SSDs and data movers

The vid today covers a couple topics. First, the Register scooped our plan for integrating SSDs. Stephen Foskett threw the bone my way, asking about a blog last week where I said something about the SSD business being lackluster while the worldwide economy was running like it was doing a parity rebuild.

Second, I wanted to send a shout out to my homey SAN Technologist on this data movement thingy from Compellent that's drawing love from the Sto-B-Sphere. EqualLogic has had automated data moving and tiering for years, but I haven't seen any EQ-peeps defending the turf. ST-man, if you are the anointed blogmeister from D/E, it's up to you now, even though you are probably circling the globe looking for outlets and wireless signals.

FWIW, 3PAR has internal data mover functionality like this too. It's called Dynamic Optimization (DO) and it was designed to redistribute data across disk drives in an InServ array - rebalancing the I/O load after changing the configuration. The secret about DO is that it uses our micro-sparing technology - particularly the software that redistributes data from a failing/failed drive to new micro-RAID groups in the system.

Comments

[Stephen Foskett]

While I'm glad to hear that the "weird greco wrestling match" was cancelled, I'd like to hear more about this "radar not roadmap" for SSDs.

How will you use them? As disks, I assume.

Will dynamic optimization be automated?

How will they be sold? Can we buy just one or do we have to buy lots?

The cat's out of the bag now!

[marc farley]

Sorry Stephen, it's a work in progress and I'm going to have to wait with you to see what the final implementation looks like.

I expect that our SSD implementation will be consistent with our "thin", fine-grained resource utilization philosophy. I also wouldn't be surprised if it also leveraged our Dynamic Optimization technology.

[Steven Schwartz - The SAN Technologist]

Well the problem is...D|E hasn't formally announced SSD drives. M. Dell did mention to keep an eye out for it, but there hasn't been any announcement about it.

I promise you, however, that if/when there is an SSD announcement, I will carry the flag and bring the tiering discussion to new light!

I'm super excited for 3Par though!

[marc farley]

Steve,

I should have been clearer, I was thinking about the data mover that does tiering in a D|E system - as well as load balancing when new arrays are added to a group.

[Steven Schwartz - The SAN Technologist]

Marc,

I know. I'm waiting for the ultimate story though LOL. Plus I hate bragging about Equallogic, it just doesn't seem fair sometimes, too many features, great performance, and easy to manage to boot! See there I go again!