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CAEN launches high
availability 2U FC AFA
Editor:- September 15, 2017 - CAEN Engineering today
introduced the
CAEN
CEI-826-FXD - a 2U 10GbE / 16G FC AFA (with 26 native 12Gb SAS bays) for
applications such as big data, HPC, Hadoop etc.
The CEI-826-FXD's
dual-active controller architecture enables both controllers to concurrently
provide storage services in real time. Active-Active architecture doubles the
available host bandwidth and cache hit ratio, ensuring the greatest utilization
of system resources and maximum throughput. If one controller fails, the other
controller transparently takes over all storage services. In addition to storage
services, management services can transparently pass to the secondary
controller.
The CAEN array offers high availability with no single
point of failure. All critical components are hot pluggable andengineered with
full redundancy. Thanks to this robust design, this system can withstand
multiple component failures and achieves 99.999% availability. The CAEN
CEI-826-FXD solution supports RAID levels 0 ,1 ,0+1 ,3 ,5 ,6 ,10 ,30 ,50, 60,
and N-way mirror.
Nimbus talks about SAS SSD array sauce
Editor:-
August 10, 2017 - In a new article on StorageSearch.com -
sauce for the
SSD box gander - I discuss Nimbus's recent entry into the merchant SAS SSD
controller market.
Based on conversations with Nimbus's CEO I asked
among other things - What's the new business plan for Nimbus? Does selling
drives replace selling systems? ...read the
article
HA lessons from BA?
Editor:- June 15, 2017 - A
systematic failure in fault tolerant architecture and processes at airline
BA led to hundreds
of UK flights being cancelled and delayed over the holiday weekend at the
end of May. The scale of disruption flashed headlines in the mainstream tv
and news outlets worldwide. But in the days during and immediately after the
story broke it seemed that extracting a plausible explanation in the public
domain was like pulling teeth from the definitely reputation-damaged and
probably litigation-sensitive airline.
It was obvious to many experts
from the start that failure in fault tolerant architecture and human error
were likely ingredients in the mix. But I thought I'd wait for a definitive
narrative to emerge before placing a note here. Because it can be useful to
learn from the common mode failures of others.
A
report
on Bloomberg - Engineer Pulled Wrong Plug provides a good summary
and says (among other things) - "An engineer had disconnected a power
supply at a data center near London's Heathrow airport, causing a surge that
resulted in major damage when it was reconnected."
Editor's
comments:- to me that's a design architecture fault and shows the failure
to learn any useful lessons from the past 3 decades of enterprise computing
(and in particular the lessons from companies affected by the terrorist
attrocity of 9/11). If BA had a disaster recovery plan it was not fit
for purpose.
some thoughts about availability prompted by the emerging picture
of Symbolic IO's revolutionary server storage architecture
Editor:-
February 25, 2017 - In my comments to a news story this month about Symbolic IO (which
led with a focus on performance and utilization efficiencies) I also identified
what I think may be unique "availability" susceptibilities which I
think are implicit in this kind architecture. Among other things I said...
All
new approaches have risks.
I think the particular risks with Symbolic
IO's architecture are these:-
- Unknown vulnerability to data corruption in the code tables.
Partly
this would be like having an encrypted system in which the keys have been lost -
but the effect of recovery would be multiplied by the fact that each raw piece
of data has higher value (due to compacting).
Conventional systems
leverage decades of experience of data healing knowhow (and
data recovery).
We don't know enough about the internal resiliency architecture in Symbolic
IO's design.
It's reasonable to assume that there is something there.
But all companies can make mistakes as we saw in server architecture with
Sun's
cache memory problem and in storage architecture when
Cisco discovered common
mode failure vulnerabilities in
WhipTail 's "high availability"
flash arrays.
- Difficult to quantify risk of "false positive" shutdowns from the
security system.
This is a risk factor which I have written about in
the context of the fast
purge SSD market. Again this is a reliability architecture issue.
