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SSD cloud storage - related newsSSD silos in the enterprise, iSCSI SSDs, SSD efficiencies, SSD pricing |
| Micron turns up the heat
for adoption of 2.5" PCIe SSDs Editor:- May 3, 2013 - Micron recently announced it's sampling a new model in the hot swappable 2.5" PCIe SSDs market - the P420m has upto 1.4TB MLC capacity and can deliver 750K R IOPS. Micron specifies endurance as "50PB of drive life". Editor's comments:- Micron is also offering half height, half length PCIe SSDs in the new range - but to my mind it's the 2.5" drives which are the significant part of this announcement. I wrote about the impact these new drives could have on traditional PCIe SSDs and SAS SSDs in an article 12 months ago. To summarize the main points in that... the new form factor for PCIe will displace high end SAS SSDs and likely make the 12Gbps SAS drives the last generation of SAS as "performance drives". SAS SSDs will in turn replace SATA SSDs as the removable drive of choice in traditional legacy fast-enough enterprise arrays. The new 2.5" PCIe SSDs will open up new markets in cost sensitive incrementally upgradeable fast SSD racks. At the high end of the server side accelerated market, however, and particularly in dark matter data centers where the rack is seen the replacement unit - I'm sure that good old PCIe SSD cards and modules will continue to hold their ground - because they have lower packaging costs and can be designed to be more efficient than smaller form factors. As discussed earlier this week - traditional PCIe SSDs will also facing pressure from memory channel storage SSDs. But MCS won't impact 2.5" PCIe SSDs. before you start selling shares in any particular company - I'm talking here about market juggling and realignments which will take 2-3 years to have a material affect on existing market sizes and revenue. These changes won't happen overnight. And these game changers in the enterprise SSDs market aren't taking part in the context of a zero sum game. The enterprise SSD universe is expanding. And here's another thing. Last year I told Micron's top SSD marketers that they weren't in tune with the needs of enterprise SSD specifiers - because they had hopelessly slow and antiquated processes for extracting technical information of the type that serious buyers needed. They seem to have taken those criticisms on board - because now you can swim around in the info they've got about their new enterprise SSDs on their web site - without having to sign NDAs and without waiting weeks to talk to the person who knows what's missing on the datasheet. Still some details missing - but it's a vast improvement on what they were doing before. Some of you may think it's ironic that it's not Micron who's doing the flash thing for memory channel SSDs. But bear in mind that semiconductor companies have to feed the fab. And their priorities are to engage in established markets where there is already known demand for millions of chips. Big memory companies don't usually get involved in blue sky system innovation - except in ORG type wolf packs. Micron's got its own thing going with hypercube memory. And - as I've said before - if that flies - it's another gating point for flash (if flash is still around when that happens). Fusion-io positions ioScale for huge SSD installations Editor:- January 16, 2013 - Fusion-io has released a new PCIe SSD called the ioScale (3.2TB on a single half length PCIe slot) which is aimed at technically savvy customers who have the potential to use thousands of cards in their installations in new dynasty enterprise SSD apps. Pricing is under $3,900 / TB and the minimum order quantity is 100 units. Editor's comments:- When you first look at this product - you might be tempted to think - So what? - isn't it very similar in capability to other products which FIO (and others) have shipped already? In one way you'd be right. The ioScale's hardware design is based on FIO's experience in making low cost PCIe SSDs for the workstation market - which is as close to consumer market price pressure as FIO gets at the present time. But the ioScale is aimed at a special class of enterprise super users - whose apps and companies I call:- new dynasty and dark matter respectively. Rick White CMO Fusion-io told me that when they did market research into the kinds of customers who were already using their SSDs they discovered the big enterprise SSD customers could be segmented into 2 groups which superficially had similar performance needs - but were very different in the ways in which they valued issues such as:-
