Why Solid State Disks?
Today's performance demands require faster processors and faster access to ever-increasing amounts of data. "Customers are spending large sums to buy multiple disk drives to spread the workload and get faster performance," says Graham Lovell, Sun's senior director of open storage, "but you can put in a few of these solid state disk drives and run much faster without changing the applications."
Radio Interview on Flash Disks
Graham Lovell talks about solid state disks and why users need them and how they are integrated into Sun's Open Storage architecture.
"This is going to completely revolutionize the storage market over the next six to nine months," says Lovell, "as solid state disks are about 100 times faster than typical disk drives, but look just like any other disk subsystem."
"SSDs can be a kind of super-cache where you store data when it needs to go fast," says Lovell, "but customers are also interested in it as primary storage for applications that require high performance all the time." And there is a bonus: "They consume about one fifth of the power of ordinary disk drives," says Lovell.
SSD's and Sun's Integrated Hardware
Chief systems architect Andy Bechtolsheim talks with executive vice president John Fowler and Sun Fellow Jeff Bonwick about how Sun's integrated systems approach to storage lets solid state disks become a transparent part of the architecture.
The Breadth of Open Storage
CEO Jonathan Schwartz talk about why Sun's unique open approach to storage provides all users, including mainframe datacenters, with flexible architectures that will deliver exactly the storage solution they need.
Open Storage Town Hall
You can view all of the Open Storage Town Hall hosted by Sun EVP John Fowler, group manager Matt Baier, Sun Fellow Jeff Bonwick, and chief architect Andy Bechtolsheim.
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Flash Storage Round Table
Executive vice president John Fowler and Graham Lowell, executive director of Sun's storage servers, met with industry analysts and reporters in Boston for a roundtable discussion on solid state disks and Sun's overall Open Storage architecture.
"It's my top effort this year," said Fowler of SSDs. "We are opening up the storage market to enable a truly open marketplace." He added that the use of SSD for enterprise storage is, "the most exciting thing going on in storage today."
Fowler and Michael Cornwell, Sun's lead on SSD technologies, said that the introduction of flash would have a broad impact on server and data center infrastructure, and predicted that solid state disks will have a larger and more rapid impact on servers and data center efficiency than virtualization, creating the largest change in storage price/performance this decade.
Sun's open source Solaris ZFS file system and Solaris OS are already optimized for SSD technologies, as is the MySQL database, all of which leverage Sun's robust Open Storage community to address performance bottlenecks for data-intensive applications. "This is a standard part of the discussion with customers now," said Fowler. "We're far down the track of rethinking servers and storage, and speeding up the I/O subsystem is a huge efficiency boost."
That means Sun customers can take advantage of flash without rewriting applications, and they won't have to wait very long -- Sun's SSDs will hit the market in the second half of 2008.
ZFS and Open Storage
The ZFS file system is the core storage management component of Sun's Open Storage architecture. It has already been enhanced to recognize solid state drives. Sun Fellow Jeff Bonwick, who created ZFS and made it part of the Open Storage architecture, talks with John Fowler about its history.
Open Storage Community
This relatively new community is robust and growing every day as users discover that they can create exactly the storage environment they need. In this video, Matt Baier, group manager for Solaris marketing, talks with business director Lynn Rohrer about how the community has worked for its members.
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