Stephen Foskett , who writes the Storage Pack Rat blog, has a very sharp mind who understands storage. He wrote a comment a couple days ago asking for more details about our SSD development efforts.
Sorry, I couldn't state them, even if I knew what they were. Besides I would probably just forget the best details anyway. However, there are a few simple design principles at 3PAR that should help people understand our future directions for most new technology developments
1) We design systems for fine-grained resource utilization. While our main claim to fame is being the grandfather of thin provisioning (thanks Barry W), our underlying volume manager works with small "slices of disk capacity".
2) Automation is another key design goal. The fewer operations an admin has to do to achieve great performance and scalability, the better.
3) High performance is another design goal. For disk drives, this means wide striping to use as many spindles as possible on as many controllers as possible. We'd like to be able to use SSDs in a way that boosts overall system performance - not just for certain applications and we certainly don't want them to have a subtractive effect by creating system imbalances or getting in the way of non-SSD I/O processes.
4) Overall reliability and fault tolerance is another key element of our designs, from our clustered controller architecture to our aggressive drive fault/failure detection and replacement mechanisms.
We think SSDs are going to be very important in our storage systems in the future. In all likelihood there will be several iterations of SSD integration technology spanning multiple years.
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