Category: Solid State Storage

Three Truths About Hard Drives and SSDs

Jason Feist 3 Comments

An examination of the claim that flash will replace hard drives in the data center

“Hard drives will soon be a thing of the past.”

“The data center of the future is all-flash.”

Such predictions foretelling hard drives’ demise, perennially uttered by a few vocal proponents of flash-only technology, have not aged well.

Without question, flash storage is well-suited to support applications that require high-performance and speed. And flash revenue is growing, as is all-flash-array (AFA) revenue. But not at the expense of hard drives.

We are living in an era where the ubiquity of the cloud and the emergence of AI use cases have driven up the value of massive data sets. Hard drives, which today store by far the majority of the world’s exabytes (EB), are more indispensable to data center operators than ever. Industry analysts expect hard drives to be the primary beneficiary of continued EB growth, especially in enterprise and large cloud data centers—where the vast majority of the world’s data sets reside. Read More

30 Speakers Highlight AI, Memory, Sustainability, and More at the May 21-22 Summit!

SNIA CMSI
SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Summit is where solutions, architectures, and community come together. Our 2024 Summit – taking place virtually on May 21-22, 2024 – is the best example to date, featuring a stellar lineup of 30 speakers in sessions on artificial intelligence, the future of memory, sustainability, critical storage security issues, the latest on CXL®, UCIe™, and Ultra Ethernet, and more. “We’re excited to welcome executives, architects, developers, implementers, and users to our 12th annual Summit,” said David McIntyre, Compute, Memory, and Storage Summit Chair and member of the SNIA Board of Directors. “Our event features technology leaders from companies like Dell, IBM, Intel, Meta, Samsung – and many more – to bring us the latest developments in AI, compute, memory, storage, and security in our free online event.  We hope you will attend live to ask questions of our experts as they present and watch those you miss on-demand.“ Read More

Power Efficiency Measurement – Our Experts Make It Clear – Part 4

Eden Kim, Keith Orsak and Chuck Paradon
Measuring power efficiency in datacenter storage is a complex endeavor. A number of factors play a role in assessing individual storage devices or system-level logical storage for power efficiency. Luckily, our SNIA experts make the measuring easier! In this SNIA Experts on Data blog series, our experts in the SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Work Group and the SNIA Green Storage Initiative explore factors to consider in power efficiency measurement, including the nature of application workloads, IO streams, and access patterns; the choice of storage products (SSDs, HDDs, cloud storage, and more); the impact of hardware and software components (host bus adapters, drivers, OS layers); and access to read and write caches, CPU and GPU usage, and DRAM utilization. Join us on our final installment on the  journey to better power efficiency – Part 4: Impact of Storage Architectures on Power Efficiency Measurement. And if you missed our earlier segments, click on the titles to read them:  Part 1: Key Issues in Power Efficiency Measurement,  Part 2: Impact of Workloads on Power Efficiency Measurement, and Part 3: Traditional Differences in Power Consumption: Hard Disk Drives vs Solid State Drives.  Bookmark this blog series and explore the topic further in the SNIA Green Storage Knowledge Center. Impact of Storage Architectures on Power Efficiency Measurement Ultimately, the interplay between hardware and software storage architectures can have a substantial impact on power consumption. Optimizing these architectures based on workload characteristics and performance requirements can lead to better power efficiency and overall system performance. Read More

2024 Year of the Summit Kicks Off – Meet us at MemCon

SNIA CMSI
2023 was a great year for SNIA CMSI to meet with IT professionals and end users in “Summits” to discuss technologies, innovations, challenges, and solutions.  Our outreach at six industry events reached over 16,000 and we thank all who engaged with our CMSI members. We are excited to continue a second “Year of the Summit” with a variety of opportunities to network and converse with you.  Our first networking event will take place March 26-27, 2024 at MemCon in Mountain View, CA. MemCon 2024 focuses on systems design for the data centric era, working with data-intensive workloads, integrating emerging technologies, and overcoming data movement and management challenges.  It’s the perfect event to discuss the integration of SNIA’s focus on developing global standards and delivering education on all technologies related to data.  SNIA and MemCon have prepared a video highlighting several of the key topics to be discussed. Read More

Power Efficiency Measurement – Our Experts Make It Clear – Part 3

Eden Kim, Keith Orsak and Chuck Paradon
Measuring power efficiency in datacenter storage is a complex endeavor. A number of factors play a role in assessing individual storage devices or system-level logical storage for power efficiency. Luckily, our SNIA experts make the measuring easier! In this SNIA Experts on Data blog series, our experts in the SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Work Group and the SNIA Green Storage Initiative explore factors to consider in power efficiency measurement, including the nature of application workloads, IO streams, and access patterns; the choice of storage products (SSDs, HDDs, cloud storage, and more); the impact of hardware and software components (host bus adapters, drivers, OS layers); and access to read and write caches, CPU and GPU usage, and DRAM utilization. Join us on our journey to better power efficiency as we continue with Part 3: Traditional Differences in Power Consumption: Hard Disk Drives vs Solid State Drives. And if you missed our earlier segments, click on the titles to read them:  Part 1: Key Issues in Power Efficiency Measurement, and Part 2: Impact of Workloads on Power Efficiency Measurement..  Bookmark this blog  and check back in April for the final installment of our four-part series. And explore the topic further in the SNIA Green Storage Knowledge Center. Read More

So Just What Is An SSD?

