More on DSSD
-- DIsclaimer: EMC'er here --
Data services are not feature of this platform. Great speed is: 10m IOPS in 5 RU, at 100ns latency. This platform expects the protection to happen at the application layer (e.g. Oracle Data Guard, Flashback DB), or to have RO data sets on it (for say, Hadoop).
As a previous poster has stated, this is not a general purpose storage platform. This is to let your business do things that weren't possible before. You can only put so much memory in servers, and then this memory is not addressable across servers as a shared pool (without 3rd party hacks). So how to load massive datasets into 'memory' to perform close-to-realtime analysis? How do you change someone's behaviour in the act of doing something? (think a shopper walking past a display, you have their phone number and location, and you want them to buy). You need something that can perform lightning-quick, and this is what DSSD is. I prefer to think of it as a shared memory extension for servers, rather than a storage platform.
There are examples of customers who are using DSSD to get Exadata-like performance for their Oracle environment (42GB/s in 5 RU vs Exadata 28 RU), but without the fancy DB tuning/layout required with Exadata. And cost savings :)
There are 3 ways to use DSSD from Day 1:
* As a block storage device on linux (more *nix platform support to follow later).
* As a Hadoop data node (using the Cloudera plugin). More plugins to follows post-GA. Going with this approach means you can de-couple compute from storage, so you are not having to add storage that is embedded in your computes nodes, each time you add compute (whether you need the storage or not). And vice versa.
* via the FLOOD API, so you can make calls directly from your app.
PS: I hate the phrase "game changing". Pet peeve I guess.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
