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back to article Explained: How LSI and Oracle cooked up magical flash-embiggening sauce

Oracle and LSI have magicked up a way for LSI’s Nytro server flash cards to hold more data than they’re seemingly physically capable of holding and called it Dynamic Logical Capacity (DLC). How does it work? We thought it might be a paging mechanism – but we were dead wrong. The card compresses the data it is sent and can …

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  1. Mine's a pint
    Facepalm

    Double-size me!

    Wow! We will soon see storage sold as double capacity assuming 2:1 compression, just like tape cartridges. More confusion as with hard drives capacity quoted in the strange units of MB which are 1000KB.

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  2. MondoMan
    Facepalm

    This has been implemented for years now

    This is the technique Sandforce has been using for more than half a decade now, and why LSI bought them two years ago.

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  3. Suricou Raven

    2:1?

    They lie!

    2:1 on what, exactly? The bulk of storage is usually media, which is already compressed. Even office documents are compressed now. The only real-world situation in which you're going to see 2:1 is database backups, and not even for all databases.

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    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Even office documents are compressed now

      Wrong. Office documents can be compressed now, at the condition that the user saves them in the latest format.

      I know quite a few (large) companies with a wealth of documents in Compatible Mode format who are not lifting a finger to convert them all. Most of them are creating new documents in the new format, but all of them have some legacy app that cannot deal with the new format so the old docs stay as they are.

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  4. flashdba
    Megaphone

    Value for money... at a cost

    Wow, Oracle is going to allow me to get more value for money from my Exadata flash cache by storing data compressed at 2:1 ratio! This is sooo cool.

    http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/engineered-systems/exadata/exadata-x4-changes-2080051.pdf

    Hold on a minute though, what's this information on page 22: "Requires Advanced Compression Option on all databases that access compressed flash cache". It's not exactly clear but it looks like you need to by ACO licenses to make use of this compression feature.

    And for a full rack X4-2 that's 192 cores * $11.5k list price * 0.5 license multiplication factor = over ONE MILLION DOLLARS of extra license costs. Plus 22% annual maintenance fees.

    No wonder they didn't mention this in the press releases or on the data sheets.

    http://flashdba.com/2013/12/20/oracle-exadata-x4-part-1-bigger-than-it-looks/

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  5. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Meh

    Kind of like what archive tapes systems have been doing for the last 30+ years

    All that is old is new again.

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  6. mi1400
    Flame

    @Pascal Monett ... stupid macdonald eating burger kid

    @Pascal Monett ... stupid macdonald eating burger kid... he/SuricouRaven meant latest format by saying word "now".

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