Personally, I think Netapps SSD offerings were just to add another tick in the box when comparing their capabilities with EMC.

I thought Netapp’s strategy was to increase performance by:

  1. Changing their OS so that NFS scales better by using more threads
  2. Offering the ability to massively increase cache using add-on cards so disks are used far less.
  3. Offering scale-out solutions where data can be striped across filers.

That’s obviously a far cheaper way to get performance and, at least in the short term the sales patter is likely to be ‘without bias (because we can offer SSD too), we’d recommend you buy our PAM modules instead and if that isn’t quick enough then SSD is an option’.

Mind you, an OnTap 8 24 node cluster with SSD and PAM would probably be pretty rapid ;-)

D



On 13/02/2009 01:11, "Kennedy, Jeffrey" <jkennedy@qualcomm.com> wrote:

Right, but the question was what’s it all about.  The SSD stuff is fairly robust, at least in the last couple of years. Burn-out is a concern but that’s why you raid it; run mirror’d SSD Lun’s.  It’s expensive for sure but if performance is everything you can get it in spades.
 
For several years now you could get this kind of performance elsewhere; Sun comes to mind immediately.  So if availability was less of a concern and you were a speed-freak, Sun owned Netapp by very large margins. And with other vendors pushing the availability envelop and creeping into Netapp’s sweetspot, along with all the other features they’ve been using to entice buyers, Netapp had to do something.
 
I think it’s a great move.  The capability is probably needed by only a small portion of the population but that portion has a lot of money to burn on performance.
 
Jeff Kennedy
Qualcomm, Incorporated
QCT Engineering Compute
858-651-6592
 

From: Jeff Mohler [mailto:speedtoys.racing@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 3:10 PM
To: Kennedy, Jeffrey
Cc: Milazzo Giacomo; toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: Re: SSD. What's about?
 
..until you burn out the SSD.

Although, thats getting better, but at much greater cost as well.

Spinning will still always be cheaper, its a simple $ per IO question

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 12:35 PM, Kennedy, Jeffrey <jkennedy@qualcomm.com> wrote:

What's it all about?  Performance. Blazing fast performance.

Think about it like this.  An SSD volume can provide ~1M IOPS and come in sizes of up to 1TB, maybe larger since I last looked.  Add in Flexshare and you can basically stop time.

Jeff Kennedy

Qualcomm, Incorporated

QCT Engineering Compute

858-651-6592

From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Milazzo Giacomo
Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2009 1:08 AM
To: toasters@mathworks.com
Subject: SSD. What's about?

Hi all,

there are a lot of rumors about Solid State Drives…or SS Disks…alfo if there are no 'disks' at all inside J

I've read some docs from NetApp and other SSD vendors.

NetApp says they support them in vFiler (so that, as native disks also? considering that vFiler nowadays can work in mixed mode) but there aren't tech specs, availability, configurator does not provide them…

So, what's about all this?

Regards,








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