Fusion-io is one of the few companies in the world which already has a set of these latter cloud / data factory economy customers who each have already got thousands of high performance PCIe SSDs - and who have the ability to scale up substantially if their requirements are met and the SSD enabled economy grows in the directions expected. Rick told me that these customers do want scalable SSD performance, and low cost - but they don't need many of the bundled frills which are deemed to be necessary for traditional enterprise SSD customers When legacy apps report faulty drives they change the drive or the rack. When uber new dynasty SSD users report faults - they route around them. Then when the time comes to upgrade the CPU and storage capacity per square foot of that region in the datacenter - the whole lot is forklifted out and replaced - faulty and unfaulty racks - makes no difference. Also - in these apps - hot pluggable drives are a frill which is simply not worth paying for. The dark matter SSD customers - at which the ioScale is aimed - also know much more about the technical limitations of their infrastructure - and have the technical expertise to change things to suit them better - if they think it's worthwhile. So - for example - the ability to dive into SSD APIs and change their apps code to get speedups or other new functionality - is something they will do - whereas traditional enterprise customers prefer all new hardware to work with pre-existing software in a tweak-free environmoent. During my conversation with Rick White - I referred back to the ION software (which FIO launched in August 2012 - and which enables users to convert a standard server and a bunch of PCIe SSDs into a traditional SAN compatible rackmount SSD). My assessment of that product shared with readers at the time - was that if it satisfied the needs of a small number of super users - who could each buy maybe hundreds or thousands of such systems - that made it worthwhile for FIO to bundle the concept and launch it. I thought the analysis I had seen in other places - which compared it to traditional rack SSDs was completely missing the point. Rick confirned my analysis was closer to the mark - and many times in our discussion we returned to the problems in the SSD market caused by faulty and incomplete market research and mistaken understandings of what the real issues in the market were. My way of summarizing this is - that if you ask a bunch of people who go to a trade show - what do you think about SSDs? - you're going to get a different result to when you talk to people who are already deeply engaged in the SSD market, have already done a lot of SSD projects and who spend nearly all their waking hours thinking about what more can they do if they had even better SSDs? It's not that the traditional market research gives you the wrong answers - it's more that - if you're not in the right place in the SSD market then you don't understand enough to pose the right questions - and you probably don't have access to the people who will ultimately decide the answers. Fusion-io isn't the only SSD company who is getting value business insights by researching its strategic customers. I reported last year that SanDisk had adapted its approach to enterprise customers by deciding to support competing hardware with its FlashSoft software. And there are many more examples I could mention if I had the time. Strategic Transitions in SSD Editor:- December 28, 2012 - the new home page blog on StorageSearch.com is called Strategic Transitions in SSD. 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 "By 2014 - 50% of all workloads will be processed in the cloud" Editor:- August 24, 2012 - that quote is part of a profile of Tom - a mythical cloud datacenter manager - in SMART's white paper - is MLC ready for the enterprise? (pdf) - presented today at the Flash Memory Summit Tom likes what flash can do to keep things flowing. His boss likes it too. Tom may get promoted. But too late he learns that the MLC SSDs he's been using have different lives in different workloads (4 months in an exchange server, maybe 1.6 years serving web pages). He starts to learn about endurance, write amplification etc - and instead of getting a kick up the management ladder - he risks getting a kick out the door. You can guess how this story ends... with a happy ending. SMART's SSDs - based on adaptive R/W DSP flash technology - saves Tom his job - and he no longer has to worry about flash reliability. The tale is engagingly presented in pictures. ...see Tom's SSD adventure in the cloud datacenter - (pdf)  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? $25 million C round keeps Nirvanix cloud flying Editor:- May 3, 2012 - Nirvanix today announced it has raised over $25 million in a Series C funding round - bringing its total capital raised to $70 million. One interesting thing is Nirvanix say keep self-healing replicas of customer data in multiple geo-diverse locations - not just static DR copies - which they say improves the data recovery experience. Nimbus publishes tick test results Editor:- April 25, 2012 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced that several key performance and operational characteristics of its S-class systems (iSCSI rackmount SSDs) have been validated by Demartek.
