Posts by marc farley

Juniper acquires Sun's chip chief with one Yen

Maybe networking will be a better fit

Sun had a habit of putting people in charge of storage who had deep technology expertise in anything but storage. I always assumed that Sun figured storage to be a "low lifer's" business. Considering that Sun had Fibre Channel systems years before anybody else, it's astounding that they allowed every Tom, Dick and Harry in the storage business (EMC, Compaq, Netapp?) to eat their lunch. By the time Yen was installed, the wagon was already down to two wheels and buried in mud.

Dell gets in a state over SSD claims

Dell EqualLogic blogger

I'm Marc Farley from Dell (EqualLogic). I don't work with the laptop SSD folks, but I became instantly interested in this story because it seemed so outrageous. I found the SSD group and checked out the story and - low and behold - was utter rubbish. We keep ORT reports for all this stuff and the flash SSDs are doing extremely well. They were sold initially for high mobility and rugged environments - a hard place for any storage to survive and they have better failure stats than disk drives. And that was for the first generation product. Early failure stats for 2nd gen SSDs are spectacular.

As to wear out. Yes, we use wear leveling algorithms to alleviate this, but at some point, there will be some statistical distribution of cells that can't be written to. Mind you, this takes some time. Anyway, the point is, Dell SSDs are designed to convert to read only devices when this happens. I don't know how this is done or at what point - but the main thing is that data is preserved, not lost.

This whole thing is so overblown and reckless. The technology is already highly reliable and getting even better. This will be born out over time.