Jonmichael Hands
It seems like an easy enough question, “What is an SSD?” but surprisingly, most of the search results for this get somewhat confused quickly on media, controllers, form factors, storage interfaces, performance, reliability, and different market segments.  The SNIA SSD SIG has spent time demystifying various SSD topics like endurance, form factors, and the different classifications of SSDs – from consumer to enterprise and hyperscale SSDs. “Solid state drive is a general term that covers many market segments, and the SNIA SSD SIG has developed a new overview of “What is an SSD? ,” said Jonmichael Hands, SNIA SSD Special Interest Group (SIG)Co-Chair. “We are committed to helping make storage technology topics, like endurance and form factors, much easier to understand coming straight from the industry experts defining the specifications.”   The “What is an SSD?” page offers a concise description of what SSDs do, how they perform, how they connect, and also provides a jumping off point for more in-depth clarification of the many aspects of SSDs. It joins an ever-growing category of 20 one-page “What Is?” answers that provide a clear and concise, vendor-neutral definition of often- asked technology terms, a description of what they are, and how each of these technologies work.  Check out all the “What Is?” entries at https://www.snia.org/education/what-is And don’t miss other interest topics from the SNIA SSD SIG, including  Total Cost of Ownership Model for Storage and SSD videos and presentations in the SNIA Educational Library. Your comments and feedback on this page are welcomed.  Send them to askcmsi@snia.org. The post So just what is an SSD? first appeared on SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Blog.

It’s A Wrap – But Networking and Education Continue From Our C+M+S Summit!

SNIA CMSI
Our 2023 SNIA Compute+Memory+Storage Summit was a success! The event featured 50 speakers in 40 sessions over two days. Over 25 SNIA member companies and alliance partners participated in creating content on computational storage, CXL™ memory, storage, security, and UCIe™. All presentations and videos are free to view at www.snia.org/cms-summit. “For 2023, the Summit scope expanded to examine how the latest advances within and across compute, memory and storage technologies should be optimized and configured to meet the requirements of end customer applications and the developers that create them,” said David McIntyre, Co-Chair of the Summit.  “We invited our SNIA Alliance Partners Compute Express Link™ and Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express™ to contribute to a holistic view of application requirements and the infrastructure resources that are required to support them,” McIntyre continued.  “Their panel on the CXL device ecosystem and usage models and presentation on UCIe innovations at the package level along with three other sessions on CXL added great value to the event.” Read More

50 Speakers Featured at the 2023 SNIA Compute+Memory+Storage Summit

SNIA CMSI
SNIA’s Compute+Memory+Storage Summit is where architectures, solutions, and community come together. Our 2023 Summit – taking place virtually on April 11-12, 2023 – is the best example to date, featuring a stellar lineup of 50 speakers in 40 sessions covering topics including computational storage real-world applications, the future of memory, critical storage security issues, and the latest on SSD form factors, CXL™, and UCIe™. “We’re excited to welcome executives, architects, developers, implementers, and users to our 11th annual Summit,” said David McIntyre, C+M+S Summit Co-Chair, and member of the SNIA Board of Directors.  “We’ve gathered the technology leaders to bring us the latest developments in compute, memory, storage, and security in our free online event.  We hope you will watch live to ask questions of our experts as they present, and check out those sessions you miss on-demand.” Read More

“Year of the Summit” Kicks Off with Live and Virtual Events

SNIA CMSI
For 11 years, SNIA Compute, Memory and Storage Initiative (CMSI) has presented a Summit featuring industry leaders speaking on the key topics of the day.  In the early years, it was persistent memory-focused, educating audiences on the benefits and uses of persistent memory.  In 2020 it expanded to a Persistent Memory+Computational Storage Summit, examining that new technology, its architecture, and use cases. Now in 2023, the Summit is expanding again to focus on compute, memory, and storage. Read More

Is EDSFF Taking Center Stage? We Answer Your Questions!

SNIA CMSI
Enterprise and Data Center Form Factor (EDSFF) technologies have come a long way since our 2020 SNIA CMSI webinar on the topic. While that webinar still provides an outstanding framework for understanding – and SNIA’s popular SSD Form Factors page gives the latest on the E1 and E3 specifications – SNIA Solid State Drive Special Interest Group co-chairs Cameron Brett and Jonmichael Hands joined to provide the latest updates at our live webcast: EDSFF Taking Center Stage in the Data Center.  We had some great questions from our live audience, so our experts have taken the time to answer them in this this blog. Q: What does the EDSFF roadmap look like? When will we see PCIe® Gen5 NVMe™, 1.2, 2.0 CXL ™ cx devices? Read More