Tag: SSD

It’s “All About M.2 SSDs” In a New SSSI Webcast June 10

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment

Interested in M.2, the new SSD card form factor?

The SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative is partnering with SATA-IO and NVM Express to give you the latest information on M.2, the new SSD card form factor.  Join us “live” on Tuesday, June 10, at 10:00 am Pacific time/1:00 pm Eastern time.

Hear from a panel of experts, including Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates, Jim Handy of Objective Analysis, Jon Tanguy of Micron, Jaren May of TE Connectivity, David Akerson of Intel, and Eden Kim of Calypso Systems.  You will leave this webinar with an understanding of the M.2 market, M.2 cards and connection schemes, NVM Express, and M.2 performance. You’ll also be able to ask questions of the experts.

You can access this webcast via the internet.  Click here, or visit http://snia.org/news_events/multimedia#webcasts

SSD Education Afternoon Monday January 27 at SNIA Symposium in San Jose

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment

Interested in the latest information on SSD technology?  Join the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative Monday January 27 for lunch and an afternoon of the latest on:

  • Flash/SSD technology
  • SCSI Express
  • SAS
  • NVM Express
  • SATA Express
  • SSD performance
  • SSD Markets

Lunch begins at noon, with presentations from 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm.  There is no charge to attend this session at the Sainte Claire Hotel in downtown San Jose CA. You can attend in person – register at www.snia.org/events/symp2014 or by WebEx (click here for details and the agenda).

Add to your NVDIMM Knowledge – Attend the January 28 Summit

Marty Foltyn Leave a comment

Over 150 individuals participated in the BrightTALK Enterprise Storage Summit NVDIMM webcast.  If you are eager for more information on NVDIMM, you will want to attend an upcoming SNIA Event – the Storage Industry Summit on Non–Volatile Memory.

This Summit will take place at the Sainte Claire Hotel in San Jose, CA on January 28th as part of the SNIA Annual Members’ Symposium, and will offer critical insights into NVM, including NVDIMMs, and the future of computing. This event is complimentary to attend and you can register here.

The Summit will take place from 8:15 AM to 5:30 PM and speakers currently include:

  • Nigel Alvares, Senior Director of Marketing, Inphi
  • Bob Beauchamp, Distinguished Engineer and Director Hardware Technology and Architecture, EMC
  • Matt Bryson, ABR Investment Strategy, LLC, SVP-Research
  • Jeff Chang, Vice President, Marketing & Business Development, AgigA Tech
  • Tom Coughlin, Founder, Coughlin Associates
  • Mark Geenen, President, TrendFocus
  • Jim Handy, Analyst, Objective Analysis
  • Jay Kidd, CTO, NetApp
  • Eden Kim, CEO, Calypso
  • Tau Leng, VP/GM, Supermicro
  • Jeff Moyer, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat
  • Wes Mukai, VP of Cloud Computing, System Engineering, SAP
  • Jim Pinkerton, Lead Partner Architect, Microsoft
  • Adrian Proctor, VP Marketing, Viking Technology
  • Andy Rudoff, Senior Software Engineer, Intel
  • Esther Spanjer, Director, Marketing Management, SanDisk
  • Garret Swart, Database Architect, Oracle
  • Nisha Talagala, Lead Architect, Fusion-IO
  • Doug Voigt, Distinguished Technologist in Storage, HP

Visit http://www.snia.org/nvmsummit for more information and we hope you will join us in San Jose!

Quick PTS Implementation

Jim Handy 2 Comments

PTS ProcedureNeed an abbreviated version of the SNIA SSD Performance Test Specification (PTS) in a hurry?  Jamon Bowen of Texas Memory Systems (TMS) whipped up a simple implementation of certain key parts of the PTS that can be run on a Linux system and interpreted in Excel.

It’s a free download on his Storage Tuning blog.

This is a boon for anyone that might want to run a internal preliminary test before pursuing a more formal route.

The bash script uses the Flexible I/O utility (FIO) to run through part of the SSSI PTS.  FIO does the heavy lifting, and the script manages it.  The script outputs comma separated (CSV) data and the download includes an Excel pivot table that helps format the results and select the measurement window.

Since this is a bare-bones implementation the SSD must be initialized manually before the test script is run.

The test runs the IOPS Test from the PTS.  This test covers a range of block sizes, read/write ratios and iterates until the steady state for the device is reached (with a maximum of 25 iterations).  Altogether the test takes over a day to run.

Once the test is complete, the downloadable pivot tables allow users to select the steady-state measurement window and report the data in a recommended format.

See Mr. Bowen’s blog at http://storagetuning.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/sssi-performance-test-specification/ for details on this valuable download.

PCs: Better Boost from Flash than DRAM!

Jim Handy Leave a comment

Objective Analysis has just published a new study with a somewhat surprising finding – that PCs get a bigger performance improvement by adding a dollar’s worth of NAND flash than by adding a dollar’s worth of DRAM.

This finding is the result of a series of nearly 300 benchmarks in which the company tested PCs with a variety of DRAM and NAND flash sizes running industry-standard benchmarks: PCMark, SYSmark, HDxPRT, and others.

In a nutshell the benchmarks showed that dollar-for-dollar NAND yields a greater performance improvement to a PC than does DRAM.  Once PC users and OEMs discover this phenomenon there should be a mass-migration of PC architectures to systems with paired storage (there’s a SNIA Webcast on this), perhaps in hybrid HDDs, and this will present difficulties to DRAM makers whose biggest market is the PC.

Oddly enough, the study shows that the HDD is likely to remain in PCs for a while to come, since well-designed DRAM-Flash-HDD configurations perform nearly as fast as DRAM-SSD systems with prices and capacities that are similar to those of a conventional DRAM-HDD system.  Future PC users are likely to opt for adding NAND flash, rather than DRAM, to their systems when they upgrade.

The report is available for purchase at http://Objective-Analysis.com/Reports.html#DRAM-NAND.

Comments and questions are more than welcome.