...read the
article in SSD news February 2017
Editor's comments:-
thinking about this again from a high availability perspective - at the top
level the fact that Symbolic IO has designed an efficiently coded server
which can replace many conventional servers is itself a notable
reliability gain. And Symbolic IO (being clever enough to solve the coding
architecture tradeoffs) is surely clever enough to have given deep thought to
a SPOF mitigation architecture too. But as Symbolic IO is still emerging from
stealth mode we will just have to wait for details.
after AFAs -
what's next?
routes
to consolidation in the enterprise
why do SSD
vendors still fail to design systems which meet needs?
the new math of AFA fault tolerance
Editor:-
November 14, 2016 - the old math regarding the
purchase price premium
of high availability storage was that more reliability requires 2x to 3x more
storage array hardware and therefore costs proportionately more.
The
new math of faster SSD arrays supported by new SSD software is they create
usable storage resources which can deliver
10x to 50x better
usable utilization of the raw storage than previously while also delivering
better application performance. Taken together with other TCO issuse the
hardware cost of providing good quality fast recovery can be essentially free.
Because speed creates cost saving opportunities in other dimensions.
This
was part of a discussion I had with a leading HPC flash array vendor about
changes in thinking throughout the SSD market. For more about this read my
article a
winter's tale of SSD market influences.
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."
Microsemi's rad tolerant FPGAs orbit Jupiter
Editor:-
September 20, 2016 - Microsemi
today
announced
that its radiation-tolerant FPGAs are in use on NASA's
Juno Spacecraft within the
space vehicle's command and control systems, and in various instruments which
have now been deployed and are returning scientific data. Juno recently entered
Jupiter's orbit after a 5 year journey.
See also:-
Juno
mission (pdf),
data
chips in space
data dematerialization in the DIMM?
Editor:- July 27,
2016 - Some of the big SSD ideas in recent years have been:-
One way to interpret the essence of Symbolic IO's
architecture - which was partially unveiled in
May 2016 - may
be as a coming together of the 2 concepts in the same place...
What
got me thinking this way was a recent blog -
a
look at Symbolic IO's patents - by Robin Harris on
his site - StorageMojo.com .
Symbolic IOs founder Brian Ignomirello who saw
and liked Robin's post - said among other things on
linkedinpulse
- "yes we (do) materialize and dematerialize data." ...read
the article
Editor's comments:- That means less
hardware right? There's a reliability gain in there somewhere.
PrimaryIO ships applications aware FT caching
Editor:-
March 8, 2016 - PrimaryIO
(which
changed
its name from CacheBox in
August 2015)
today
announced
the general availability of its Application Performance Acceleration V1.0 (SSD aware software) for
VMware vSphere 6.
PrimaryIO APA aggregates server-based flash storage
across vSphere clusters as a cluster-wide resource and supports write-around
and write-back caching with full
fault-tolerance
in face of node failures since writes to cache are replicated to up to 2
additional nodes.
Datalight's SSD firmware to boldly go
Editor:-
September 17, 2015 - Datalight
today said its embedded filesystem (Reliance
Nitro) and FTL (FlashFX
Tera) have been selected by NASA for use
onboard future manned spacecraft in the
Orion
program.
3D TLC is good enough to last 7 years says Kaminario
Editor:-
August 21, 2015 - One of the early
new SSD
ideas in 2014 was that 3D nand flash was tough enough to consider using
in industrial SSDs so it was no surprise when 3D flash started to appear in
volume production of enterprise SSD accelerators such as Samsung's 10 DWPD
NVMe PCIe SSDs in September
2014.
So the recent
announcement
by Kaminario
that it will soon ship 3D TLC (3 bits) flash in its K2 rackmount SSDs can be
seen as a predictable marker in the long term trend of
flash adoption in
the enterprise.