OCZ ships 16TB CloudServ auto caching PCIe SSD Editor:- February 14, 2012 - OCZ today announced imminent shipments of new high capacity PCIe SSDs optimized for cloud apps. The Z-Drive R4 CloudServ (which uses 16x SandForce 2581 SSD processors) has up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single full height card and is supported by auto-caching SSD ASAP functionality (based on the acquisition of SANRAD's VXL) and OCZ's VCA 2.0 which together enable host migrations without loss of performance or interruption of service. with economic certainty lost in the mist - university data heads for the clouds Editor:- November 15, 2011 - the University of Southern California (USC) will deploy over 8PB of unstructured data on a private cloud managed by boxes and software from Nirvanix. Customer spokesperson (CTO and Associate Dean of the USC Libraries) Sam Gustman said "We shifted to the cloud because it provides USC with a geographically diverse and cost-effective way of storing, preserving and distributing our content on a truly global scale." Hybrid Memory Cube will enable Petabyte SSDs Editor:- October 7, 2011 - Samsung and Micron this week launched a new industry initiative - the Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium - which will standardize a new module architecture for memory chips - enabling greater density, faster bandwidth and lower power. "HMC is unlike anything currently on the radar," said Robert Feurle, Micron's VP for DRAM Marketing. "HMC brings a new level of capability to memory that provides exponential performance and efficiency gains that will redefine the future of memory." Editor's comments:- HMC may enable SSD designers to pack 10x more RAM capacity into the same space with upto 15x the bandwidth, while using 1/3 the power due to its integrated power management plane. The same technology will enable denser flash SSDs too - if flash is still around in 3 years' time and hasn't been sucked into the obsolete market slime pit by the lurking nv demons which have been shadowing flash for the past 10 years and been waiting for each "next generation" to stumble and be the last. The power management architecture integrated in HMC and the density scaling it allows for packing memory chips (without heat build-up) are key technology enablers which were listed as some of the problems the SSD industry needed to solve in my 2010 article - this way to the Petabyte SSD. Pure Storage has amassed $55 million for bulk FC SAN SSD storage Editor:- August 24, 2011 - Pure Storage yesterday unveiled its first SSD product line and announced it had received $30 million in series C funding bringing its total capital funding up to $55 million. Pure Storage 's FlashArray provides bulk / utility SSD storage for FC SAN enviroments - which by using inline dedupe and compression - can in some applications (25TB and 50K IOPS per U) offer lower cost and yet still deliver higher performance than classic hard drive disk arrays. Editor's comments:- This looks like a spreadsheet based value proposition rather than a disruptive new product - and follows a market groove already established by WhipTail Technologies and Nimbus Data Systems. The market for this type of SSD market will be huge - but along the way to proving itself will have to fight off competition from auto-tieing SSDs and white box SSD RAID which will nibble away at the same customer SSD budgets. SolidFire launches SSD cloud appliances Editor:- June 21, 2011 - SolidFire has announced details of its first product - an iSCSI SSD appliance designed for cloud storage applications which the company says can scale to 1 petabyte capacity (which takes 100 nodes with current models). Performance within a SolidFire system is virtualized separately from capacity, allowing cloud service providers to prescribe and guarantee performance to every volume within the system. Editor's comments:- the company's SolidFire elements include features such as:- self healing data protection, always on availability, reservation-less thin provisioning , inline real time compression, cloning and snapshots, and dedupe, as well as adjustable managed IOPS and throughput performance windows. These are the essential characteristics of what I called "bulk storage SSDs" in my article roadmap to the Petabyte SSD - although in that article what I had in mind is that by 2016 that a PB archive SSD library should fit into a single 2U rackmount. If that seems far fetched - remember that a lot of things can change in the SSD market in 5 years. 5 years ago - in 2006 - the enterprise server flash SSD market didn't exist. 