Category: solid state storage initiaiive

Memory Channel Storage Demystified at Next PCIe SSD Committee Meeting on March 10

Marty Foltyn

Join SSSI members for an “open” call on March 10, 2014 at 7:00 pm ET/4:00 pm PT.  SSSI member Jerome McFarland, Principal Product Marketer at Diablo Technologies, will talk about how memory channel storage technology works, how it’s deployed, and its advantages for applications.

Dial in at 1-866-439-4480 passcode 57236696.  A WebEx will be available at http://snia.webex.com, meeting number 792 152 928, password sssipcie.

The SSSI PCIe SSD Committee is a SSSI member committee that provides guidance to the marketplace on SSDs.  This can take the form of educational materials, best practices documents, and SNIA standards.

The “open” calls of the SSSI PCIe SSD Committee are designed to foster a broad understanding of technologies.  All SNIA and SSSI members, and those who are simply interested in technology advances, are welcome to attend.  Spread the word!

SSD Education Afternoon Monday January 27 at SNIA Symposium in San Jose

Marty Foltyn

Interested in the latest information on SSD technology?  Join the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative Monday January 27 for lunch and an afternoon of the latest on:

  • Flash/SSD technology
  • SCSI Express
  • SAS
  • NVM Express
  • SATA Express
  • SSD performance
  • SSD Markets

Lunch begins at noon, with presentations from 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm.  There is no charge to attend this session at the Sainte Claire Hotel in downtown San Jose CA. You can attend in person – register at www.snia.org/events/symp2014 or by WebEx (click here for details and the agenda).

Add to your NVDIMM Knowledge – Attend the January 28 Summit

Marty Foltyn

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

Jim Handy

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.