26 April 2010

Do It Yourself SSDs: It Had to Happen

Zsolt does it again, with this article about a storage vendor cutting out the middleman. I, too, considered that likely, given that the value of an SSD is in the controller, while the NAND is nothing but commodity.

Here's the money quote (from the point of view of this endeavor):

Unlike SSD ASAPs - which are designed to accelerate hard disk arrays - the name of the game with the new Nimbus product line is to make it attractive for users to place all their critical IOPS intensive data into SSD.


What this implies for pure SSD versus SSD/HDD hybrids is not clear. Nimbus is, whether they know it or not, making the case for putting databases in SSD. They're a company I'll spend some time investigating. May be I can convince them they need a RDBMS Evangelist. Always loved the smarminess of that word.

Whichever way that works out, the SSD vendors have to be wondering, especially the "enterprise" variety, whether there's anything to be gained from bespoke controllers.

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