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SSD empowered cloudSSD newsthe Top SSD Companies After AFAs... what's next? Can you trust SSD market data? introducing Memory Defined Software the changing face of DWPD in real products decloaking hidden segments in the enterprise controllernomics and user risk reward with big memory "flash as RAM" the importance of being earnest about 3DXPoint and other SSD memoryfication heresies | ||||||||||||
| in-memory cache as a
cloud service - beta from GridGain Editor:- June 12, 2018 - GridGain Systems today announced the beta release and free trials of GridGain Cloud - an in-memory cache-as-a-service that allows users to rapidly deploy a distributed in-memory cache and access it using ANSI-99 SQL, key-value or REST APIs. The result is in-memory computing performance in the cloud, which can be massively scaled out and can be deployed in minutes for caching applications. why we need cloud chips Editor:- March 10, 2018 - "In any computer architecture, it takes a lot more energy to fetch and schedule an instruction than it does to execute that instruction" says Rado Danilak, founder and CEO - Tachyum - in his new blog - Moore's Law Is Dying - So Where Are Its Heirs? - which among other things - shows how the transactional costs of fetching instructions and data in classical processors. ...read the article Editor's comments:- the needs of the cloud, coupled with growing understanding between the tradeoffs between processors, memory, controller dynamics, software and energy consumption since the widespread deployment of solid state storage have been the inspiration for rethinking all the classical elements of computer architecture. Some of that thinking has been rooted in the memory space but just as significant has been a rethinking of what processors should aim to do. Tachyum announced external funding for its Cloud Chip last month. And as with previous disruptive technologies - part of the warm up process for the market - is to educate more people about how things work now so they can better appreciate what the new technologies offer. ioFABRIC awarded patent for latency aware software Editor:- February 27, 2018 - ioFABRIC today announced it has been awarded a patent for an innovation in its Vicinity policy engine for creating and managing data volumes based on latency requirements. The patent protects a method for maintaining fast response times by auto-migrating data when hardware resources are added or decommissioned, when performance degrades due to overconsumption, or application use requirements change. Vicinity can apply this policy even when a volume is spread over multiple nodes and storage devices see also:- Latency - the SSD bookmarks, are we ready for infinitely faster RAM? Microsoft acquires NASA's cloud hybridisor - Avere Systems Editor:- January 3, 2018 - Microsoft today announced it has agreed to acquire Avere Systems. Ron Bianchini, President and CEO - Avere Systems said - "When we started Avere Systems in 2008, our founding ideology was to use fast, flash-based storage in the most efficient, effective manner possible in the datacenter. Along the way, our team of file systems experts created a technology that not only optimized critical on-premises storage resources but also enabled enterprises to move mission-critical, high performance application workloads to the cloud."...read more from Ron Bianchini Editor's comments:- There was a lot of deep thinking in Avere. I wish them luck in the reset and recompile chaos-sphere. the SSD empowered cloud after AFAs what's next? - cloud adapted memory WekaIO compares cloud storage pools to IBM FlashSystem Editor:- July 12, 2017 -WekaIO - a cloud storage software company today emerged from stealth and announced details of its cloud-native scalable file system which the company says can deliver performance comparable to rackmount SSDs / AFAs. Editor's comments:- The notable thing for me in this announcement was that WekaIO uses a performance benchmark compared against an IBM FlashSystem 900 (the decendant of the RamSan world's fastest storage systems from TMS.) WekaIO says "Utilizing only 120 cloud compute instances with locally attached storage, WekaIO completed 1,000 simultaneous software builds compared to 240 on IBM's high-end FlashSystem 900. The WekaIO software utilized only 5% of the AWS compute instance resources, leaving 95% available to run customer applications." That's an ambitious positioning statement and offers users a glimpse into the kind of performance they can get by using flash assisted cloud services. Like other modern SSD fabric software software - "WekaIO eliminates bottlenecks and storage silos by aggregating local SSDs inside the servers into one logical pool, which is then presented