Flash memory and storage

E8 Storage scales higher with new HGST NVMe SSDs

E8 qualifies HGST SN200 6.4 TB PCIe drives for D24 NVMe all-flash system. The 2U enclosure houses 24 SSDs and scales to 140 TB of usable capacity. Continue Reading

The status of NAND flash memory now and in the near future

Flash memory chips have driven a revolution in storage, and faced a recent shortage because of huge demand. That's easing, and advances in NAND technology show a great future. Continue Reading

Awaiting NVMe flash surge, Pure Storage preps FlashArray//X

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe flash array will be generally available starting in July. It packs 1.1 PB of raw storage in 3U, and 15 PB in a standard 42U rack. Continue Reading

The present and likely future of the NVMe protocol

The NVMe and PCIe combination of protocol and interconnect was an inevitable development once solid-state drives were created, as was moving NVMe to fabrics. Continue Reading

Flash, hybrid RealStor added to Seagate storage arrays

Hybrid and all-flash Seagate RealStor arrays are sold to original equipment makers to build branded storage systems. The all-flash pricing is pegged at less than $50,000. Continue Reading

Dell EMC XtremIO adds speed to Red Sox IT lineup

A Dell EMC all-flash array knocks a home run for the Boston Red Sox organization, improving management and analytics of ever accumulating data, and speeding performance. Continue Reading

Entry-level Brocade FC switch enables NVMe flash fabric

New Brocade SAN switch turns Fibre Channel into NVMe fabric for all-flash storage. The G610 device is targeted at converged infrastructure, small SANs and rack-based flash servers. Continue Reading

Reduxio Systems snares venture funds, moves closer to IPO

Storage startup Reduxio Systems has bulked up its venture capital, a stepping stone to a potential IPO. On Monday, the hybrid flash vendor nabbed $22.5 million in Series C financing from private ... Continue Reading

Intel Optane SSD starts shipping to select customers

New Intel Optane SSDs based on long-awaited 3D XPoint technology ship to early customers, promising up to eight times the performance over NAND flash-based NVMe PCIe SSDs. Continue Reading

HPE 3PAR all-flash target allows persistent containers

HPE 3PAR flash container reference architecture bundles Mesosphere orchestration software with ProLiant blades, 10 GB SAN FlexFabric and StoreServ 8200 arrays. Continue Reading

Five factors to consider before buying all-flash storage arrays

Before purchasing all-flash array storage, you should determine whether your site plans to integrate AFA storage into its existing infrastructure or to start a new storage silo. Continue Reading

Enterprise HDDs launch from Seagate, Toshiba

Flash may dominate the storage headlines, but there are still signs of life with HDDs. Seagate showed off 12 TB helium-based enterprise HDDs at last week's Open Compute Project Summit in Santa ... Continue Reading

Startup Excelero shares server-based NVMe flash

Excelero's NVMesh Server SAN is generally available after two years of proofs of concept by hyperscale data centers. The product builds SAN capacity from server-based NVMe flash. Continue Reading

DSSD D5 flash appliance sales cease, Dell EMC says

The DSSD D5 for PowerEdge servers from Dell EMC was the first product from the merged vendors. DSSD instead will be used to accelerate existing and new all-flash systems. Continue Reading

Building a business case for all-flash array storage

To make a business case for purchasing AFA storage, you must first understand what your applications need in terms of IOPS, latency and throughput. Continue Reading

HPE’s Nimble Storage acquisition expands its struggling portfolio

Hewlett Packard Enterprise today made its second major storage acquisition of 2017, spending $1.2 billion on all-flash and hybrid array vendor Nimble Storage. The Nimble Storage acquisition comes ... Continue Reading

Riverbed SteelFusion edge devices embrace NFS

Riverbed adds NAS support to SteelFusion to broaden the reach of the remote office storage appliance, which already supports SAN and object storage. Continue Reading

The state of flash storage performance

All-flash arrays have virtually eliminated flash storage performance issues, for now. But applications and user expectations will eventually catch up. Innovations in flash technology -- such as nonvolatile memory express and storage-class memory (flash DIMM) -- promise to keep solid-state storage ahead of the curve, however. We discuss these technologies and more as we explore the current and future states of flash storage performance.

DevOps allows developers to rapidly create, develop, amend and deploy applications using Agile methodologies. DevOps resources, including storage, are consumed differently, though, taking more of a cloud-like approach.

Security and compliance concerns are big obstacles to public cloud storage adoption. Reliability, data movement and poor application performance, frequently from irregular spikes in network latency, are other important caveats. We provide tips on how to overcome these and other issues.

