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Sun To Include SSDs On Server Motherboards
snydeq writes "Sun has announced plans to integrate solid-state drives onto server motherboards to provide faster data access for I/O intensive applications. For now, the company is offering SSDs that customers can slide into their storage bays, but long term, Sun will locate SSDs closer to the server CPUs to cut the bottleneck that occurs when powerful, multicore CPUs have to wait for data to be delivered from hard drives, according to the company. The move could mark a change in how Sun servers are designed going forward, including the possibility of servers that have no hard drive, relying entirely on SSDs."
Sun's hardware is already prohibitively expensive, how much will options like this add to the price of hardware? When I can order up a pair 4U boxen from any competitor that each have the same hardware specifications as a single box from Sun, what does this buy me besides simplified wiring/management, and the ability to run Solaris?
I know that websites as a whole that serve just static content are increasingly rare, but sometimes a separate server is created for static content. If the volume of this content is pretty small a small SSD on the motherboard would allow for an OS + the content to be served very efficiently.
No.
Before anyone complains about ssd wearing out quickly, please read here.
long term, Sun will locate SSDs closer to the server CPUs to cut the bottleneck that occurs when powerful, multicore CPUs have to wait for data to be delivered from hard drives
So close, and yet...
SSDs allow us to stop thinking about attached "storage" devices, and instead think of them as their originally-intended purpose - Slow memory. For decades, they've run so much slower than the CPU that we can't treat them as a form of memory without paying a huge performance hit (try running XP with 64MB of RAM and a 2GB pagefile on the fastest HDD out there, and experience the suck); but finally, with SSDs, we may soon have the ability to treat them as a system's primary memory, with what we currently consider RAM acting as an L3/L4 cache. Not to say SSDs have come anywhere *near* DRAM for speed, but the no-seek-time-penalty starts putting them in the right ballpark.
I also don't know that I'd consider building them right on the motherboard a good idea... Much like the same path DRAM took, in the end the limitations (no easy upgradeability) far outweighed the convenience ("just there" as a given).
But one small step at a time, I guess, so kudos to Sun for taking even a baby-step in the right direction.
Because when your SSD fails, you simply have to swap out the motherboard.
pictures or it didnt happen
So the old new thing resurfaces....
Persistent ram drives have arrived. Should we be dredging up our old DOS disks again?
Why put this on the MoBo?
Why BUY this on the MoBo?
Have we not been thru enough new-product cycles to learn NEVER NEVER NEVER buy an integrated version of new technology?
How many modems lurking on motherboards were abandoned in the race from 300 baud to 56k? How many on-board video chip-sets are doing nothing at all, having been replaced by generation after generation of add-on video?
In 8 years, this might make sense. After the industry has stabilized with regard to technology, and size, and price of SSD. (but I doubt it). It certainly makes no sense today.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
While SSDs can have decent latency, their typical bandwidth is _horrible_ (~5-10x slower) than spinning disks.
Is Sun going to try $$$ome expen$ive proprietary (parallel flash) to overcome this?
Integrated components are never good. When they break you can't fix them unless your an electrical engineer with some serious experience soldering.
These days most people don't know how to solder anymore and actually desoldering and components is unheard of, even in logical cases like replacing/upgrading a graphics card on a laptop, upgrading/replacing the CPU on a laptop with a soldered on CPU etc.
Now with advancements in manufacturing and mass production individual components aren't replaced. You send a faulty motherboard back to the manufacturer and they are just going to throw it out and try to melt it down for gold.
In some ways its a good thing but in other ways its bad because the only way for people to upgrade/replace things (like a soldered on SSD) would be to replace the whole darn thing >.
And you can't imagine how expensive a server motherboard is.
Thanks sun but no thanks. We don't want to have to replace a $700+ motherboard every couple of years just to upgrade the SSD.
HP announced a blade server with this capability last year and is shipping them now.
Options: Low-power Solid State Drives (SSD) that use less than 2 watts of power
I don't get it.
With fiber channel and infiniband becoming more common, servers are moving away from direct attach storage. It simply doesn't need to be there.
Also, the 2 most important things for server storage is capacity and bandwidth. Both of which SSDs are kind of poor at.
Maybe this is for smaller servers or something. Or just a marketing gimmick.
FUNK!
This isn't such a bad idea. I mean, if you can have a boot drive on your mobo, then that's something you'd never have to mess with, and OS designers would be forced to keep their OS under that footprint.
Just imagine, a computer where you knew that everything that was on the hard drive was expendable, and could be deleted without harming the system...
____________________
Clouds in the Sky,
Water in a bottle
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167013
sequential read: 250MB/s
sequential write: 170MB/s
i've been working on a number of now .12 drives
last-generation hard drives that move data
at ~130-140MB/s. the new segate
are supposed to move data at 160MB/s.
I wonder if this development has to do with this:
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/news/article.php/3809601
Which would mean, like processors & RAM, that it's designed to be replaced or upgraded as the need arises.
Everyone here seems to be missing the point.
The integrated SSD probably has way more to do with being used as L2ARC cache in ZFS than as the primary storage for the box. ZFS is a bit sluggish without any cache (every sync burns a minimum of 5 writes to disk at different places), but the L2ARC feature introduced in the latest builds of Solaris (and much earlier in OpenSolaris) gives ZFS a healthy performance boost. Sun is already selling SSD drives in their 7000 series storage appliances as L2ARC cache. It's turned on by default.
And for those of you who think they can buy white-box servers cheaper, you're right. Sun's hardware is more expensive. However Sun's servers come with integrated ILOM in all models, even the really cheap ones. ILOM in servers is an absolute MUST for any server not deployed within 1 or 2 floors of your desk, and adding an ILOM/DRAC/ILO/whatever card to a stock server jumps the price of the server at least $250-300, with some cards costing over $700. Having an in-the-box 100% supported ILOM is well worth the typical $200 price difference between Sun and other vendors.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Crikey. They'll be going sideways, upwards, backwards. That's innovation for yer.
Which marketroid glossary did the poster learn their English expressions from.
How about, "how Sun servers are designed in the future." That's one less letter and the same number of characters if you include spaces; lot simpler too.