| Here's a sprinkling of the topics
discussed when Fusion-io's CEO - David Flynn spoke to the mouse site. | |
| ... |
| Flash SSD
storage density |
It's
well known
that people have turned to SSDs for server acceleration because CPU clock
rates stopped accelerating and
hard
disk spin rates stalled - but David Flynn suprised me by saying that in his
view the DRAM market had run out of steam too.
At the chip level the
storage capacity of flash is much denser than DRAM.
But because of
the lower power consumption of flash you can pack much more flash into a
rackmount SSD
than the chip density comparisons would suggest.
He said that using
today's technology you can get 200x more capacity using flash than RAM
in a rackmount system. He said that
petabyte SSD
installations are technically feasible now. | | |
| ... |
| the data
driven economy |
| David Flynn said that in the
near future datacenters would be regarded as drivers of the knowledge economy
in the same way as factories were in the industrial age. | | |
| . |
| flaky SSDs and flash
burnout in RAID |
David Flynn said the situation
regarding the misapplication of consumer grade SSD technology to enterprise
applications was a real problem for the reputation of the SSD market.
He
said one organization (which he named) had installed RAID systems using
Intel SSDs in a high
performance environment.
About half the SSDs had "burned out"
after a year.
Worse than that - when the customer investigated more
closely they found that some SSDs had failed in a way which had not been
detected by the RAID controllers.
That meant the data was trashed.
David
Flynn wryly commented that there was a lot more to marketing enterprise SSDs
than adding an "e" to a consumer technology SSD brand (and
redesignating it an "enterprise" product).
He said Intel has
a very strong brand
in the computer market and he doubted it would be dented - even by as many as
4 SSD design recalls
- but
customer education
about SSDs is a serious issue in the industry. | | |
| . |
weakness in
some competing PCIe SSD architectures /
the SSD Heresies
|
David Flynn shared his views
about other oems - rushing to get into the PCIe SSD market.
Some
products had been little more than cards which had a
RAID controller and
bunch of SATA SSDs
repackaged on a card. (For example
OCZ's
Z-Drive
- unveiled at CeBIT in March
2009.)
He
said not only was performance terrible - because they were doing all that hard
disk interface "rubbish" between the PCIe bus and the flash memory -
but the products did not have end to end error correction. Any big installed
base of such SSDs ran serious risks of uncorrectable random data corruption.
He
said Fusion-io's attention to the subject of data integrity was one of the
things which was appreciated and well understood by their server oem partners
HP
and
IBM.
He
said that some other new companies coming into the PCIe SSD market with native
PCIe designs - such as LSI
(working with Seagate)
might find it difficult to solve subtle reliability problems - because the
different parts and technologies (which include controllers from
SandForce) would be
coming from 4 (or more) different places. | | |
| . |
| storage reliability |
David Flynn talked more about
this subject than anything else.
Mostly it was related to SSDs and is
reported elsewhere on this page.
But he also said that it was a bigger
problem for hard disk based systems than most users fully appreciated - because
of inadequate strength error correction designed into industry standard hard
disk interfaces.
He said the only practical way to prevent data
corruption in HDD based datacenters was to overlay additional levels of error
checking and data healing outside the arrays. This harmed performance - but was
essential.
He observed that many mid range
RAID vendors approach big
end user sites
hoping to
dislodge vendors like
EMC with lower cost
storage. But one of the added values in these big iron storage systems is the
enterprise wide data integrity cushion which mid scale vendors can't easily
penetrate or replicate. | | |
| . |
| hardware
minimalism |
David Flynn talked about the
virtues of stripping out layers of unnecesary junk in the design of their SSD -
which would only be there to emulate hard disk protocols.
He said this
was one of the aspects of the company which had appealed to
Steve Wozniak - who is
now Fusion-io's Chief Scientist.
Flynn related one of the
many legendary tales
told about Wozniak's design of the Apple Computer - the world's first high
volume desktop PC - when Wozniak replaced a whole bunch of chips which
traditionally would have been needed to interface to a floppy drive - and
instead used sofware.
Not only did that save cost - but by using the
6502 processor to calculate the momentun of the mechanics - his design gave
better performance with the same floppy media than the dumb floppy chips it
replaced. | | |
| . |
|
|
| . |
SSD history
Can you
trust SSD market data?
where are we now
with SSD software?
how fast can your SSD
run backwards?
Decloaking
hidden segments in the enterprise for SSD boxes |
