Flash and Software-defined technology from 10 years ago

How would you even survive one day without flash technology? Do you even have enough time to wait for classic, rotary disk systems data access? USB drives and SD cards are now the most commonly used technology over the last 10 years; meanwhile flash is seriously present in data centers for only a few years now. We believed in this very technology more than 10 years ago, where we successfully finished our flash project in the Company ELES, which was then technically represented by Mr. Valentine Preston. In those days there were only a few manufacturers present, so the challenge was to guarantee an as fast as possible read/write response of data recordings for applications, that were added to the system for management and control of the electro-energetic transmission network.

AThe architecture was based on Intel platforms with hyper drive module (flash) key components and open-E NAS operational systems, which would be today classified as software defined storage solution. The servers integrated top-quality RAID controllers, made by the Company 3ware (later AMCC, now under the Company Avago), that guaranteed, on 2 classic disks, capacities for safety backup on the flash disk space.   [quote author="Valentin Preston"]In those days we decided, in the process managing sector of our workspace ELES, to use the flash technology, because a strong need for interval gathering of larger quantities of process data in real-time was emerging. That is why we decided to use NAS SSD with RAM disk subsystems based on the DDRAM fast storage.[/quote]   The infrastructure was used for fast capturing, forwarding processing and other data of different environments (heavily and less heavy protected networks) and users (processing, business users) and only those. The application demands were the following:

• Security – NAS SSD disk subsystems had to:
  • enable safe data transfer through different environments,
  • prevent access from business to protected processing networks,
  • prevent transfer of program codes and system commands from business to processing networks,
  • enable system management, authorization and assigning access rights only to system administrators through a separate controller console,
  • prevent loss of written data in an event of system loss,
  • enable a working system in an event of loss of outer electric power.
• Performance - the NAS SSD disk system had to fulfil following criteria:
  • SSD capacities for 6GB-big data bases,
  • Up to 40.000 recording per second (the size of the data block range from 100 B to 1KB), circular buffer (FIFO).

  [quote author="Valentin Preston"]The selected NAS SSD technology fulfilled our needs of usefulness, performance and safety completely and even went beyond them. The system worked without any errors all the time it was used, from the end of the year 2005 till 2010.[/quote]   10 years ago, when we implemented these solutions, we were completely convinced of the future of this technology in a similar way. Today 95% of all our new projects are based in combination with these kind of or similar solutions with flash. We helped our customers in the last few years to build trust in flash technology and we still are; with this approach we guarantee our customers high competitiveness of their business decisions, which are based on fast data access and their processing.