 |
| Seemingly belying my upbeat projections
for the
enterprise SSD
market in an earlier article
is the SSD Market
Recession-Proof? in this new article -here below - I explain... |
why the
ASAP hockey stick
curve is flat...by
Zsolt Kerekes, editor, May 28, 2010
|
why's no one buying
auto-tiering SSDs?
the Problem with Selling Revolutionary
SSDs to Risk Averse Technology Laggards |
Editor:- May 28, 2010 - OCZ yesterday
announced
that its SSDs have been qualified for compatibility with Adaptec's MaxIQ SSD
caching products (which are
SATA compatible
SSD ASAP controllers
for Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage).
Originally
launched in
September 2009 to
interoperate with Intel
SSDs - Adaptec's product was in the forefront of a new wave of products
designed to automate the acceleration effect of mixing SSDs with legacy HDD
arrays in hybrid
storage pools - a paradigm discussed in an article here on
StorageSearch.com which was aptly
titled Using SSDs to
Boost Legacy RAID and Database Performance (published in 2004).
The
idea (of using a small capacity SSD to cache a large capacity HDD array) has
been around for more than 20 years - to the dawn of the
RAID systems concept and
this kind of speedup challenge was my #1 product design priority when I
joined a hot start up called Databasix in 1987. I didn't solve the problem -
but during the next several years learned a lot about performance measurements
and how to achieve wire speed writes in rotating (and solid state) storage
arrays.
The SSD automatic tuning / optimization problem has never
been successfully solved in a way which is economic for all applications.
Personally I don't think it ever will be. Like all SSD acceleration schemes
(except those which use 100% SSD without HDD) - the application speedup is
environmentally specific. It depends on the server environment, the shape
of the user process demand curve, the spatial distribution of hot-spot data and
the compatibility of the caching algorithms compared to the real-life data
flows.
Vendors in this market space face a tough challenge - which is
that their ideal customers are mostly SSD virgins who are conservative by
nature and who have opted out of earlier generations of SSD acceleration
because their installations were not big enough to make human tuning feasible -
or because the cost benefits of SSD speedup versus server consolidation were not
big enough to justify the risk in their own business operations.
That
means SSD ASAP companies have been offering revolutionary products to potential
customers who by their own choices behave as technology laggards. No
surprise it has not resulted in any hockey stick sales growth curves (yet).
But I have no doubt that when some companies do prove that their way of doing
SSD ASAPs is the safe way to go for specific applications (and specific server
environments) - it will become a huge market. The clock is ticking. The SSD
ASAP market is only viable
until the SSD array
cost of ownership model falls below that of HDDs |
...Later:- discussing
these problems with some readers I used the idea of concatenated probabilities
to explain why new vendors in this market were seeing slow sales ramps.
1st
- the user has to believe that SSDs will solve their problems (and the ideal
customer segment served by ASAPs has already resisted SSDs until now).
2nd
- the user has to be convinced that your own proprietary SSD ASAP algorithms
are the best match for the application and server environment they've got - and
you (the SSD vendor) will still be around in a few years to support them.
Because unlike vanilla SSD accelerators - these ASAPs will only do speedups
based on algorithms which are designed into the box. What if the algorithms
aren't quite right? - and need to evolve... If the vendor is bust - the user is
stuck with an expensive storage box which performs no useful functions at all.
Satisfying
both conditions concurrently is a much smaller probability than satisfying
either one. And to make things worse - establishing the reputation consistent
with calming nervous user FUD could take longer than the typical market life
of a new SSD product. |
| ......................................................................................................................... |
| ...Later:- in July
2010 - an article - when the SSD brand
sends the wrong signal discussed 2 of the oldest surviving SSD brands
- Dataram and RamSan . |
| ......................................................................................................................... |
| ...Later:- -
December 2010 - SSD ASAPs are mentioned in
11 SSD Predictions
for 2011. |
