Some so-called “Green” harddisks don’t like being in a RAID array. These are primarily SATA drives, and they gain their green credentials by being able reduce their RPM when not in use, as well as other aggressive power management trickery. That’s all cool and in a way desirable – we want our hardware to use less power whenever possible! – but the time it takes some drives to “wake up” again is longer than a RAID setup is willing to tolerate.

First of all, you may wonder why I bother with SATA disks at all for RAID. I’ve written about this before, but they simply deliver plenty for much less money. Higher RPM doesn’t necessarily help you for a db-related (random access) workload, and for tasks like backups which do have a lot of speed may not be a primary concern. SATA disks have a shorter command queue than SAS, so that means they might need to seek more – however a smart RAID controller would already arrange its I/O …

How many in your household again?

One of President John Kennedy’s most memorable phrases is “ask not what your country can do for you –  ask what can you do for your country”.  I got to thinking about this over lunch with a fellow colleague in the big data space. After comparing named customers for a while, we realized we had forgotten one of the biggest “big data” customers whom we both have in common – the government.

Whether you believe in small or big government, one thing is for certain – it has some very big data on its hands. Some of this is freely available, such as the …

(Fractal) Tree Frog

Fractal Tree™ indexes are green. They have the potential to be greener still. Here’s why:

Remarkably, data centers consume 1-3 percent of all the US electricity. A majority of this power is used to drive servers and storage systems. Significant energy savings remain on the table.

Here’s why Fractal Tree indexing enables more energy-efficient storage: Data centers typically use many small-capacity disks rather than a few large-capacity disks. Why? One reason is to harness more spindles to obtain more I/Os per second. In some high-performance applications, users go so far as to employ techniques such as “ …

Kickfire has announced (as of April 14th, 2008) record breaking results in the TPC-H(tm) Price/Performance category at 300GB and also in overall performance in the non-clustered category at 300GB.
You can find the official results here on the TPC(tm) (Transaction Processing Performance Council) website:
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp
http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp?resulttype=noncluster

While the amazingly low price of the Kickfire Database Appliance 2400 will grab you (only about twice the price of a typical 4U MySQL database server) -- the amazing performance per watt is truly incredible. The 3RU Kickfire appliance used in the 300GB volume test consumes …