Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Thu 24th Jul 2008 09:35 UTC, submitted by amjith
Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has an interesting blog entry about how Sun Microsystems will start introducing Nand Flash with ZFS as an enterprise storage solution by the end of this year. With the price of Flash memory already plummeting this could be an economical alternative to the expensive NAS solutions.
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Member since:
2007-08-04
There are two main technologies for flash in ZFS: the ZIL to improve write performance, and the L2ARC to improve read performance (although with current flash-memory based SSDs, we'll be using the L2ARC to improve random-read performance - and leave sequential read for the disks).
I've been busy developing the L2ARC, and recently posted some screenshots of it in action here:
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test
These results aren't the best we can do - this was just to provide an example of it doing something.
A point about power consumption worth mentioning (and that Adam Leventhal has been making), is that the power savings aren't all about comparing flash-memory based SSDs to disks or DRAM; it is also about allowing slower spinning disks to be used for primary storage, while maintaining high performance through these flash technologies (if you want - the option is there for better price/performance). Check out his ACM article for power consumption numbers:
http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/hybrid_storage_pools_in_cacm