November 2011 – SNIA on Storage

Webcast on SSD Encryption

November 28, 2011November 28, 2011 Team_SSSI

Join Tom Coughlin, Marketing Chair, SNIA SSSI and President, Coughlin Associates, for an informative SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative webcast on Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 11:00 am PT/2:00 pm ET.

Solid Security: The Rise of Self-Encrypted Solid State Drives

http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/37987

Protecting user data is important in storage devices. If valuable information is on a storage device, it makes sense to make sure that that data isn’t accessible by unauthorized individuals or organizations. Protecting user data from being stolen or accessed leads to the use of encryption in storage devices.

With one of the hottest drive categories – solid state drives (SSDs) – rapidly penetrating data centers, this hour-long webcast provides a valuable introduction to self-encrypting drives (SEDs) and explains why organizations need SEDs Solid State Drives in their environment. Listen, ask questions, and find out from your peers where they are in incorporating SEDs and SSDs in their environment.

Quick PTS Implementation

November 11, 2011November 11, 2011 Jim Handy

Need 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.

New Article on SSD Security

November 2, 2011November 2, 2011 Team_SSSI

An article by SSSI member Tom Coughlin on Self Encrypting Drives was just published in the October edition of Storage Networking Solutions. Tom defines SED, discusses the advantages of a SSD SED, and forecasts the rate of adoption of this important technology. It starts on page 17.