, but it’s actually important to bear that in mind when architecting a data access solution. Solid-state drives (SSDs), also referred to as flash memory and flash cache, have more in common with memory -- specifically cache memory -- than with spinning hard disk drives (HDDs). Although SSDs are commonly deployed “behind the storage-area network (SAN)” and provisioned as part of the total storage pool, they behave like large repositories of cache. That’s important to consider when designing solid-state storage into a storage solution. SSD chip technologies Three solid-state storage technologies dominate the market today: single-level cell (SLC), multi-level cell (MLC) and enterprise multi-level cell (eMLC). This may seem like an... Access >>>

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Features
    • Enterprise flash: Three implementation options for virtualisation by Manek Dubash

      Enterprise flash now comes in a variety of form factors aimed at speeding I/O beyond what’s possible with spinning disk in server and desktop virtualisation scenarios.

    • Determining the real cost of storage by Jeff Boles, Contributor

      Vendors tout dollars per gigabyte per I/O, but figuring out what a data storage system will really cost your company is a much more complicated process.

    • “Big data” conspiracy theories abound by Rich Castagna, Editorial Director

      Could the latest and greatest buzzword in the storage biz be killing off some of the most useful storage technologies around?

    • Storage networking alternatives by Dennis Martin

      All the old standards -- FC, iSCSI and NAS -- are still going strong, but FCoE and virtualized I/O are waiting in the wings to help remake our storage networks.

    • Status report: Solid-state storage by Phil Goodwin, Contributor

      Solid-state storage has carved out a niche in the storage ecosystem, establishing itself as a viable alternative for high-performance applications.

    • Occupy Storage! by Jon William Toigo

      Data storage technologies keep getting better, but storage vendors may just be up to their old tricks.

    • Cloud backup is ready for the enterprise by Jacob Gsoedl, Contributor

      Cloud backup services have seen increased adoption by SMBs, but with a choice of methods and tighter controls, cloud backup is now also a viable enterprise alternative.

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