Sun To Include SSDs On Server Motherboards 79
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."
But at what cost? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But at what cost? (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh, only the joys of supporting integrated peripherals when they inevitably fail.
Take the sun-supplied crowbar, now just pry the ssd's off the motherboard...
Missing... The... Point! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Static Content (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ram drives suddenly new again? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:But won't it wear out quickly? (Score:3, Insightful)
Before anyone complains about ssd wearing out quickly, please read here.
That is the single most fucked up page layout I've ever seen. It managed trigger my ad-blindness for both columns. I gave up after three seconds trying to read it.
Page loads: article nowhere. Just a bunch of incoherent links and some cute drawings. Ok, page down... a bunch of incoherent sentences? Where does the article start? What's the content? Why is the page divided into two columns which have no visible connection? Where the fuck am I supposed to start reading?!
5 page downs later I realize the article is 500 pixels wide, while the annotations 700...
Re:why on the motherboard? (Score:1, Insightful)
You're forgetting latency. Just count how many hops you have till you reach your storage array.
This has a huge impact on certain loads.
Re:But at what cost? (Score:1, Insightful)
I always go to blogs for utterly honest, objective, Marketing-free content.
Why does nobody get this? ZFS L2ARC (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone here seems to be missing the point.
The integrated SSD probably has way more to do with being used as L2ARC [google.com] 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.