Storage is moving to flash, and flash is getting faster, so people keep
asking me why I keep talking about latency as if there is a problem. Isn't
faster flash going to just make everything faster? Won't "the rising tide
lift all boats"?
Flash media as a storage media is indeed "faster" than the spinning
hard-disks we've all been using for decades. But when it is used to
simulate a hard disk, as is the case with SSD products, there are software
layers which prevent it from reaching its full potential. That explanation
always gets heads nodding, because it is obvious. But what about when the
flash media is not simply packaged into an "SSD" and connected over SATA or
SAS, but instead can be addressed via NVMe over PCIe? Doesn't that make the
problem of hard disk drive emulation go away?
Not entirely. For one thing, in some cases the SSD abstraction is
maintai... (more)
Incumbent storage vendors such as EMC, Netapp, and Nutanix have built their
rich code base on the block layer. This means that the only viable option to
use Persistent Memory as a storage tier is to wrap it up with an abstraction
layer that will present it as a block device.
As a veteran researcher, I'm always interested in brand-new approaches for
doing things. One great example is the new NVM programming model (NPM)
proposed by SNIA. The new NPM approach took a big step forward this week, as
version 1.0 of the associated NVM library (NVML) was released.
For the few people who u... (more)
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In the hilarious 1985 film “Brewster’s Millions,” Richard Pryor had to
work hard for a full month in order to waste 30 million dollars. And he
almost failed.
Today, with a modern data center infrastructure for production and test
environments, wasting millions is barely a challenge. Unlike Richard Pryor,
you’re not actively trying to waste money. It just happens.
Apache Cassandra, like other NoSQL or In-Memory compute middleware, was
designed with the assumption that the active working set should fit inside
memory in order to achieve l... (more)
Dr. Amit Golander is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and R&D Manager for Plexistor. His responsibilities are to develop the product and work with CEO, Sharon Azulai, on the vision for the technology and products.
Charles Araujo
Emily Jackson
Brendan Harding
