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Includes news, articles and a directory
about HA rackmount SSDs with no single point of failure - which are factory
built and have significant fault resilience integrated in the standard system
design. |
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why factory configured HA SSDs will create a new market
by
Zsolt Kerekes ,
editor
It's always been relatively easy for users and systems
integrators to configure high availability rackmount SSD systems by using
failover and clustering techniques designed for traditional
FC SAN or
IP SAN storage systems -
so you may ask - why have a different directory page which is focused on factory
designed HA SSDs?
The answer is:- performance, flexibility of use,
risk, complexity and scalability.
Customer designed fault tolerant
wrap arounds which go outside the
SSD controller loop -
and which simply engage at the host interface level - incur considerable losses
in latency and failure recovery time compared to systems where the HA fault
tolerant architecture has been designed inside the SSD system - behind the host
interface and around the SSD memory arrays. And customized HA SSD designs can
introduce software complexities and controller configuration issues -
because even if the native SSD systems look like virtual storage - the FT
wraparound introduces its own peculiar characteristics.
Anyone who has
done a formal hazard analysis or failure analysis in a critical industry
knows that it's all too easy to think that a particular FT problem has been
solved whereas in fact there are still common modes of failure.
One of
the invisible risks of "configure your own" HA arrays is that the user
may incur the cost of assembling a DIY HA configuration only to discover that
when a fault does occur - their solution became part of the problem instead of
solving it. That's another reason that factory designed HA SSDs are superior.
They reduce risk - due to the fact that they have been designed by people who
spent more time thinking about the problems than you can afford to do yourself.
Vendors
I've spoken to in the HA SSD market are excited that their products will open up
new businesses - but a particular concern - first voiced to me in November 2011
by
Don
Basile, CEO of Violin
was that HA SSDs could just get lost amidst a sea of other SSD announcements.
And if you're reading through a bunch of pages which talk about SSD performance
and see some latency and performance figures for an HA SSD in the wrong context
- you may well think - that's doesn't sound so great - whereas in the context of
a protected performance metric - it may instead be truly amazing.
In
my past 20 years of publishing enterprise buyers guides - I've developed an
instrinct for judging when the market is ready for a new focused directory.
Sometimes I've been too early - but with the memontum in the SSD market and the
number of HA SSD vendors dipping into double digits - I think this is
exactly the right time for a new directory.
The initial HA SSD vendor
list will be updated daily as new companies enter this market - and existing
vendors are rediscovered in my news and email archives - or contact me - if
they think they are eligible to be listed. | |
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When a bike failed
Megabyte didn't have to shoot it. | |
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| news
about HA enterprise SSD products |
Nimbus does that "no
spof SSD" thing
Editor:- January 31, 2012 - Nimbus Data Systems
today announced
its entry into the
high availability
enterprise SSD market with the uveiling of the company's -
E-Class systems -
which are 2U rackmount SSDs with 10TB
eMLC per U of
usable capacity and no single point of failure. Unified interface
support includes 10GbE,
FC, and
Infiniband.
Nimbus
software (which supports upto 0.5
petabytes in a
single SSD file system) automatically detects controller and path failures,
providing non-disruptive failover. The E-Class also supports online software
updates and online capacity expansion. It has
RAID protection and
hot-swappable flash, power, and cooling modules. Pricing starts at $150K approx
for a 10TB dual configuration system.
Editor's comments:-
Nimbus seemed incredulous at my immediate reaction to the preliminary info they
sent me. I said I knew of competing shipping SSDs which were denser, faster
and offered more HA features too. But that's not to understate the value of
what the company does. Instead of being impressed by a bunch of me-too
technical metricals I was rather more impressed to learn that Nimbus is still
profitable. More about that later.
HA enterprise SSD arrays
Editor:- January 26, 2012 -
due to the growing number of oems in the high availability rackmount SSD market
StorageSearch.com today
published a new directory focusing on
HA enterprise SSD
arrays.
The new directory will make it easier for users to locate
specialist HA SSD vendors, related news and articles.
If you're a
marketer in an SSD company, not listed in the preliminary vendor listing on this
page below, and you haven't contacted me in the past few weeks about your HA
SSD systems - then contact
me with details.
Huawei Symantec publishes SPC-1 results for Dorado2100 SSD
Editor:-
January 12, 2012 - Huawei
Symantec has published an
SPC
Benchmark report (66 pages pdf) for its high availability FC SAN rackmount
SSD - the
Oceanspace
Dorado2100.
