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Posts Tagged ‘SSD’

I do not often write to specific implementations of a vendor. This time however I focus on EMC’s FAST-cache technology, and we will be playing a little “follow the I/O” to see what it actually does, where it helps and where it might not.

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Ask any user of a SAN if cache matter. Cache DOES matter. Cache is King! But apart from being “just” something that can handle your bursty workloads, there is another advantage some vendors offer when you have plenty of cache. It is all in the implementation, but the smarter vendors out there will save you significant overhead when you use RAID5 or RAID6, especially in a write-intensive environment.

Recall on RAID

Flashback to a post way back: Throughput part 2: RAID types and segment sizes. Here you can read all about RAID types and their pros and cons. For now we focus on RAID5 and RAID6: These RAID types are the most space efficient ones, but they have a rather big impact on small random writes. Read the rest of this entry »

Once shared storage came about, people have been designing these storages so that you would not have to care again for failing disks; shared storage is built to cope with this. Shared storage is also able to deliver more performance; by leveraging multiple hard disks storage arrays managed to deliver a lot of storage performance. Right until the SSDs came around, the main and only way of storing data was using hard disks. These hard disks have their own set of “issues”, and it is really funny to see how different vendors choose different roads to solve the same problem.

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