Recently in Storage Category

In light of the well-received Windows 7, it's hard to ignore that XP is getting on in years. Nonetheless, it's still pretty prevalent in netbooks. Part of the problem for netbook owners is that XP is an OS developed well before SSDs were a glimmer in systems makers' eyes.

NetworkWorld's Jon L. Jacobi takes FlashFire for a spin and discovers a genuinely solid little piece of software that works wonders on SSD access times. How it works exactly only the utility's author knows, but Jacobi thinks it boils down to some clever little trickery (in the best sense). He writes:

The author's wiki describes FlashFire as a ram buffer. I'm not certain of the details, but since SSDs perform at their worst when reading and writing simultaneously, my guess is that the software caches and delays writes. Delaying writes means there's a small chance for data loss or file system corruption if your system crashes before data in the buffer is written.

As with all software of this type, use it at your own risk.

Source: NetworkWorld

A terabyte of storage on your fingertip? If Tadahiro Kuroda and his team of researchers from Toshiba and Keio University in Tokyo have developed a technique that packs 128 NAND flash chips and a controller into the area of a postage stamp, effectively reducing the size of SSDs by 90 percent.

Are you ready for more good news? Apart from undergoing the shrink ray treatment, the new SSDs are said to consume 70 less electricity, will be cheaper to produce and a prototype can transfer data at 2.5 Gbps, higher than SATA 1 and SATA 2 drives.

The group hopes to see the technology go into production in 2012. If so, expect it to be an exciting year for data storage market, one that ushers in a new breed of energy efficient storage systems.

Image Credit: PhysOrg.com/Prof. Tadahiro Kuroda

I recently chatted with Analytico's Tom Trainer about his new GigaOM Pro report, "The Future of Data Center Storage" (subscription required) and wrote about some of the insights I gleaned for Earth2Tech (thanks Katie!).

I was encouraged to find out that storage vendors like IBM and EMC aren't just pursuing green IT strategies for their own operations and manufacturing, they're also pushing products that perform more efficiently and help enterprises derive more value from the storage they already own.

Why is it important? Cloud computing and ballooning stores of data in server-rich environments will soon tax power grids. Many companies are already bumping their heads on their data center's power ceiling. Simply throwing more storage at the problem is hardly a solution.

Two of the technologies that can help are data de-duplication (dedupe) and thin provisioning.  How? My Earth2Tech article explains, but essentially it boils down to a popular mantra that's bandied about during these gloomy economic times: "Do more with less."

Photo Credit: Flickr/Stuart Bryant

Dell has officially launched a data deduplication site and a cursory glance reveals an intro to the technology, an assortment of whitepapers, and of course, a healthy spotlight on the IT vendor's partnership with the dedupe mavens at CommVault.

Here's a blog post by Greg White explaining Dell's approach to the capacity-sparing technology. If you're a Dell shop it's worth a look

[via Twitter @dell_storage]

Adding a hard drive to your Windows PC is an easy way to expand storage capacity if you find yourself running out of room for your files. But there are two problems with this approach.

First, it'll cost you money. There are bargain basement drives out there, but they're unlikely to be of the energy efficient variety. Which leads us to the second point, power savings. Installing another drive adds yet another component that you have to keep powered. And while heat-wise they pale in comparison to processors, they can contribute to your PC's thermal load making the fans work harder.

There is one super cheap option: delete files.

You're thinking, "Thank you, Captain Obvious!" What you may not have considered are the less obvious places to reclaim drive space, which can free up megabytes, if not gigabytes, of space.

Before you take a single step forward, an important reminder: backup your files!

Everyone needs a backup plan, no excuses. Things happen, no matter how well maintained your PC. There are tons of backup guides online and many external drives ship with software that makes it dead easy to make copies of your data. So, take this opportunity to backup (or ghost, even better) your PC and check the integrity of your backup files.

Got that? Good, then read on...

Not to worry, the flash-packing storage devices play a supplementary role in the Sun Storage 7310, acting more like cache to improve performance. That cache can swell up to 600 GB, which in concert with with up to 64GB of DRAM, is meant to significantly improve I/O rates.

Mass storage--up to 96 TB worth--is comprised of traditional 7200 RPM SATA drives. Sun envisions that IT shops will be smitten by the application performance boost and power savings of this hybrid approach. The company claims that the 7310 uses three times less power savings than a traditional disk-based array.

