Archive for the ‘ssd’ Category

SSD Vendors: Please let developers obtain extended health and # of erase cycle stats on your SSDs.

Сентябрь 29th, 2009

Here’s the problem I currently have.

We’re looking at deploying the Intel X-25M MLC SSD in production.

The problem being that this drive has a lower number of erase cycles but is much cheaper. Than the Intel X-25E SLC drive.

However, in our situation we’re write once, read many. I’m 99% certain that we will not burn out these drives. We write data to disk once and it is never written again.

The problem is that I can’t be 100% sure that this is the case. There is btree flushing, and binary log issues that I’m worried about…

What would be really nice is an API (SMART?) that I can enumerate the erase blocks on the drive, determine the max erase cycles, and read the current number of erase cycles.

This way, I can put an SSD into production, then determine the ETA to failure.

I can also add this to Nagios and Ganglia and trend the failure date and alert if the derivative is too high and the drive will soon fail.

Further, I can figure out if a database design is flawed. If I deploy a new database into production and the failure ETA is too high after 24 hours I know that something is wrong. Either a misconfiguration or a problem with the design.

I think this would solve a LOT of the problems with deploying SSD in enterprise environments. (MySQL, Oracle, etc)


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Storage for your Database

Сентябрь 25th, 2009

Save the date - October 14th, 3pm Paris & Berlin, 2pm London, 4pm Jerusalem  -  for this free live webinar where you'll have a chance to ask questions to our experts.

This webinar focuses on how ZFS, SSDs and the Open Storage line of products from Sun are changing the rules in the database storage industry. You will learn how to increase data security, scalability, and reduce the price/performance ratio with these technologies. This webinar includes ZFS best practises for databases backup and performance.

To register, click here.


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SSD Market Continues to Heat Up

Сентябрь 21st, 2009

I had originally posted this on the 16th of September, but I had been changing hosting providers and such and it has managed to drop through the cracks.  So, if you didn’t see it before here it is..

I have long held the opinon that SSD (Solid State Disk) drives are going to be a major part of the database future. I just checked and I wrote a blog posting about them two years ago. I am not alone in this opinion.  It has long been realized that both I/O access speed and throughput increases have not kept pace with the increases in CPU power and the steadily decreasing cost of RAM. Storage space has increased, but both access speed and throughput performance have only had marginal increases in performance.

Solid state disks have long held the promise of lowered access speeds, especially when it comes to random access.  Even so, prices for SSD drives have been high and space small (compared to standard hard disks). That is slowly beginning to change. I suspect that within five years SSD drives in RAID arrays for database servers will be just as common as standard disk arrays are today.

Pliant Technology announced today what they call an Enterprise grade series of SSD drives that they claim has twice the throughput of the leading competitors. Computer World has a good writeup of the announcement here. Interesting technology that Pliant claims can produce a maximum of 180,000 IOPS from a single 3.5″ SSD drive.  While undoubtedly expensive, for those who are I/O bound with few other options this could be a God-send.

Be prepared . . the time is coming sooner than you think that SSD drives are your main system drives and traditional hard drives are used for backup.


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Recording: "ZFS + SSD tuning for databases"

Сентябрь 3rd, 2009

Just in case you missed the live event, we have a recording of the ZFS + SSD for databases webcast Listen Now

You can also download the slides from Slide share. Download Slides


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ZFS & SSDs. Database Performance tuning webcast

Август 26th, 2009
Over the last month I have been working on a ZFS Tuning for Databases presentation. I'll be presenting it live tomorrow 8/26/09 at 8 AM PST.

This based on a lot of work done at Sun as well as in the community. With the massive adoption of Solid State Devices (SSDs) (thank you iPOD) the storage market just got a whole lot more interesting. Incorporating SSDs into a ZFS pool is a breeze. This presentation is meant to help you get the best out of the ZFS + SSD combination for databases. We look into Postgres, MySQL and Oracle. I also provide a quick into into Sun's unified storage 7000 series systems.

If you are interested do Register Now


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RethinkDB all the rage today

Июль 29th, 2009

RethinkDB is all the rage today, as its a Y Combinator funded startup, which also launched a developer pre-alpha today. So what is RethinkDB you ask? Yet-another-MySQL-storage-engine, that’s what. But this time, its tuned for solid-state drives (SSDs), which also happen to be all the rage these days.

Anyway, check them out more, and the materials currently tell me that they’re using append-only algorithms, which allow for live schema changes and hot backups, with instantaneous recovery from power failure. Those are just some of the exciting bits.

What didn’t excite me so much was the fact that you were only getting 32-bit or 64-bit Linux binaries, built against MySQL 5.1.31 and you’ll just install it via the INSTALL PLUGIN option. But they are trying to get some semblance of a community growing, with their getting involved page, filled with some papers, as well as a support mailing list (I see Mark Callaghan is already busy asking them questions). And of course you can follow them on their blog, or on Twitter. All this without source ;-)

One of the developers also confirmed that they’re adding “features required by Wordpress so we could eat our own dogfood”. They haven’t started profiling (much yet?), and they’ve probably got ways to go on performance. Seems like “getting it working for WordPress”, is slowly becoming a good testing ground – Jeff Waugh did so for WordPress and Drizzle, too.

Anyway, it seems like its time to get some SSDs, as we start seeing things like this pop up. RethinkDB will also face another problem for mass adoption – how many hosting providers are using SSDs? Probably not many (if at all).

Have you tried RethinkDB? Your thoughts?