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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?
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.
Then why not just get a bit more RAM and load the whole site into RAM during boot-up? It's faster and more cost effective than getting a SSD hard drive if you're only going to use a few GB (if that) of the SSD drive.
Sun's using hardware that amounts to pluggable disks on a range of hardware. The same module they're putting into other devices will go into this motherboard, so it's sort of a commodity. A huge benefit of this tech is that if you can put your OS on it, you get faster swap, faster access to data on these devices, and much less electricity per rack. If they wanted to they could probably produce blades that were teeny tiny but still had on-board storage. RLX could have used this.
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)
With my slashdot ID half of yours I'd be careful about calling anyone "son".
Being a server is even MORE reason this is an inappropriate use of SSDs.
Servrs should be adequately sized and powered such that they can cache their
workload and never have to reboot.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
Look at the picture below at:
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/news/article.php/3809601
Does this look like a integrated component?
Looks like a Mini-DIMM to me.
Given your attitude, I bet you are some sort of curmudgeon. I'm not, and my id is half again lower than yours. It's almost as if it is a meaningless number.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Throw and equivalent amount of money at REAL RAM, such that your machine never swaps and everything will run much better.
This approach works, but only up to a point.
Sure, a system with a 64-bit address bus is theoretically capable of addressing 16 petabyes of RAM, but how many motherboards do you know of that have more than six or eight DIMM slots? I don't think they make 2-million-terabyte DDR3 sticks, yet...
> I don't think they make 2-million-terabyte DDR3 sticks, yet...
But you know of someone using that much swap?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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