| A New
Market for RAID Controller OEMs? |
Editor:- May 8, 2008 -
traditionally what stirs up a hornet's nest in the
RAID controller HBA
market is the introduction of new interfaces.
I've chronicled the
emergence of RAID controllers using incrementally faster versions of
parallel SCSI, then
fibre-channel (from the
100Mbps days), SATA
and SAS for the
past
16 years.
These technology changes (and the follow-on 2x, 4x, 8x speedups)
always provide a window of opportunity to oems who want to be #1 in the new
standard.
In the next few years a new market will open up for RAID
controller HBAs aimed at the
SSD market.
An
ideal RAID adapter for a
rackmount SSD
needs different characteristics than a hard disk array.
- better latency - the access time in the RAID becomes a critical
competitive factor for the overall SSD array performence.
- smaller RAM cache (and different sorting algorithms).
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I predict that in the next 5
years the SSD RAID adapter market will become as important a new market segment
(for RAID technology oems) as the appearance of a new interface standard like
SATA was - in the past decade. | | |
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| Nibble:-
How Much Hay Has Your Car Been Eating Lately? |
Editor:- May 6, 2008 - I've
been publishing articles about the
SSD market for over a
decade - so maybe that's why something in my brain snapped yesterday - when I
was reading yet another new article from an SSD vendor about the server
acceleration which you could get from their product.
Because the only
competition it mentioned was
hard drives.
Enough
is enough! - I said.
I can't remember whether the article claimed
their product was 300x or 500x faster in random IOPS than a 15K
SAS hard drive -
but as the IOPS in a hard drive haven't changed much since the appearance of the
first 15K RPM products in
EMC's CLARiiON
systems in 2002, and as there may
never
be a 20K RPM drive... The long and the short of it is that every month the
fastest SSDs get
better - while the fastest hard drives remain exactly as fast as they were. So
the HDD versus SSD random IOPS gap gets wider. We haven't learned anything
new!
I'm not denying that these comparisons have been useful in the
past. And they are still useful when a single
2.5" SSD for
example is being compared with a single 2.5" hard drive. But as I wrote in
an article in
2003 when you're looking at what a fast
rackmount SSD can
do for you - you should be calculating how many servers you can save /
or would need to add to get to the same 3x application speedup - not how
many disks.
It's understandable that people refer new products to an
assumed common frame of reference.
I'm sure that a century ago when
the first car owners were talking to their neighbors - they must have made
comparisons like - how much faster they were than a horse.
"It's
amazing. Unlike my old horse my new car doesn't get tired. And I don't need
pasture or hay to make it go - just a few bottles of gas."
And
you didn't get the same stinking mess in the city streets either. (At the time
the Sherlock Holmes stories were being published in the Strand Magazine in 1892
- there was a "green" market carting horse dung out of London to stop
the streets becoming impassable.)
I think I'm safe in assuming that the
last time you bought a car - you didn't compare its speed or fuel consumption
to a horse. Am I right?
No - of course not. You compared it to other
cars.
It's a sign of a maturing market when there are enough products
around to compare them to each other, instead of comparing them to what came
before. And we have reached that time with SSDs. It's taken
30 years
- but that's another story.
This new wave of comparing SSDs to each
other kicked off with the article
RAM SSDs versus
Flash SSDs - which is Best? - which included views from leading SSD
oems on both sides of the fence. And other articles have demolished the
myths about SLC
flash SSDs while highlighting the
risks of using
MLC flash in inappropriate server applications.
In my view
comparing SSDs to HDDs does not give you a useful picture when you're looking
at options in the server acceleration market. |
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Although I expect that such
weak comparisons will be sprinkled in lite weight SSD articles for the next
few years - it's time for some stronger seasoning. It's time for more articles
by SSD vendors to say how their products and technologies compare with other
SSDs. | | |
| . |
| Nibble:-
Whatever Happened to Optical Storage? |
Editor:- when I started
STORAGEsearch.com in 1998 there was
a lot of industry excitement about the promise of optical storage.
Marketers
in optical storage companies set the hype volume at a high level - which was
necessary in those days for anyone to be heard above the din of the dotcom
boom.
It was not uncommon to read claims like:-
- "Our optical disks will offer more capacity than hard drives."
and / or
- "Our new optical storage will be faster than hard disks." and /
or
- "Optical storage will replace
tape and
disks as the primary backup
medium."
Although hundreds of millions of dollars got poured into
such ventures (a small dribble compared to the the multi-billion dollar
VC storage stream)
nothing very significant ever came out the other end. And certainly nothing
approaching the aspirations of the industry.
Instead the optical
storage industry has settled into a comfortable sort of middle age couch potato
early retirement. Instead of offering revolutionary products - they're mostly
content churning out bits of shiny plastic for delivering music or movies.
There are still some comnpanies flogging the dead horse of optical
backup and archiving. But for most users - the proposition of backing up a
single hard disk onto 10 or more optical ones - doesn't sound like a better way
to do things.
Every couple of years - the rallying cries from the old
pretenders (or new ones) of optical storage are heard again. But after a few
flurries and flag waving press releases - they go quiet and nothing more is
heard. |
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If anything does happen to
change that - I'll let you know on these
news pages. | | |
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STORAGEsearch
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