[BBLISA] September recap and October meeting

[John P. Rouillard]

Hello all:

I'm sorry I am late with this. here is a short recap of last month's
presentation and an announcement for next Wednesday's presentation.

I would like to thank the speaker and the 18 people who came to the
talk on "Solid State Drives: Use, Performance, Caching, and More" by
Dan Noe from VeloBit.

We had a very lively discussion about Solid State Drives. The
discussion covered a number of things including the reliability of the
various components that make up a SSD. The benefits/costs associated
with multi and single level cells (MLC/SLC) and the role of the
firmware on drive performance was shown. Also the role of SSDs
connected to a SAS/SATA bus vs. solid state disks that connect
directly to the PCI bus was discussed. Security aspects of SSDs were
discussed including the effects of the flash translation layer in the
drive firmware which makes erasing drives difficult.

SSDs are unique because of the long write/erase cycles and write
amplification that occurs as the drives are used. This can be affected
by the alignment of the data on the drives. How to improve performance
and lifetime using techniques similar to short stroking a hard drive
we also addressed.

Because of these unique characteristics compared to spinning media,
SSDs have a particular workload that they excel at. This includes
acting as a cache for randomly accessed data.

At the request of the attendee's the VeloBit software was also
discussed and how it uses an SSD as a block level cache for reading
and writing using compression and on the fly de-duplication to make
better use of the unique nature of SSDs.

October's presentation will be on Wednesday, October 10, 2012 by Peter
Baer Galvin about:

    The State of ZFS

  ZFS has taken the world by storm, and is still advancing. This talk
  will summarize the state of ZFS, including its availability, feature
  set, and recent changes.

  Peter Baer Galvin is a seasoned tech writer, columnist, consultant,
  teacher and author. He is the CTO for systems integrator and VAR,
  Corporate Technologies (www.cptech.com). He's a Lecturer at Boston
  University and co-author of the Operating Systems Concepts
  textbooks. He's given talks and tutorials at USENIX conferences and
  other venues.

The location is MIT E-51, Room 149 and the agenda is:

  7:00 - Announcements & Introductions
  7:25 - Door prizes (worth anywhere from $43.99 to $2.99)
  7:30 - Formal presentation

I hope to see you there.

--
				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
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My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.