as a single namespace to the host applications." Walmart generates 2.5PB of analyzable data every hour Editor:- April 3, 2017 - Walmart's Data Café is a private cloud which supports business decision makers in its 20,000 stores who can access over 200 streams of internal and external data, including 40 petabytes of recent transactional data, which can be modelled, manipulated and visualized. I learned the above stats in a new case study - Big Data At Walmart: How 40+ Petabytes Improves Retail Decision-Making by business author Bernard Marr who tells us how teams from any part of the business are invited to bring their problems to the analytics experts and then see a solution appear before their eyes on the nerve centre's touch screen "smart boards". ...read the article if your cloud leveraged service is down - it's your fault Editor:- March 7, 2017 - "If your business leverages AWS, and you had an outage or degraded operation during the massive AWS outage last week, you can only blame yourself" - says Erez Ofer, Partner at 83North in his new blog - No Excuses. Among other things Erez Ofer says - "What is happening now after each cloud outage is a lot of learning by businesses on how to create systems that don't go down." ...read the article See also:- high availability SSD stories on StorageSearch.com cloud adapted memory systems Editor:- January 24, 2017 - Throughout the history of the data storage market we've always expected the capacity of enterprise user memory systems to be much smaller than the capacity of all the other attached storage in the same data processing environment. A new blog on the home page of StorageSearch.com - cloud adapted memory systems - asks (among other things) if this will always be true. Like many of you - I've been thinking a lot about the evolution of memory technologies and data architectures in the past year. I wasn't sure when would be the best time to share my thoughts about this one. But the timing seems right now. ...read the article Nimbus awarded patent for non blocking backplane technology Editor:- December 21, 2016 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced it has been granted a patent - 9,268,501 - for the non-blocking data fabric architecture which is used in its petabyte scale SSD racks. "Conventional HDD-centric architectures employed by the majority of all-flash array vendors trap flash performance behind legacy shared bus and scale-up designs," said Thomas Isakovich, CEO and Founder. "Now patented, Nimbus Data's Parallel Memory Architecture overcomes the limitations of generic off-the-shelf servers, capturing the full performance potential of all-flash technology." Elastifile gets patent for flash-aware adaptive cloud scale data management Editor:- November 3, 2016 - Elastifile today announced it has been granted a US patent (No. 9,465,558) for a method of flash-native, collaborative data storage when running on multiple interconnected nodes. Elastifile's technology (which is integrated in software solutions) is aimed at the hybrid cloud market. The patented technology enables efficient, distributed storage across full-mesh clustered architectures in which all nodes interact with one another across multiple sites and clouds, in complex or constantly varying network conditions, and/or at a scale that may encompass thousands of diverse configurations. "One of the greatest challenges for private and hybrid cloud data services has been ensuring consistent performance for distributed data writing, especially due to noisy and mixed environments," said Ezra Hoch, chief architect at Elastifile. "Our patented approach adaptively and efficiently manages how and where data is written, mitigating the constantly changing conditions—at cloud scale." Maxta offers free 24TB version of its SDS software Editor:- September 29, 2016 - Maxta today announced the general availability of a free download of its MxSP SDS software for qualified organizations in the U.S., Canada and select European countries. Approved registrants will receive a perpetual, transferable license to a fully-featured version of the software free of charge, enabling them to configure and deploy a three-node HCI cluster with a maximum storage capacity of 24TB. lowering cloud wattage with low DWPD SATA SSDs Editor:- August 4, 2016 - Although it's the faster SSD products (like PCIe SSDs and memory channel SSDs) which capture the attention of readers - because they show what is possible (and after a long enough interval we see pioneering enterprise speeds becoming commonplace at lower prices as we're now seeing with M.2 SSDs) nevertheless - when it comes to where most of the SSD slots are - the workhorse of the SSD market - in arrays, webscale and cloud - is still the simple 2.5" SATA SSD.