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The state of flash storage systems

Making flash storage performance even faster has little to do with the media itself and more to do with the storage infrastructure that surrounds it. Continue Reading

The state of flash storage systems

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AFA storage has total cost of ownership advantages over HDDs

All-flash array storage TCO advantages, including reduced power and cooling and increased performance, can help an organization justify its use to store their active workloads. Continue Reading

AFA storage advances may mean the end of the hybrid market

Flash price drops and speed boosts make the all-flash array the smart choice over hybrid storage arrays for most enterprise users, not just those with high-performance computing needs. Continue Reading

Tegile Systems IntelliFlash HD

Tegile Systems IntelliFlash HD intended to appeal to medium and large enterprises looking to consolidate multiple workloads on a single all-flash array. Continue Reading

Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays (AF-Series)

Nimble's first all-flash array family scales from 20 TB to petabyte and 8.2 PB of usable storage and 1.2 million IOPS per four-node cluster. Continue Reading

Hitachi Data Systems Virtual Storage Platform VSP F800

Modular rack-mounted Hitachi Data Systems VSP F800 runs the vendor's SVOS operating system software and is equipped with custom-designed flash storage modules. Continue Reading

Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash Arrays (CS-Series)

Nimble Storage jumped on the all-flash bandwagon in 2016, but didn't forget its disk fans by upgrading its CS-Series mixing flash and hard disk drives. Continue Reading

Kaminario K2 array boosts performance, capacity

New Kaminario all-flash array features higher performance and capacity, improves data reduction guarantee to 4:1 and offers faster storage networking options. Continue Reading

NetApp AFF A700s flash array slims down A700 footprint

NetApp launches small-footprint A700s version of its high-end All Flash FAS A700 with built-in SSDs, updates all-flash capacity guarantee for A-Series flash storage line. Continue Reading

Dense Pure Storage FlashBlade storage zeroes in on web-scale analytics

FlashBlade system-on-a-chip from Pure Storage converges compute, flash storage and software-defined networking. The arrays use custom flash modules instead of solid-state drives. Continue Reading

Enterprise flash storage to speed up in 2017

CTOs at leading storage vendors predict speed and latency breakthroughs with new NVMe-based enterprise flash and upcoming memory technologies in 2017 and beyond. Continue Reading

IBM DS8880 arrays adopt PCIe 3 in all-flash versions

The expansion of the IBM DS8880 hardware line introduces all-flash models designed around the vendor's High-Performance Flash Enclosure Gen2 to support PCIe 3.0, but not yet NVMe. Continue Reading

All-flash array market advances outpace demand, create opportunities

Scott Sinclair says high-density, high-capacity all-flash storage arrays are a disruptive technology ahead of customer demand for now, but businesses will realize they need it. Continue Reading

All-flash array market advances outpace demand, create opportunities

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All-flash storage system 2016 Products of the Year finalists

Our seven all-flash storage system 2016 finalists include products from flash-only vendors, as well as vendors that offer all-flash versions of existing hybrid arrays. Continue Reading

How eMMC 5.0 can improve your organization's small storage needs

The latest eMMC specification puts the tiny flash storage devices on a level playing field with many SSDs when it comes to speed -- but eMMC is still the smallest flash drive. Continue Reading

Differences between SSD caching and tiering technologies

Brien Posey looks at popular ways of using SSD as cache, including write-around, write-through and write-back, as well as how the technology compares with SSD tiering. Continue Reading

HPE launches new XP7 based on Hitachi technology

Hewlett Packard Enterprise launched its high-end enterprise storage array upgade today at the same time as Hitachi Data Systems. The HPE XP7 and HDS Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) use the same ... Continue Reading

Dell EMC to 'stay the course' with flash storage portfolio

Dell EMC plans to “stay the course” with its flash storage portfolio despite overlapping products at the midrange and low end, an executive at the newly combined company confirmed. Daniel Cobb, a ... Continue Reading

Flash storage caching boosts application performance, requires balance

Chris Evans discusses the benefits to caching flash storage, the trade-offs involved and flash cache models, as well as a handy cheat sheet. Continue Reading

Nimble says customers quick to embrace all-flash

Nimble Storage, which was relatively late selling all-flash arrays, is trying to make up for lost time since launching its Predictive Flash platform in February. The vendor received a jolt from ... Continue Reading

IBM flash storage expands with midrange all-flash products

IBM's all-flash portfolio grows, with a new midrange and entry-level option, and the vendor adds a migration program aimed at EMC-Dell customers. Continue Reading

Almost time for SSD flash storage to be used with object storage

As the price of flash SSD storage continues to fall, it becomes more attractive for object storage, which otherwise counts on big, slow and cheap HDDs. Continue Reading

NAND flash technology is just the beginning

NAND flash adoption has been as fast as the speed it offers, but faster storage techs such as 3D XPoint and phase-change memory are on their way. Continue Reading

How to measure flash storage's true value

Flash storage, or using the broader term, solid-state storage, suffers from an inadequate measure of value. Flash storage provides a step-function improvement in the ability to store and retrieve ... Continue Reading

How can you increase SSD lifespan and keep performance?