2006 was the 1st year of the notebook SSD market and there were only 36 makers of SSDs - compared to 300 today. Compliance issues in Cloud Storage Editor:- June 10, 2011 - A recent article in InformationWeek.com discusses the use of cloud storage for archiving. Among other things - the author George Crump warns that - "The deletion of data from the cloud may be the most overlooked consideration." ..read the article Editor's comments:- - judicious deletion is also a strategic issue for long established web sites too. GerryMcGovern discussed that in his classic article - the Business case for deleting content. the future of data storage in broadcast and IPtv Editor:- January 23, 2011 - the future of data storage is the lofty sounding but aptly chosen title of a new article published online today in Broadcast Engineering - written by Zsolt Kerekes editor of StorageSearch.com (that's me). It's a completely new article which synthesizes and integrates concepts from several futuristic articles which have already appeared here on the mouse site and wraps them into a cohesive whole. Anyone who reads it will get a clear idea of where the incremental changes they read about in storage news pages are likely to end up. ...read the article All storage fails - design is choosing management preferences Editor:- January 4, 2011 - the Future of Storage in the Cloud is the title of a blog on DataCenterPOST written by Patrick Baillie, CEO of CloudSigma (based in Zurich, Switzerland). In it he discusses what he calls the "Myth of the Failure Proof SAN" and his preferences for managing inevitable failures. Patrick Baillie says "When building out our cloud we made the decision early that we preferred more frequent low impact problems than infrequent high impact problems. Essentially we'd rather solve a simple small problem which occurs more frequently (but still rarely) than a complicated large problem that occurs less frequently. For this reason we chose not to use SANs for our storage but local RAID6 arrays on each computing node." ...read the article Overland says cloud tech can scale NAS VTLs Editor:- October 14, 2010 - Overland Storage today announced that it has acquired MaxiScale - a cloud storage technology company. Dr. Geoff Barrall, CTO and VP of engineering at Overland Storage said "The logical next step for us is to create a clustered scalable NAS forming a local cloud of storage. When the opportunity arose to acquire MaxiScale's well-regarded technology, we took notice. MaxiScale's architecture will provide our customers with the ability to scale hundreds of (our) SnapServers into one unified pool of storage." TwinStrata gets traction with CloudArray software Editor:- May 10, 2010 -TwinStrata announced new customer deployments of its CloudArray software - which delivers cloud storage functions (such as data replication, backup/restore, data archiving and DR) piped through an iSCSI connection. TwinStrata says its software supports all market-leading hypervisors: VMware ESX/ESXi, Citrix XenServer, and Microsoft Hyper-V. StorSimple fills "missing link" in cloud storage DNA Editor:- May 4, 2010 - StorSimple has exited stealth mode - announcing a bunch of collaborative customer supply agreements - and disclosing info about its Armada storage appliance - which is designed to reduce the cost and simplify the integration of cloud storage within datacenter applications and infrastructure. Editor's comments:- Just as application specific SSDs are the future for the SSD market - StorSimple's Armada system can be regarded as an application specific SSD ASAP which includes features such as real-time dedupe and cloud data encryption. The simplest way to think about it is as "the missing link" between the promise of cloud storage and its practicality. The companies which have agreed to be named in StorSimple's company launch press release (Amazon, AT&T, EMC, Iron Mountain, and Microsoft) seem to think it's a noteworthy part of cloud storage DNA too. Digitiliti Launches Virtual Corporate Library Editor:- March 22, 2010 - Digitiliti today announced availability of its DigiLIBE a multi-functional continuous VTL, dedupe, compression, ediscovery appliance which automatically captures and archives new data from the time it is created and sanitizes it at the end of its policy mandated life. Pricing starts at about $20,000 for a 3TB information director and $3 per GB archived after dedupe and compression, plus $100 per client. New Image for Cloud Storage Editor:- January 13, 2010 - a new article on PCWorld.com discusses on-low cost and no-cost cloud storage offerings from Google. The author David Coursey (and his commenting readers) make some interesting comparisons with Microsoft 's SkyDrive. Personally I loathe the term "Cloud Storage". But I have to admit we're stuck with it. So today I changed the graphic on the online backup and storage page. The old one - with the tag about "Spellerbyte was cooking up a new business plan which involved online web backup" - was appropriate when it was first published 10 years ago - but no longer fits this market's image today. I resisted the temptation to use an image compatible with the business metaphor of "sad losers" or "big black hole for VC investors." Systemic Risk with "Cloud Think" Editor:- June 4, 2009 - Burton Group today published an article called - Clouds and Systemic Risk. The author Jack Santos says he thinks "clouds" are at a peak hype stage and ready for a big disillusionment phase. |
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