Sun Microsystems has added the solid state drive (SSD) management technology from its popular “Amber Road” data storage systems to the latest release of the open source ZFS file system.
OpenSolaris 2009.06 includes a number of updates to the ZFS file system, including technology that automatically places certain workloads on flash, such as random writes and reads, that can benefit from the higher performance of SSDs. The fully integrated flash support in ZFS can optimize large-scale pools of high-performance storage by designating flash devices as write or read accelerators. The pools are then automatically managed by ZFS to achieve high performance across many workloads, eliminating the need for small caches on RAID controllers.
SSDs have been one of the hottest data storage technologies in the last year, as users have been willing to pay up for much greater performance even in a down economy. But to take full advantage of SSD technology, users need management software to fine-tune performance. Sun is breaking new ground by offering that capability for free.
“Sun is taking a very aggressive position here,” said Objective Analysis analyst Jim Handy. “SSDs are nice, but without proper software support, they really don’t do much to help the system out. That’s why SSDs’ penetration in the PC is still significantly below 1 percent. There is a lot of value in the kind of SSD support software that ZFS includes.
“Interestingly enough,” added Handy, “when a data center uses a system like OpenSolaris with ZFS, the addition of a pricey SSD will actually help data center managers reduce their storage costs, since they can avoid wasting precious budget dollars on a bunch of slower enterprise HDDs.”
Read whole article (enterprisestorageforum.com – 01/06/09)
