Your Questions Answered on Non-Volatile DIMMs

  by Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-Chair, SMART Modular SNIA’s Non-Volatile DIMM (NVDIMM) Special Interest Group (SIG) had a tremendous response to their most recent webcast:  NVDIMM:  Applications are Here!  You can view the webcast on demand. Viewers had many questions during the webcast.  In this blog, the NVDIMM SIG answers those questions and shares the SIG’s knowledge of NVDIMM technology. Have a question?  Send it to nvdimmsigchair@snia.org. 1. What about 3DXpoint, how will this technology impact the market? Read More

How Many IOPS? Users Share Their 2017 Storage Performance Needs

New on the Solid State Storage website is a whitepaper from analysts Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates and Jim Handy of Objective Analysis which details what IT manager requirements are for storage performance. The paper examines how requirements have changed over a four-year period for a range of applications, including databases, online transaction processing, cloud and storage services, and scientific and engineering computing.  Read More

Add to your NVDIMM Knowledge – Attend the January 28 Summit

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

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.