back to article IBM Zurich wants to spice up your life with SALSA translation layer

Research gnomes at IBM Zurich say we should take translation layers off storage devices and run many at the same time on a server to get faster IO. They have published a research paper discussing this. An SSD has a Flash Translation Layer (FTL), which interfaces between the database and file system concepts on the host system …

  1. Nate Amsden

    sounds similar to other tech

    HP 3PAR adaptive sparing(2014, maybe earlier) closely integrates the SSD with the array, returning a chunk of space otherwise reserved for the SSD for bad blocks etc to the array. The array then uses it's own algorithms(which it was using regardless) to mark stuff as bad when there are read errors etc. Then there is adaptive read and write caching which optimizes the data going to the SSDs so they get the data in the most efficient means possible(reduces wear).

    I believe more recently I have read other companies deploying similar tech in their arrays.

    Obviously such tech generally hasn't been available to servers with internal storage(which is what the article seems to be targeting with software RAID etc)

  2. Androgynous Cow Herd
    Headmaster

    The difference may be in the execution

    Another HPE product, Nimble, is a log structured system and aspects of this approach also sounds similar to CASL. Some of it eerily so, like optimizing and tuning writes for the different kinds of underlying media, and offloading that functionality to X64 processors rather than letting the media controllers do it. Offloading to the server instead of the storage controller sounds a bit like Datrium.

    Coming out of IBM, it's nice to see something that resembles a more modern approach than the V7000, anyway. Good for them.

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