Solid-state drives offer high performance, but their cost remains prohibitive. Here are some ways to prolong your SSD lifecycle while maintaining performance. Continue Reading

Propane provider gives SAN the gas with Violin flash array

Ferrellgas' switch from a hybrid array to a Violin flash storage array brought a boost in performance as well as surprising reductions in cost and management. Continue Reading

HPE turns 3PAR array from all-flash to hybrid

For years we’ve seen storage vendors take systems designed for hard disk drives (HDDs) and add solid-state drives (SSDs) to them. Now Hewlett Packard Enterprise is taking hardware that ran all SSDs ... Continue Reading

Pure FlashBlade tackles scale-out unstructured data

Pure Storage launches a blade-based, scale-out unstructured data all-flash system that handles NAS and object storage. The vendor also brings out an entry-level version of its SAN flash array. Continue Reading

Pure Storage accelerates flash revenue

Pure Storage is looking at more competition and more opportunity than ever, and handling both well. The all-flash vendor bucked industry trends by growing revenue significantly last quarter despite ... Continue Reading

Tintri adds entry-level all-flash, teases analytics

Virtual machine-storage specialist Tintri rounded out its all-flash product line today with an entry level version priced at $125,000 for 5.34 TB of raw capacity. The VMstore T5040 is the third ... Continue Reading

Will most 3D NAND flash products continue to feature TLC?

Vendors are using TLC flash in their 3D NAND flash products, which allows for greater capacity at a lower cost, according to Brien Posey. Continue Reading

Server-side caching has new data center role

Some server-side caching products have evolved into complete software-defined storage platforms that can aggregate flash across multiple servers. Continue Reading

Utility watchdog deploys all-flash SolidFire storage array

California Public Utilities Commission was stuck at about 80% server virtualization before adding all-flash SolidFire storage to remove latency problems. Continue Reading

EMC XtremIO storage array

The XtremIO storage array from EMC is an all-flash system that offers scalability and high performance. Continue Reading

Examine your computing environment before you buy flash storage

The decision to buy flash storage can overcome many performance issues, but other areas of your computing environment could be contributing factors. Continue Reading

Will memristor technology replace NAND flash?

Brien Posey says that with HP working on a memristor-based computer it plans to launch by 2020, the technology could eventually succeed NAND flash. Continue Reading

New Dell storage array, software-defined options added

Dell Storage ships new entry-level SCv2000 arrays, ups performance and density in PS6610 and adds a new Microsoft-based software-defined storage option. Continue Reading

SanDisk sees PCIe flash take a dive

SanDisk became the PCIe flash market leader with its 2014 acquisition of server-side flash pioneer Fusion-io. Less than a year later, there is a lot less to that market and that is having a ... Continue Reading

Four tips to maximize the lifespan of your flash memory storage

The lifespan of flash memory storage is not the hot-button issue it once was, but you should perform these tasks to prolong the life of your drives. Continue Reading

SanDisk InfiniFlash launches company's all-flash platform

SanDisk launched the InfiniFlash all-flash platform this week. The system is said to deliver flash storage for less than $2 per GB before data reduction. Continue Reading

How does RDMA work and why is it advantageous with flash?

Remote Direct Memory Access is a good way to reduce latency in flash environments and works with InfiniBand and some Ethernet connections. Continue Reading

What's the difference between 'usable' and 'effective' flash capacity?

Vendors often publish numbers for 'usable' capacity versus 'effective' capacity. Can you explain this and how can you plan flash capacity needs with these numbers in mind? Continue Reading

What you should know about using flash to complement DRAM

George Crump discusses emerging technology that enables using flash as memory, why it matters and its applicable use cases. Continue Reading

EMC gives ViPR flash-related upgrade

EMC last week quietly upgraded its ViPR software-defined storage and ScaleIO hyper-convergence software, broadening support for platforms and emerging technologies. One of the selling points of ... Continue Reading

Essential guide to desktop and laptop solid-state drives

Essential guide to laptop and desktop SSDs Continue Reading

What is the relationship between cache technology, CPU and RAM?

As flash memory caching is on its way in because of its cost and non-volatile nature, RAM may be on its way out the door, says analyst Jon Toigo. Continue Reading

What should I consider when using SSD cloud?

