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."
Static Content (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:But at what cost? (Score:1, Interesting)
This could allow for even higher blade density in HPC solutions. I don't see it being such a big deal for 4U.
Re:But at what cost? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Missing... The... Point! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not so impressed.
The reason they are on the motherboard is because they have exceeded peripheral bus speed. Of course, so have many hard drives.
Keeping them as hard drive replacements will force new bus technology, which in the long run will be more useful than SSD on the mobo, which will be obsolete the moment it reaches the end of the assembly line.
Re:Ram drives suddenly new again? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Integrated Components . (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ram drives suddenly new again? (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:But at what cost? (Score:2, Interesting)
Firstly, you employed the term "boxen" which pretty much denotes that you're a basement dwelling fanboy poseur.
Secondly, prohibitively expensive? Sun support in my neck of the woods is first class... so much so that they're being encouraged to bid on support contracts supporting other vendors like HP, since HP support is utter shit.
Re:But at what cost? (Score:3, Interesting)
The last bidding process I was involved in (for x86 hwardware) 2.5 years ago, Sun came out less than Dell and HP, and significantly less than IBM. Options always add to the price of any vendor.
Re:But at what cost? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, there is a price tag. However, because Solaris and the SPARC hardware are both made by the same company, you can call and get 24/7/365 support and not get bounced between a software vendor and a hardware vendor endlessly. This matters greatly with server clusters that are supporting 99.99% or higher uptime, and one has to troubleshoot a kernel panic at 3am in the morning. Sometimes, a Sun tech may be sent out because the hardware notices a glitch that means hardware about to fail, but not yet.
There is a diminishing returns curve where people pay exponentially more for hardware that supports more 9s, but there are a lot of industries that need this uptime. Banks come to mind, because the financial loss from down hardware after a period of minutes can easily pay for the equipment.
Re:Missing... The... Point! (Score:3, Interesting)
In the not too distant future, non-volatile will be as fast as RAM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor [wikipedia.org]