Sun's Storage 7310 Unified Storage System (specs here) is available now. It will set you back $40,165 US for a base configuration.

Kudos to Sun for helping to bridge the hard drive SSD chasm in enterprise storage.

Here's an example that might provide a compelling business case for organizations considering the technology:

A banking institution running on the System Storage DS8000, DB2 for zOS and SAP, can improve their business performance by more than 30% and reduced their physical storage footprint by 60% and thereby reducing their energy consumption by more than 70%. Improved performance and reduced costs in energy can shift the focus on the company's information and generating a new of intelligence to anticipate new customers' demands.

SSDs are also gaining ground in IBM's other product lines namely becoming options in System x, System Storage DS8000 (as mentioned above) and all POWER6 systems.

Source: Press Release

The difference between SSDs and traditional hard drives go well beyond energy savings and fast I/O rates. There are some fundamental ways flash chips store data, which makes regular defrag and other drive optimization techniques that operating systems employ unsuitable for SSDs.

The Windows 7 team says not to worry, they have it covered....

Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation on SSD system drives. Because SSDs perform extremely well on random read operations, defragmenting files isn't helpful enough to warrant the added disk writing defragmentation produces...

By default, Windows 7 will disable Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching on SSDs with good random read, random write and flush performance. These technologies were all designed to improve performance on traditional HDDs, where random read performance could easily be a major bottleneck. See the FAQ section for more details.

Since SSDs tend to perform at their best when the operating system's partitions are created with the SSD's alignment needs in mind, all of the partition-creating tools in Windows 7 place newly created partitions with the appropriate alignment.

Another way they optimized Windows 7 for SSDs is with a process called Trim. They explain:

In addition to the above, Microsoft and SSD manufacturers are adopting the Trim operation. In Windows 7, if an SSD reports it supports the Trim attribute of the ATA protocol's Data Set Management command, the NTFS file system will request the ATA driver to issue the new operation to the device when files are deleted and it is safe to erase the SSD pages backing the files. With this information, an SSD can plan to erase the relevant blocks opportunistically (and lazily) in the hope that subsequent writes will not require a blocking erase operation since erased pages are available for reuse.

As an added benefit, the Trim operation can help SSDs reduce wear by eliminating the need for many merge operations to occur. As an example, consider a single 128 KB SSD block that contained a 128 KB file. If the file is deleted and a Trim operation is requested, then the SSD can avoid having to mix bytes from the SSD block with any other bytes that are subsequently written to that block. This reduces wear.

Now, if they can do something about the huge price premium over regular hard drives, then we're in business. Read more about Windows 7 SSD support here.

Verizon Business today announced an expansion of its Verizon Remote Backup and Restore software as a service (SaaS) offering to now include PCs ( previously only available for servers). Although not expressly mentioned in today's announcement, the telecom's business services unit also saves energy on its end. This is accomplished by employing data deduplication, which in turn prevents overprovisioning by eliminating redundant data and keeping otherwise underused capacity powered.

According to Verizon, the service requires that a low-resource agent that "supports a wide range of commonly used computing platforms" is installed onto a PC or Server. Administrators manage the setup on a Web-based dashboard and customers only pay for the storage they use.

Is your data safe? The company promises that backups will reside in datacenters that "feature 24 x 7 security protection, redundant and uninterruptible power supplies, as well as built-in fire suppression and environmental controls to help maintain data availability."

Verizon Remote Backup and Restore for PC and Server is available in the U.S. and Europe with Asia-Pacific to join in later this year.

Considering that Verizon already subscribes to a green datacenter mentality, there are worse, less energy efficient places to keep your data...

Seagate is countering Western Digital's Caviar Green line of hard drives with new the Barracuda LP line. Anandtech has the details:

Based on Seagate's internal testing (review samples arrive shortly) the drives are rated at 19dB(A) at idle and around 20dB(A) under load. This compares to the WD Caviar Green 2TB at 19db(A) idle and near 21db(A) under load. Power consumption is very close also, Seagate reports 3W at idle and 5.6W during operation, compared to 3W at idle and 5.72W under load for the WD drive.

Source: Anandtech