A 1 terabyte (approx) usable protected (mirrored) SSD
system (2.4TB raw) delivered over 100K SPC-1 IOPS at a market price of$0.90/SPC-1
IOPS. Click
here for summary (pdf)
Editor's comments:- these
SPC
reports are very technical and the $ per SPC-1 IOPS headline
figures include a lot of detailed factors including 3 years of 4 hour on-site
response warranty etc. But the documents also include market prices for
everything which goes into these calculations. From which we learn that a
2.4TB Dorado2100 SSD system with 16x 8Gbps FC ports costs about $52,000. See
also:- SSD pricing
will new RamSan rattle Violin?
Editor:- December 6,
2011 -
Texas Memory Systems today
announced
imminent availability of the
RamSan-720
- a 4 port (FC/IB) 1U
rackmount SSD
which provides 10TB of usable 2D (FPGA implemented)
RAID protected and hot
swappable - SLC
capacity with 100/25 microseconds R/W latency (with all protections in
place) delivering 400K IOPS (4KB), 5GB/s throughput - with no single point of
failure (at $20K/TB approx list).
The new SSD uses a
regular RAM cache
flash architecture which in the event of
sudden power
loss has an ultra reliable battery array which holds up the SSD power for 30
seconds while automatically backing
up all data in flight and translation tables to nonvolatile flash storage. On
power up - the SSD is ready for full speed operation in less than a minute.
Aimed
at HA tier 1 storage markets - the RamSan-720 consumes only 300-400 W - which
makes it practical for high end users to install nearly 1/2
petabyte of SSD
storage in a single cabinet - without having to worry about the secondary
reliability and
data integrity
risks which can arise from high temperature build-ups in such
enclosures.
Editor's comments:- I've
been talking to TMS every month for over 10 years - and I've been writing
about their memory appliances since the early 1990s - so you might think that I
would have run out of things to say by now. When I saw the preliminary specs
for the new RS-720 - the features which jumped out at me were:-
- the low R/W latency for this class of SPOF product. Which is 2x as
good as the next fastest product I know - the 6000 series fron
Violin - and several
times faster than some other tier 1 SSD vendors such as
Kaminario and
Huawei Symantec
- the high storage density - over 3x better than
Violin delivers in SLC -
and close to the usable RAIDed capacity that a
Fusion-io 1U server
can deliver in MLC when using Octal.
A few days ago I spoke to
Holly Frost, CEO
and Dan Scheel,
President of Texas Memory Systems about their new SSD, what they think about
what's going on in the SSD market, and the philosophy that steers the design
of their SSDs. In a hour long discussion I learned enough new stuff to write
several new articles. So instead of condensing it down here into a couple of
bullet points - I'm going to give you the benefit of what I learned in a
new article tomorrow called -
"StorageSearch
talks SSD with Holly Frost."
Going back to my headline - will
new RamSan rattle Violin?
I'm sure that Violin would say that this
simply validates what they are doing (and shipping) already - and that the
enterprise SSD market is big enough for all vendors in this category to
keep growing
at a healthy clip. It make you wonder how much a company like TMS might be worth
too...
Violin unveils naked cost advantages in reliable SSD arrays
Editor:-
September 27, 2011 -
Violin Memory
today announced
new models and options in its range of fast
iSCSI /
FC SAN rackmount SSDs.
The new
6000
series - designed for high availability applications with no single point
of failure and hot swappable "everything" - provides 12TB SLC, or
22TB MLC usable capacity with 200/600 microseconds mixed latency, 1 million /
500K sustained RAIDed spike free write IOPS, in 3U rackspace at a list price
around $37K / $20K per terabyte.
For less demanding applications (but
still featuring hot swap memory modules) the company has also extended its
lower priced
3000 series
to 16TB SLC usable capacity.
Editor's comments:- when I spoke
to Violin's CEO -
Don
Basile about the new 6000 series he was curious about how I would tell
you what's unique about this product and signal whether it's relevant to you or
not.
I said - when it comes to reliability -
you've either got it - or you haven't - and there aren't too many enterprise
SSD systems which have hot-swap everything. That's one of the reasons the
latency looks slow - compared to many other fast SSDs - because the figures
quoted here include the latency of the internal factory built protection
schemes.
Another angle - I said is your product is an example of
"big SSD
architecture". When I explained what I meant - Don agreed and said
what it means for the customer is
lower price.
Because when you look at the raw capacity that's lost to over-provisioning
and RAID like protection
and get down to the usable capacity that the customer sees in an MLC rack - say
- then Violin's 6000 delivers about 70% of the raw capacity - versus nearer to
30% in an array of 2.5"
SSDs for example. That confers a 2 to 1 native cost and density
(SSD TB/U) advantage.
