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the SSD
news archives
Can you
trust SSD market data?
after AFAs -
what's the next box?
what's
RAM really? - RAM in an SSD context
Can you tell me the best
way to get to SSD Street?
controllernomics
and risk reward with big memory "flash as RAM"
where are we
heading with memory intensive systems and software? |
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| would you
buy an SSD array for $1 million a pop? |
Editor:- March 3, 2017 - Dell EMC has end of lifed
the DSSD product line (an NVMe array and one of the
fastest SSD systems
in the market) and the
storyline
discussed in StorageReview.com
is the missmatch between Dell's high volume commodity business and this niche
HPC storage box.
The warm up to such an ending came in a
news
story in December 2016 by the
Register which revealed the $1 billion gap between the cost of
acquiring and developing the product and sales ($6 million).
Editor's
comments:- In the short term this is good news for
IBM's
FlashSystem
which is the most mature storage product line in this class.
And it's
good news for startups and other specialist SSD companies which engage with the
high performance end of the market.
One question I guess about the DSSD
product line is that the market which it might have been aimed at 3 years ago
doesn't exist any more.
Most computer companies who would be looking
for HPC storage of the NVMe array variety are easily able to produce such
systems from a competitive market of
2.5" NVMe SSDs.
So why pay a premium to EMC or anyone else?
But a more deep rooted
problem is that the DSSD is an old fashioned systems designer's prototype
implementation of a modern persistent memory box. And the nvm memory changes
in recent years (in cell technology and
controllernomics
tiering) makes the design about as useful as a TTL minicomputer competing with
an NMOS microprocessor.
No matter how much cooling or SRAM you pack
into a card - the cheapest place to solve latency problems is in the
semiconductor chip itself before the data hits the external brake pads of the
physical interface to copper.
We're going to see a lot of different
permutations of big memory coming into the market. Generally the smaller the box
and the closer it is to the applications processor the less waste there is in
intersystems latency.
The DSSD approach has been blown away by
commodity arrays at the low end of its performance ramge and by genuine memory
systems technology advances at the high end.
Storage systems thinking
can't compete for performance with semiconductor integrated memory systems
architecture.
And here's another angle...
If you were looking
for a low cost companion ultra fast compute box to work as a companion to
DSSD class storage -
Symbolic IO have got
their own way to do it and can do it faster with less hardware. | | |
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