Flashman Farley

So 3PAR come to the party and talk about Flash drives in the InServe range. I've extracted the following from Chris Mellor's article on The Reg because I think it sounds particularly interesting.

"The InServe software can recognise a tier zero of SSD storage and place data there, as well as move the data to a lower tier when activity rates and/or time and policies dictate. The InServe will avoid interleaving SSD and hard disk drive I/O so as as not to bottleneck the SSD data stream."

Does this imply that 3PAR are going to be doing some kind of automated storage tiering? If it does, I think that this is more important than the SSD announcement? It also implies that the SSD will have a seperate back-end, perhaps be a seperate 'array'. Sounds a bit like IBM's potential approach with Quicksilver and SVC.

Comments

[Stephen Foskett]

The Reg article was a bit confusing, but hints at some serious technical changes. I am not surprised to see that 3PAR won't mix disk and flash in a stripe - that would be dumb. Marc?

Oh, and is anyone else sick of The Register's "no link" policy?

[marc farley]

I would have to be a freaking moron to comment on this.... So here I am commenting.....

The 3PAR engineering team is working on this. The same guys who did very well inventing thin provisioning and implementing micro-RAID and wide striping without me are continuing to do their work as if I did not exist.

And this is really quite OK with me. If my blog posts provide them some amusement, that's great. If they cause a distraction, that's probably not so great and if they cause them to want to inflict damage on me, that's bad.