Zadara Blog

solid-state-disk-drives

Solid State Disks (SSDs): Definition and Use Cases

If there’s one technology that has taken the storage world by storm over recent years, it’s flash drives. Solid State Disks (or SSDs) have transformed the storage landscape, offering much higher I/O density (IOPS per TB of storage) than can be achieved with traditional hard drives. HDDs are obviously mechanical media, based on spinning platters, accessed by multiple read/write heads. The physical geometry of these devices means that they are more attuned to sequential than random workloads. It’s easy, for example to write data sequentially onto a disk track as the disk rotates past the head. What’s much harder for HDDs is to manage random I/O profiles that read data from physically disjoint parts of the drive, either on separate tracks or platters. Totally random read requests can slow a hard drive down to 120-200 IOPS, depending on the drive speed.

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Zadara Rocket In The Clouds

4 New Services to Amp Up Your Zadara Storage Cloud

This morning, we shared really exciting news and some of my favorite new VPSA service features. Here’s a summary of why enterprise cloud storage just got even better, everywhere you are, both on premises and at AWS, Azure and other public clouds:

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SAN SSD NAS HDD

All flash? No cash! HDD SSD SAN NAS – Alphabet Soup for the Admin’s Soul

All flash is gaining much hype – and for good reasons. Flash is changing architectures, delivering faster workloads, enabling new applications and is helping to achieve better efficiencies – we are just at the beginning of the flash revolution in the data center.

But we all know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that although hyperbole often has a grain of truth, it needs to be looked at critically. With flash, the cost equation (TCA and TCO) is becoming more confusing whether on-premise or in the cloud, and flash vendors add to the confusion with marketing lingo. Well, who can blame them? Flash is a great technology and it’s tempting to market it everywhere.

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