Nomenclature: SSD is a physical device that plugs into an electrical disk slot. Flash is a PCIe card. Both use the same underlying back end storage technology (flash chips of SLC, MLC, and related). I’ve had a while to do some testing with a large number of SSD units in a single device. I can give you a definite sense of what I’ve been observing. First: SSDs are, of course, fast for certain operations.

This is old news at this time, but Microsoft has moved its HPC group into their Cloud groups. I’ve talked in the past about critical business decisions that need to be addressed over time, as a business matures, and a product line is given time to sink or swim. At the end of the day, a business has to make hard decisions about what products to introduce, which to end-of-life, which to grow independently, which to fold into other initiatives.

“Scientists Trace Heat Wave To Massive Star At Center Of Solar System” See here

I say I am not surprised for their reasoning … not that I had an inkling that they would do this before hand. Basically they pulled the plug because the costs were growing far faster than they planned, and they couldn’t afford to deliver the machine at the requested price. Which makes perfect sense to a business that has to consider profit and loss, but maybe not so much sense to research groups that want things.

… where you look at a technology and think to yourself … I need this. Just had that looking over MongoDB. I’ve spent the better part of a couple of weeks working on implementing a very poor mans version of this atop SQLite for one of our tools. And along comes MongoDB, and they solve the exact problem I am looking for. So, we are going to start implementing it on our units.

SSD units are fast, well, depending upon design, controller and other things. Sandforce units use a compression and overprovision technology to reduce write amplification. SSD units do writes, optimally, in erase block sizes. This suggests that your RAID chunk size should be a multiple of the erase block size. This is a good thing. The issue is that if you have a hardware RAID controller, you might think that the optimal way to handle this is to build a RAID5 or RAID6 atop this SSD pool.

… both my daughter and I were promoted to yon-kyu (green belt) in Isshinryu. Took me longer than I liked, but the specific kata we were learning was complex. Ok, it looks simple, but … it really … really … isn’t. There is great subtlety in it. Mastering this takes a while. The moves took me about a month. The rest took me much longer. Here is one of the style’s leadership (10th Dan) showing how to do this

I’ve had some concerns over the business model for this. The price per GB is way … way out there for SLC. The use case for SLC vs MLC (especially with eMLC coming on line) is very similar. The cost of MLC is making these units affordable, and even considerable for people. There seem to be a consumer/hobbyist version and a professional class. The former has a bad performance rap from the first set of products.

I’ve been mostly heads down for the last month, very little time to work on posts. This is a good thing, as this has been mostly (new) business bits. We’ve got a range of new products we’ve been working on to address specific market segments, and have a number of nice new wins in a market segment we’ve been working on for a while. Working on more of course, and our core markets.

Its a Friday, I’ve had a tough week (caught pneumonia on the way home from NY, been recovering all this time). Hopefully this isn’t the meds talking below … Every now and then, there is inadvertent and unintentional humor in news. Well, the juxtapositions are humorous, even if the events are terrible. Think …. causality … below … Obviously, violence isn’t a laughing matter. But that juxtaposition … with Jersey Shore immediately above it … doesn’t quite suggest it was … or wasn’t!