I said Violin's density looks good too - compared
say to Kaminario's K2.
I
also said - that our SSD readers would recognize what was meant by "spike-free"
IOPS - because of various
past articles
about this - and because another enterprise flash vendor -
Virident Systems -
had made that one of the
differences they
talk about compared to some other flash
PCIe SSD companies. I
knew that in Violin's case that was due to their patented non-blocking write
architecture - which was explained to me when their
first flash
products came to market in 2008.
Don said - that inside their
protection array they're actually doing 5x more IOPS than the customer
is seeing outside the box and on the datasheet - and that helps too.
I
also asked about price - and where they were relative to $30K / TB - which is
the ballpark for this type of product - and you can see where Violin are above.
That's a competitive figure for a no SPOF SSD.
I said that for people
who are serious about enterprise SSDs it's relatively easy to decide what
products you may want to focus in on after just seeing a couple of simple
metrics.
Don did also mention a comparative write up - about their
SSD versus another so called "tier 1" storage solution - from
EMC. Violin think it
makes them look pretty good - but I can't understand why anyone cares how they
stack up to EMC - who never understood the SSD plot - which is why their (at
one time) prime SSD supplier
STEC has had a bumpy
revenue stream in recent years.
I had one final question for Don -
which wasn't about Violin's new SSD - but about
something
which had come to my attention while I was googling the company just before
our conversation.
When can we expect to see a picture of a naked man
featured on a
Vmem
poster ad? - I asked.
He laughed and indicated it wouldn't be
anytime soon.
Kaminario carves new market niche for RAM SSDs
Editor:-
March 28, 2011 -
Kaminario
announced immediate availability of its
K2
DRAM storage appliance a family of enterprise
FC SAN
rackmount
RAM SSDs which scales
up to 12TB and delivers 1.5 million IOPS with 16 GB/s throughput.
K2's
entry level configuration provides 500GB of storage and delivers 150,000 IOPS
with 1.6 GB/s throughput for $50,000. Kaminario's K2 has true N+1 high
availability, including mirrored storage with automatic data recovery, redundant
fibre channel connectivity and a
UPS, to
reduce the risk of losing data access.
Editor's comments:- I
spoke to
Gareth Taube,
VP of Marketing and Dani Golan
CEO about the new product and how they see Kaminario in the SSD market. We had a
wide ranging discussion about the challenges in the enterprise SSD market,
the growing new role of RAM SSDs, and how they solve the competing demands of
reliability and
speed.
Overall
I got the impression this is a company which really understands its market
niche well and fills an important gap in the enterprise acceleration space which
is not catered for economically by other vendors.
Re customers:-
Kaminario said "Everyone has an application where performance limits the
business."
Kaminario said most of their customers already had
experience with 2 or 3 previous SSD projects. Like all new SSD companies they
like to talk about the successes they've had with accelerating enterprise apps
performance in what I call the "usual suspects" - banks and other
financial institutions - 10x speedup here, 25x speedup there. We've heard all
that stuff
before.
But Kaminario's products also match the budgets and performance needs
of smaller companies in new markets. One of their customers in this category
is
Digital Trowel which extracts data
from web sites and uses analysis and inference techniques to provide real-time
alerts and predictions about stocks, prices, news and other significant
market
developments. That's a good example of the "only with an SSD"
can you do this - data factory model killer app which I had in mind when I
wrote my
petabyte SSD roadmap
article last year.
Digital Trowel 's CTO,
Anton Bar said - "Other
SSD storage had the same price, but much lower speed than the Kaminario K2 -
a clear no-brainer. The bottom line is, the K2 shortened our identity
resolution process by about 50%, and that's very important in our line of
business."
Kaminario said its sweet spot in the hot data capacity range upto
12TB which is on the SAN
and which has very high IOPS demand. Because Kaminario is unashamedly a RAM
SSD company. Their "IOPS performance" doesn't need to be
qualified by
small print and hedging statements like those of flash SSDs. And I'll be
saying more about the internal technology elsewhere.
Kaminario said
that many of their customers - having experienced the K2 - were now acting
as internal evangelists to other parts of their organizations to advise them
how to solve performance problems which had previously proved intractable to
solutions by flash SSDs (due to latency) and traditional RAM SSDs (due to the
complexities
and side effects of failover architectures).
Rackmount RAM SSDs
connected by fibre-channel have been available from multiple vendors for over 10
years. Kaminario has shown that a new company can still shake up and surprise
the enterprise SSD market. | |
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