With all this EMC Lightning kerfuffle and Dell, HDS and NetApp joining in – with HP pointedly saying "No comment" like we really believe it's not playing too – there's a Big Blue elephant we're not hearing or seeing. Don't worry, IBM definitely has skin in this game – and it's called eXFlash. This is solid state storage local …

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Friday 10th February 2012 20:48 GMT LeguanArne

So IBM offers SSD's to their servers?

Revolutionary!

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1. Saturday 11th February 2012 00:25 GMT Tom Maddox
  
  No, no, no
  
  This is all just so you can run Lotus Notes at speeds greater than a crawl.
  
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  1. Monday 13th February 2012 13:22 GMT Captain Scarlet
    
    There nothing wrong with a crawl
    
    Oh dammit my DESKTOP6.NDK workspace file has corrupt.
    
    On a serious Note, you can always run Lotus Notes in legacy mode if speed is your thing.
    
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Saturday 11th February 2012 01:28 GMT Anonymous Coward

kerfuffle -- best word this week

So it's 2012 and they have `hot swap` listed as a new feature on a product. As said `kerfuffle` realy is the best word this week and so very very apt.

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Saturday 11th February 2012 10:07 GMT Dare to Think

Easily outgunned....by DIY

Why does IBM need hot swapping for SSD, does IBM's solution lead to more SSD failures?

The throughput is easily outgunned by the 410,000 IOPS and the 2,800MB/s read and write of a 1.6TB SSD PCIe.

Looks to me if you want to have a decent server you, er, take your earthing kit and screwdriver and build it yourself.

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1. Saturday 11th February 2012 11:37 GMT Destroy All Monsters
  
  That depends on where you feel your are situated in the food chain.
  
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2. Monday 13th February 2012 17:23 GMT Nacona
  
  Actually IBM has been selling the full suite of PCIe based solid state since before the announced the EXFlash.
  
  While the PCIe are faster, they do have the downside of not being hot - swap and only able to use software RAID to protect data unlike the EXFlash which sits behind a hardware RAID card allowing for a lot more flexibility and aggregation if required.
  
  But hey, you seem to know everything already :)
  
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Saturday 11th February 2012 11:49 GMT Lorddraco

I though it is equivalent .. but it is not

It is not even close ... it is just a bunch of SSD in a Disk enclosure using SAS or SATA interconnect ... mmm .. funny that it is classified as VFCache equivalent? Think VFCAche is greatly mis-understood....

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1. Saturday 11th February 2012 16:53 GMT Ammaross Danan
  
  Additionally
  
  If these disks are stuck in a RAID, does that mean IBM developed a RAID controller that passes TRIM through to the SSDs? Or at the very least, these disks will have garbage collection to prevent them from performing like a SSDNow drive....
  
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  1. Monday 13th February 2012 17:23 GMT Nacona
    
    The IBM RAID cards have been supporting SSD devices for a long time now, this is nothing new.
    
    Regarding TRIM, that is a function where the SSD is relying on the O/S to govern recycling of deleted data cells. In the SSD's in use in the servers, the SSD's have an internal garbage collection mechanism that takes care of this function.
    
    As I mentioned in my earlier post, putting the SSD's behind a RAID card ( an HBA is supported as well) gives you flexibility on hardware assisted data protection as well as drive aggregation for capacity increases.
    
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