It's a big market for SSD vendors and SATA SSDs are a low risk choice for users because there are so many competing companies and products that ensure continuous improvements in value and quality. A new addition to this crowded market is the - Nytro XF1230 (pdf) - a 1.9TB capacity SSD which consumes less than 5W, is rated at 0.67 DWPD - which Seagate announced will ship to channel partners next month. Weka.IO has raised over $32 million for its SDS cloud cookbook Editor:- June 8, 2016 - another new name unstealthing in the software defined storage market is Weka.IO, founded in 2014, which has announced the closing of Series B funding bringing its total capital raised to over $32 million. Editor's comments:- In various slideshares by Weka.IO cofounder and CTO - Liran Zvibel - you can see how they're progressing with their big idea of enabling clouds and enterprises to have a single software based storage solution with good performance, efficiency and scalability. There are interesting comments here about the latency impacts of garbage collection within the D software development environment. Zvibel says an infrequent (few times an hour) latency of 10mS for GC can become an infinite wait if the kernel is stressed on memory. The variability of DRAM latency took many years to be widely appreciated and is what created opportunities for PCM and flash as DRAM (Micron and Diablo in SCM DIMM wars) and also big PCIe RAM fabrics likes those from A3CUBE. what was the spark of opportunity for Weka.IO? Liran's slideshare (from 2014) - the future of the data center - includes this comment:- "IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Dell and the like lost their ability to shape the future of data centers." Pure's CEO says his legacy systems competitors are 2-3 years behind in flash/cloud centric software Editor:- May 26, 2016 - Pure Storage reported that revenue for its recent quarter was approx $140 million, up 89% from the year ago period. In his blog which recaps business highlights CEO - Scott Dietzen - comments on the nature of the competition he sees from legacy storage companies. He says - "In our view, refurbished mechanical disk-era designs from the last century cannot fulfill the needs of the modern data center: solid-state flash memory and cloud demand a holistic rethink. Yet the majority of FlashArray's and all of FlashBlade's competition comes from pre-cloud disk-centric retrofits..." ...read the article Avere ranked #1 in Google's cloud partner search list Editor:- March 16 , 2016 - How well does Avere Systems (and its virtual edge filer) work as a gateway to Google's cloud services? Apparently very well - as Avere today announced it had been named "Google Cloud Platform Technology Partner of the Year" for 2015. Plexistor releases its Software Defined Memory Editor:- January 26, 2016 - Plexistor today announced the availability of its Software Defined Memory (SDM) architecture for both on-premise and cloud-based deployment on EC2 for AWS. Plexistor has a presentation (ppt) which outlines the launch product environment and gives indicative benchmarks. Cache latency is key to side-channel attack technique which can breach cloud server security walls Editor:- October 29, 2015 - Cache jitter and latencies are more than simply performance quality issues - they can be the root of security vulnerabilities too. The juxtaposition of these concepts in colocated cloud servers presents risks which were reported recently by researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The research team used a combination of techniques to first create a virtual machine on the same Amazon cloud server as a target machine (a technique known as co-location). They then used the co-located machine to spy on the target. By observing how it accessed information in memory, they could determine when it was retrieving its RSA key. Then by charting the timing of the memory access they were able to deduce the key's actual numeric sequence. ...read the summary OCZ does that 3rd generation SSD firmware cloud thing (but gives it a better name) Editor:- October 16, 2015 - It's no longer just the newcomers to the enterprise SSD market who are doing that 3rd generation / co-operative (whatever you want to call it) SSD controller firmware and host stack collaboration thing. OCZ this week announced they're doing it too. It's available in the Saber 1000 (2.5" cloud oriented, read mostly SSDs). And they've got a better name for it too - "Host Managed SSD Technology". "Our new Saber HMS SSD, together with a software library and API, enable for the first time (in OCZ's product line) software orchestration of internal housekeeping tasks across large pools of SSDs, thus overcoming performance barriers that were simply not possible to address without this technology" said Oded Ilan, GM of OCZ's R&D Team in Israel. "With HMS APIs, a host can coordinate garbage collection, log dumps, and drive geometry data" (and graphics too) in OCZ's HMS product brief (pdf) Lite-On says small NVMe M.2 PCIe SSDs could be a good fit for datacenter Editor:- August 6, 2015 - Lite-On today unveiled a new NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD for datacenter environments. The EP2 series delivers R/W IOPS up to 250K /25K respectively and low latencies of 35/35 (µs). It also has power loss protection, scalability, end-to-end data protection, low power consumption, high endurance, sustained performance, and customized firmware. Editor's comments:- in an earlier press release (in June 2015) about supplying a related product line to an unnamed customer described as "one of the largest cloud service providers" Jeffrey Chang, Lite-On's Technical Product Manager said "The M.2 is perfect for where we believe the future of enterprise SSD cloud storage is going." SuperCloud rebuilds RAID 20x faster with CoreRise PCIe SSD Editor:- July 3, 2015 - CoreRise today noted some record breaking performance results from one of its customers - SuperCloud (a well known Chinese cloud server manufacture) based on a configuration with CoreRise's PCIe SSDs in a 4U server with 2x 56Gbs InfiniBand ports. Among other things SuperCloud said its lab results showed that RAID rebuilding was 20x faster than without the SSD - using a RAID5 configuration of 6D+1P. While RAID throughput was 10 to 14GB/s and 1 to 1.5 million 4KB IOPS. bath tub curve is not the most useful way of thinking about PCIe SSD failures Editor:- June 15, 2015 - A recently published research study - Large-Scale Study of Flash Memory Failures in the Field (pdf) - which analyzed failure rates of PCIe SSDs used in Facebook's infrastructure over a 4 year period - yields some very useful insights into the user experience of large populations of enterprise flash.