Using solid-state in the cloud can boost performance, but first be sure you look past cost per gigabyte and are aware of any constraints from providers. Continue Reading

NVDIMM vs. memory channel flash storage

Marc Staimer of Dragon Slayer Consulting compares NVDIMM and memory channel flash, explaining the advantages and disadvantages of each. Continue Reading

Memory channel flash storage vs. PCIe flash storage

Marc Staimer compares memory channel flash storage with PCIe connected flash and offers insight on the advantages and disadvantages of each. Continue Reading

What you need to know about flash caching

Using solid-state storage as cache can boost server and application performance dramatically, but the kind of flash cache you choose is critical. Continue Reading

Pros and cons of file- and block-based flash caching

George Crump of Storage Switzerland discusses pros and cons of file and block flash caching and how they can be implemented in this Expert Answer. Continue Reading

Comparing performance and cost of DRAM vs. NAND

George Crump of Storage Switzerland compares the performance and cost of DRAM to NAND flash in this Expert Answer. Continue Reading

How NAND flash degrades and what vendors do to increase SSD endurance

Storage Switzerland senior analyst Eric Slack digs into the technical aspects of SSD cell degradation and how vendors are increasing SSD endurance. Continue Reading

How DRAM or NVRAM cache can reduce flash SSD write amplification

DRAM/NVRAM caching provides SSD systems with better performance while reducing flash SSD write amplification. Continue Reading

Comparing write-through, write-back and write-around caching

George Crump of Storage Switzerland compares three common types of caching -- write-through, write-back and write-around -- in this Expert Answer. Continue Reading

Comparing DIMM-connected flash vs. PCIe flash benefits

Leah Schoeb of Evaluator Group discusses DIMM-connected flash as compared with PCIe flash benefits in this Expert Answer. Continue Reading

The variety of enterprise SSD options available today

Leah Schoeb of Evaluator Group discusses the variety of enterprise SSD options available today in this Expert Answer. Continue Reading

Micron adds RPMC support to NOR flash devices for improved security

Micron announced its Replay-Protection Monotonic Counter (RPMC) feature is now available for its serial NOR flash memory devices. Continue Reading

Fact or fiction? Flash SSD storage is faster than HDD storage

The general perception of SSD storage is that it's always faster than HDD storage. Marc Staimer examines whether that's actually true. Continue Reading

Problems with using SSDs for write caching and how to avoid them

Marc Staimer looks at using SSDs for write caching and explains why most storage SSD caching is write-through and not write-back. Continue Reading

Why is persistent cache important?

Leah Schoeb, partner with Evaluator Group, discusses the importance of persistent cache in this Expert Answer. Continue Reading

Best practices for SSD technologies

No longer a luxury item for well-heeled data centers, SSD technologies are more affordable than ever and come in a variety of form factors with a choice of deployment options. Continue Reading

How cloud providers are using NAND flash technology today

Leah Schoeb, senior partner with Evaluator Group, discusses how cloud providers are using flash today in this Expert Answer. Continue Reading

How to align laptop flash drive partitions in Windows

Marc Staimer outlines how to ensure that your laptop flash drive partitions are aligned properly in this Expert Answer. Continue Reading

MRAM technology likely choice as post-flash solid-state storage

NAND flash-based storage is becoming a common alternative, but NAND flash could soon be replaced by newer forms of non-volatile memory like MRAM technology. Continue Reading

Manufacturing NAND flash chips

NAND flash chips are made in fabrication plants known as fabs. Market oversupply or undersupply can cause manufacturers to alter production plans. Continue Reading

Comparing SLC SSD with DRAM SSD when it comes to IOPS

Find out how DRAM SSD and SLC SSD compare when it comes to IOPS and if you need a DRAM solution in this Expert Response from Marc Staimer. Continue Reading

Define SSD: Top terms you need to know

How do you define SSD? Check out this list of important SSD terms. The list includes terms you should know and some that may seem obscure. Continue Reading

RAID with SSD: A primer

While RAID is still a storage standard, questions remain about RAID’s relevance with SSDs. This tip will explore the basics of using RAID with SSD. Continue Reading

The impact of SSD technology on the network and CPU

SSD technology can have a noticeable effect on the network and CPU utilization. Learn how increased traffic loads can change the bottlenecks in your environment. Continue Reading

Is PCIe SSD right for you? Deploying PCI Express SSD devices

Learn about the PCI Express (PCIe) solid-state drive (SSD) market, how and where to deploy PCIe SSD in your environment, and challenges with the technology. Continue Reading

Solid-state drives quiz

While solid-state disk (SSD) devices offer faster speeds and consume less power than hard disks, the high price of solid-state memory has kept the devices confined to limited use in the data center. Storage professionals are now seeing more situations where the advantages of SSDs outweigh their cost. But how much do you really know about these high-speed storage devices? Continue Reading