Posted 11/18/09 at 01:00:12 PM by Paul Lilly

There's no way around it - if SSDs are to eventually replace mechanical hard drives, manufacturers have to find a way to increase capacity at a reasonable cost. So far, every SSD vendor has failed on both accounts, which is why we're excited to see OCZ release a 1TB SSD.

Also available in the more traditional 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB capacities, the new Colossus 3.5-inch SSD series brings no-holds barred performance to the scene, at least on paper. According to OCZ, each drive is capable of up to 260MB/s reads and writes, up to 220MB/s sustained writes, and up to 14,000 IOPS. That puts the Colossus right up there with the fastest spec'd drives on the market.

"The new Colossus Series is designed to boost desktop and workstation performance and is for high power users tht put a premium on speed, reliability, and maximum storage capacity," said Eugene Chang, VP of Product Management at OCZ. "The Colossus core-architecture is also available to enterprise clients with locked BOMs (build of materials) and customized firmware to match their unique applications."

A 1TB drive certainly makes headway on the capacity front, but the question is, how much will it cost? OCZ didn't say, though previous reports had the then-upcoming drive pegged at $2,500. Ouch.

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Posted 11/18/09 at 07:03:26 AM by Paul Lilly

While Oracle's been busy trying to win the blessing of the European Union in its attempted takeover deal with Sun Microsystems, Sun has been focusing on upping its storage ante, The company on Tuesday announced upgrades to its Sun Storage 7000 family of disk arrays that purports to double both the performance and capacity from a maximum of 288TB to 576TB in a 4U space.

Sun said it outfitted its Sun Storage 7410 Unified Storage System with four six-core AMD Opteron processors, double the amount of DRAM cache as before (up to 512GB), and new 2TB capacity drives. The end result is significantly improved performance, the company claims.

"Sun server, storage, and networking contniue to fuel world record HPC performance and provide the building blocks for dozens of new Sun Constellation System deployments around the globe," said John Fowler, executive vice president, System Group, Sun. "Corporations and scientists alike are using Sun server and storage innovation to gain competitive advantage and tackle the world's most complex problems."

In addition to storage upgrades, Sun also announced a pair of InfiniBand switches, the Datacenter InfiniBand Switch 72 and Switch 36.

More details and specs here.

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Posted 11/15/09 at 04:44:48 PM by Justin Kerr

Most people don't really think about it, but optical media, particularly the stuff you burn at home has a limited shelf life. Worse yet, depending on the quality of the disk, its probably a lot less than you might think. This is but one of many reasons why DVDs typically make lousy long term backups, that is of course, unless you have a burner from a new startup company called Cranberry. Its new optical technology called "DiamonDisk" claims to have a useable life of more than 1,000 years, or to put it in layman's terms, about 900 more than any of us would care about.

The durability of the disk is apparently a result of the media itself containing no dye layers, or adhesives / reflective materials that will deteriorate. Data is also said to be etched far more deeply into the disk using its proprietary burner. Currently a drive will set you back about five grand, but just in case you find this a bit extreme, you can also upload your data to the company's website and let them burn it for you.

Anyone considering this for a time capsule might also want to toss in a drive for good measure. 1,000 years from now a DVD is likely to be about as useable as an 8-track. Lets just hope they still use USB!

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Posted 11/11/09 at 04:32:21 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Purchasing storage space in addition to the 1GB free space included with every Picasa Web Albums account just got cheaper, and dramatically at that. Google has slashed the price of additional storage space by eight times: “twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price.” Paid storage plans now start at $5 a year for 20GB and go all the way up to $4,096 per year for 16TB space, which is enough to store 8 million full resolution photos.

With that much storage on offer, it just sounds like the cloud storage solution that NASA has been waiting for to store its satellite imagery. “While the cost of hard drive storage has continued to drop in these two years, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable,” Google engineer Elvin Lee wrote in a post on the official Google Photos Blog.

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Posted 11/11/09 at 11:13:31 AM by Paul Lilly

After a flurry of activity earlier this year, which seemingly saw a new SSD being released every week, we're beginning to see the SSD market cool down a little. But rest assured, manufacturers are still devoting R&D to the flash-based storage segment, as evidenced by G.Skill's new Falcon II 2.5-inch SSDs.

G.Skill says the Falcon II series comes equipped with the new Indilinx ECO controller. Seeing the ECO tag, the first thing that came to mind was what effect will that have on performance, and G.Skill rates its new SSDs at up to 220MB/s reads and 150MB/s writes (110MB/s writes on the 64GB model).

The drives, which are available in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities, also boast 64MB of DRAM cache and advanced wear leveling algorithms. G.Skill says the Falcon II series also feature the latest Indilinx 1819 version firmware, which purports to offer improved support for the Windows 7 TRIM command, something Intel's 34nm SSDs have struggled with as of late.

No pricing information was available.

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Posted 11/09/09 at 06:49:06 AM by Paul Lilly

Fujitsu announced it is currently scoping out areas of Western Sydney, Australia hoping to find a location with enough power to build and run a new data center, TheWhir.com reports.

The IT services provider is already constructing new data centers in Perth and Melbourne, both of which address the lack of data center space in Australia. But one thing Fujitsu has found is that existing data centers in the country lack the necessary power to host boatloads of blade-based servers.

In addition to finding a location with the proper power requirements, Fujitsu wants an area with cooler temperatures in order to deploy new free cooling power reduction designs, just as it is currently doing in Perth and Melbourne.

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Posted 11/09/09 at 06:48:43 AM by Paul Lilly

IBM continues to focus on going green and is now hard at work developing technology that could lead to zero-emission data centers, according to a report at eWeek.com.

Bruno Michel, the guy in charge of Advanced Thermal Packaging at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, said he and his team have put their heads together trying to figure out new ways of reducing emissions and waste in data centers. Among the ideas being tossed around are chip stacking and liquid cooling.

"High-performance liquid cooling allows data centers to operate with coolant temperatures above the free cooling limit in all climates, eliminating the need to chillers and allowing the thermal energy to be reused in cold climates," Michel said.

According to Michel, his team has been able to remove 85 percent the heat load from high-performance compute nodes at a temperature of 60C.

As data centers continue to consume more energy, expect more companies to devote increasing amounts of R&D into reducing emissions.

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Posted 11/06/09 at 11:15:04 AM by Paul Lilly

Late last month, several owners of Intel's X25-M G2 solid state drives cried foul when a firmware update promising a 40 percent performance boost ended up bricking their drives instead. Oops! That marked the latest in a what's becoming a string of problems plaguing the 34nm SSDs, and once again, Intel says a fix is on the way.

"Intel has replicated the issue on 34nm SSDs -- X25-M -- and is working a fix," wrote Alan Frost of Intel's NAND Solutions Group. "Intel is pursuing the resolution of this as a high priority. Intel is seeking direct feedback on this issue from members of the [Intel Support Community]... asking them to send their drives directly to Intel to expedite the analysis of the issues. This action will enable us to more quickly generate a resolution for this issue."

Frost added that there have been no reports of related issues by users who were able to successfully upgrade to the 02ha firmware via the firmware upgrade tool, which would suggest the problem isn't the firmware itself, but a bug in the loader software.

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