Which approach will win out remains to be seen, but its clear that flash-based storage has arrived–and that its here to stay.

Flash storage will continue to bring amuch needed boostto the enterprise landscape. From Fusion-ios IPO last year to the recent launches of a host of venture-backed startups likeNutanixandTintri, theres a lot going in the world of flash storage.

Apple Talk

With more than 15 years of technology and marketing experience spanning from Bell Labs to multiple start-up IPOs, he is CEO and founder of Nodeable, co-founder of MuleSoft, and serves as managing director for Hardy Way. He also happens to be a U.S. patent holder and a workaholic. Technology is his best friend and mortal enemy.

While cloud computing and virtualization have transformed server infrastructure dramatically, its the rise of solid-state drive/flash technologies that have enabled a storage renaissance.

Geek Gestalt

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HPs fiscal first quarter not so hotCEO Meg Whitman says that the company is taking the necessary steps to improve execution.

Tintri pushes what it refers to as an intelligent flash storage approach–a hybrid array that combines both flash and SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment), which comes at a much cheaper price point. According to Lee, all-flash arrays arent necessary the vast majority of the time and its too costly to simply throw flash at performance problems.

Dave RosenbergDave Rosenberg dishes up Software, Interrupted with more than 15 years of technology and marketing experience. He is CEO and founder of Nodeable, co-founder of Mulesoft, and previously held a wide range of technical and marketing positions. He is an adviser to DataStax, IT Database, and Puppet Labs. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.Disclosure. E-mail Dave atsoftwareinterrupted@gmail.com.

Crave

Cutting Edge

As an increasing number of applications and databases are virtualized and deployed to the cloud, traditional disk-based storage arrays are creating serious performance bottlenecks that are rendering them increasingly irrelevant. Virtual and cloud-based infrastructures consolidate workloads on a smaller number of servers, which in turn quickly overwhelms disk-based architectures.

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Industry giants EMC and NetApp have begun to offer flash as cache solutions that can be bolted on to their existing products, though critics point to two significant drawbacks with this approach: adding flash to existing solutions can be incredibly expensive; and their function is limited to a read cache.

A number of storage vendors–including Violin Memory and SolidFire–offer 100 percent flash arrays, touting the enormous performance enhancements that their solutions offer. While this is certainly true, it doesnt do much to address the prohibitive cost per gigabyte of flash.

Flash storage too good to resist? virtual server hosting,Flash storage drives are proving to be an important part of cloud and virtualized architectures. Now is the time to move away from traditional disk drives.

As an alternative to the bolt-on approach, a wave of startups have launched with flash-based offerings. By incorporating techniques like inline de-duplication and compression, new solutions are able to reduce the per-gigabyte cost of flash and offer high-performance products at a competitive price point.

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Business Tech

While server, network 域名注册, and processor performance have followed Moores Law, the performance capability of a single disk sFlash storage too good to resist? virtual server hostingpindle hasnt changed significantly. Flash, on the other hand, offers r greater performance. A single commodity SSD is 400 times ster than a single hard disk for example. This is just one reason why Amazon Web Services new DynamoDB offering runs on SSD drives instead of a traditional disk architecture.

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Cutting Edge

In Software, Interrupted, Dave Rosenberg discusses disruption in the software market, as well as the products and services that keep business technology norms in perpetual flux.

Digital Media

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Technically Incorrect

The flash storage market is crowded, and growing larger by the day. EMC recently announced its VFCache solution (project Lightning), a server-side flash PCI card, similar to Fusion-io. NetApp, its main competitor, has alluded to a similar release in the near future.

The second limitation is critically important, according to Ed Lee, an original member of theBerkeley RAID teamin the 1990s who is now lead architect at Tintri. With a bolt-on flash as cache, youre lucky if 30 percent of the application traffic benefits from flash. Basically, youre still getting disk-level rather than flash-level performance, Lee said in an e-mail interview.

De-duplication and compression combined with a hybrid system that automatically places inactive data on disk can deliver the same level of performance as an all-flash avirtual server hostingpproach–without the manual work that a tiered approach requires.

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5,000 Kindle titles shut down by Amazon in pricing disputeAmazon accused of pressure campaign to extract more vorable terms from publishers and distributors.

Tesla downplays danger of bricked batteryA report says that drained batteries in five Tesla Roadsters required battery pack replacements. Tesla counters that it takes multiple measures to avoid the problem.