Analysis

posted on 03 July 2008 09:55

A Sun engineer, Adam Leventhal. has written a 5-page article for Comunications Of The ACM magazine which is freely downloadable. So ... I have freely downloaded the PDF and tried to extract the five pages from the 116 pages of the magazine, but ... no-can-do due to dratted Acrobat security restrictions.

The piece is a detailed explanation of Sun's view of flash solid state drives (SSDs) as a system software I/O enhancer and not a hard drive replacement: "Flash should be viewed not as a replacement for existing storage, but rather as a means to enhance it."

As such it is a counter to the views expressed by Barry A. Burke of EMC here.

The download is 6.2MB and you need to go to page 47. I'd recommend going to the trouble of downloading - it won't take long in these broadband times - and printing off pages 47 to 51. It will be an informative read, not least for suggesting that flash SSD use as a server I/O enhancer could lead to the re-adoption of slower disk drives as a low-energy, bulk data storage medium.

One concern; it may be that Sun will build servers specialised for Solaris, ZFS and MySQL because that system software has been amended to use flash-enhanced Sun servers for its working data storage. Use the same software on non-Sun servers and its performance could be slow indeed compared to its Sun platform speed. How's that for a new way of encouraging customers to use your HW and SW?

^{[Chris Mellor.]}

Download file: communications200807-dl.pdf