Starboard Storage Blog

As many of you, I read with interest this week that as Apple announced their new IPAD Mini, they also announced that they would be shipping new Fusion drives in their MACs. What is the Fusion drive? As described by Phil Schiller of Apple, it is a combination of flash and spinning HDD drive to speed performance. As you look under the covers of the announcement, more emerges, because what Apple has done is add quite a lot of flash to the drive,120GB in fact. This amounts to between 3 and 10% of the capacity of the HDD.

At SNW (Storage Networking world) in California, Greg Schulz of Storage IO and his co-host Bruce Ravid of Ravid & Associates were able to catch up with Starboard Storage CMO Karl Chen in the bar. As you might expect, the conversation did turn to some questions on Starboard Storage but not before it covered VMworld, The Americas Cup, the number of storage startups, and the value of networking in the storage industry (the social kind).

You can be a fly on the wall here:-

http://storageio.com/audio/SNW2012_KarlChen.mp3

and take a look at more of Greg Schulz unique insight into the state of servers and storage here:-

http://bit.ly/RaLksb

By now, readers of this blog will know that Starboard Storage uses SSD as both a read and a write cache in order to offer the performance of solid state at the economics of spinning disk. One of the questions I get asked is “What magic do you use to promote data to the read cache?”, or “How does your SSD caching work?” To help answer this I like to use the analogy of a frequent flyer program and here’s why.

Sometimes in the day to day heat of doing your job it is easy to forget what you are actually selling to customers. Today I got a timely reminder.

I was discussing some of the features of our AC72 Storage System including our SSD Accelerator with a potential customer when an email hit my desk from an existing customer. The email was titled “Kudos to Starboard”.