Caringo gets patent for adaptive power conservation in SDS pools
"The access patterns and retention requirements for enterprise data have changed considerably over the last few years to a store-everything, always accessible approach and storage must adapt," said Adrian J Herrera, Caringo VP of Marketing. "We developed Darkive to help organizations of any size extract every bit and watt of value while keeping their data searchable, accessible, and protected." See also:- petabyte SSDs, the big market impact of SSD dark matter another design win for Seagate's Nytro in China cloud market Editor:- March 12, 2015 - QingCloud mentioned high capacity and low cost among the reasons for selecting Seagate's XP6209 (pdf) (PCIe SSD) as components to build the low latency SSD infrastructure of its cloud services for the China market - in a press release today.
Editor's comments:- who are the new cloud companies in China? Meet China's Cloud Innovators - a blog by Charlie Dai, Principal Analyst - Forrester Research See also:- the big market impact of SSD dark matter the Top 10 Hyperscale Sites Editor:- December 10, 2014 - IT Brand Pulse recently published a new list - the Top 10 Hyperscale Sites - measured by square footage on its publication - World's Top Data Centers . So you won't be surprised IT Brand Pulse says - "These hyperscale sites are some of the biggest data centers around the world..." ...read the article 70% of raw enterprise storage capacity will be in hyperscale datacenters by 2016 Editor:- December 9, 2014 - In its Datacenter Predictions for 2015 press release today - IDC says - "By 2016, hyperscale datacenters will house more than 50% of raw compute capacity and 70% of raw storage capacity worldwide, becoming the primary consumers/adopters of new compute and storage technologies." Efficiency is important for web scale users - says Coho Editor:- October 9, 2014 - Facebook as a file system - a web scale case study - a new blog by Andy Warfield , cofounder and CTO - Coho Data - made very interesting reading for me - as much for revealing the authoritative approach taken in Andy's systematic analysis - as for the object of his discussion (Facebook's storage architecture). It reveals useful insights into the architectural thinking and value judgments of Coho's technology - and is not simply another retelling of the Facebook infrastructure story. When you read it you may get different things out of it - because it's rich in raw enterprise ideas related to architecture, software, and dark matter users. All of which makes it hard to pick out any single quote. But here are 2.
WORM hard drives - now a reality Editor:- August 20, 2014 - From time to time I get an email from a new (to me) company which really grabs my attention. Here's one such which arrived this morning. "We now have the WORM hard disk you refer to in your article in StorageSearch.com (Introducing WORM Hard Disk Drives - February 28, 2005). "It was developed for the Department of Justice, and is now in use, by GreenTec-USA, Inc. in conjunction with Seagate. Can we send you some information? Would love to hear from you!" - Bob Waligunda, VP of Sales at GreenTec-USA. Editor's comments:- I haven't spoken to Bob yet - because of the time difference. But here's some info I got from GreenTec's web site:-
I had almost forgotten about my 9 year old WORM HDD (market needs this) article. I'll update it later with this note. Linking this back to SSDs - there have been several companies in recent quarters who have announced physical write-disable switches into embedded SSDs - including:- See also:- SSD security, military SSDs Decloaking hidden segments in the enterprise Editor:- May 28, 2014 - StorageSearch.com today published a new article - Decloaking hidden segments in the enterprise for rackmount SSDs Who's got your keys? Editor:- April 5, 2014 - "Think about it" says Chandar Venkataraman, Chief Product Officer, Druva - "If your service provider has access to your encryption keys, can you really say that your data is secure?" That's just one of the thought provoking ideas in his new blog - 5 Things You Didn't Know About the Cloud See also:- SSD security, SSD enterprise software Coho Data now shipping 2U MicroArray hybrids Editor:- March 6, 2014 - Coho Data today announced general availability of its first product - a 2U SSD ASAP called the DataStream (an SSDserver 4/E) - which integrates PCIe SSDs, hard drives and a server into a web scale expandable unit (using an internal 52 port 10GbE fabric switch) to implement what the company refers to as a "MicroArray" designed with the philosophy of "Turning Tiering Upside Down (pdf)" to deliver a base building block unit of 180K IOPS performance (4KB). Editor's comments:- you may judge for yourself the lofty scale of Coho's ambitions by this market soothsayer quote which they integrated in the launch press release - "By 2017, Web-scale IT will be an architectural approach found operating in 50% of Global 2,000 enterprises." See also:- SSD hybrid arrays, meet Ken - and the enterprise SSD software event horizon Atlantis provides more evidence of the trend towards massively improved enterprise utilization enabled by SSD-aware software Editor:- February 11, 2014 - Atlantis Computing today announced that the new "In-Memory Storage Technology" release of its storage virtualization software - called Atlantis ILIO USX - can significantly increase enterprise utilization by enabling users to deploy up to 5x more VMs on their existing storage. See also:- ILIO USX faqs (pdf), enterprise utilization and the SSD event horizon, SSD ASAPs, SSD software Permabit has shrunk data storage market by $300 million already Editor:- September 30, 2013 - Permabit today announced that its flash and hard disk customers have shipped more than 1,000 arrays running its Albireo (dedupe, compression and efficient RAID) software in the past 6 months. "We estimate that our partners have delivered an astonishing $300 million in data efficiency savings to their customers" said Tom Cook, CEO of Permabit who anticipates license shipments to double in the next 6 months. See also:- SSD efficiency, new RAID in SSDs, SSD software SolidFire - as an anti-jitter service in the cloud Editor:- August 19, 2013 - SolidFire provides the underlying rackmount SSD support for a new SSD empowered cloud product Platform as a Service (PaaS) being offered by IT Solutions Now which I learned about in a blog by Sorab Ghaswalla on Software Tools Journal. Editor's comments:- cloud companies - like the stars in the sky - are nearly numberless - however if you want to see a partial list of who they are - SolidFire's news page is cluttered with the names of cloud companies - and reads almost like a set of audited customer accounts than a technology news forum - which can be off-putting - if like me - you're looking for SSD content - rather than SSD investment fodder. But although I couldn't find any mention of this particular story on my brief visit to their website this time around - I was reminded about an interesting observation which SolidFire had written about earlier (in February 2013) regarding the performance and QoS impacts that "Noisy Neighbors" can create in a shared storage infrastructure. | ||||||||||||
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| See also:-
bottlenecks and
SSDs, can you trust
SSD performance benchmarks?,
SSD scalabilities
and symmetries AI in the cloud needs SSDs September 28, 2012 - "Consumer products are moving more and more towards that touch of artificial intelligence and in particular speaking to your devices and having your voice sent off to the cloud, recognised and analysed on good computers there and transmitted back" - said Steve Wozniak Chief Scientist at Fusion-io in the interview / article - Data deluge - the need for speed Amazon offers explicit SSD performance in the cloud Editor:- July 19, 2012 - There are many ways SSDs can be used inside classic cloud storage services infrastructure:- to keep things running smoothly (even out IOPS), reduce running costs etc. Amazon Web Services recently launched a new high(er) IOPS instance type for developers who explicitly want to access SSD like performance. In 3 to 5 years time all enterprise storage infastucture will be solid state - but due to economic necessities it will still be segmented into different types by speed and function - as I described in my SSD silos article - even when it's all solid state. I predict that when that happens - AWS's marketers may choose to describe its lowest speed storage as "HDD like" - even when it's SSD - in order to convey to customers what it's about. It takes a long time for people to let go of old ideas. Remember Virtual Tape Libraries? |
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