Less predictable, than the price (under
$1,000/TB
for usable systems capacity) however, is that Kaminario is offering a 7
years endurance related systems warranty.
This
factor - discussed in a
Kaminario
blog - tells us more about Kaminario's customer base than it tells us about
flash endurance
however.
Kaminario says its HealthShield "has been collecting
endurance statistics for the past few years, and from analyzing the data we see
that 97% of (our) customers are writing less than a single write per day (under
1 DWPD) of the entire capacity."
This is one aspect of a trend I
wrote about a few years ago -
thinking
inside the box - which is that designers of integrated systems have more
freedom of choice in their memories than designers of standard SSD drives -
because they have visibility and control of more layers of software and can
leverage other architectural factors.
A competent box level SSD
designer can make better decisions about how to translate raw R/W intentions
(from the host) into optimized R/W activities at the flash .
This
is especially the case when the designers are also collecting raw data
about the workloads used in their own customer bases. The customer experience is
more important than slavishly designing systems which look good in artificial
benchmarks.
"more lanes of SAS than anyone else" - new 4U
SavageStor
Editor:- July 28, 2015 - As the
rackmount SSD market
heads towards
future
consolidation - new business opportunities are being created for those
brave hardware companies which accept the challenge of providing simple
hardware platforms (which provide high density or efficiency or performance or
other combinations of valued technical features optimized for known use cases)
while also being willing to sell them unbundled from expensive frivolous
software.
In that category - Savage IO today
launched
its SavageStor - a 4U
server storage box - which - using a COTS array of hot swappable SAS SSDs -
can provide upto 288TB flash capacity with 25GB/s peak internal bandwidth with
useful RAS features for embedded systems integrators who need high flash
density in an untied / open platform.
Savage IO says it "products
are intentionally sold software-free, to further eliminate performance drains
and costs caused by poor integration, vendor lock-in, rigidly defined
management, and unjustifiable licensing schemes."
Editor's
comments:- I spoke to the company recently and most of you will
instantly know
if it's the right type of box for you or not.
High Availability Thinking in Pure's Flash Arrays
Editor:-
June 7, 2015 -
Purity:
Building Fast, Highly-Available Enterprise Flash Storage from Commodity
Components (pdf) by authors at Pure Storage
describes several interesting aspects of Pure's flash arrays which internally
use consumer grade
SSDs.
The paper presented at
SIGMOD 2015 says among
other things-
- Purity can tolerate the loss of 2 SSDs without losing availability. Pure
encourages potential customers to pull drives and unplug controllers as part of
their evaluation.
- Due to efficiencies
in deduplication Pure's customers on average provision approximately 12x
more virtual space than physical storage.
- Commenting on the
differences
in capability between flash management which is possible seen from a single
drive level and a global array level the authors say - Pure's controller has a
global view of the workload and much more computational power than the SSD FTL,
allowing it to apply optimizations and make global decisions that the drives are
incapable of.
Pure says that "improvements" in consumer solo drive
benchmarks do not
always follow through to deliver better performance in the managed enterprise
array context. Sometimes the optimized drives perform worse in a Pure array.
- Re quality of service Pure says that to avoid application failures
during controller failure, they have to guarantee that recovery will complete
in under 30 seconds.
...read the
article (pdf)
Nimble video discusses 5 9's in 5,000 systems
Editor:-
February 21, 2015 - Nimble
Storage recently disclosed (in a
sponsored video fronted
by ESG) that its
customer deployed rackmount storage systems are achieving better than
5
9's uptime - 99.999%
availability.
 This
has been attained in a field population of 5,000 arrays representing 1,750
years of system run time thanks to a combination of factors including the crowd
sourced intelligence of its
InfoSight
management system which can alert users to potential down time events so they
can take evasive action before bad things happen.
Editor's
comments:- While useful in telling us how many systems Nimble has sold it's
less useful as an indicator of availability given that the average run time
across the population is about 4 months.
It would be more impressive
if they could repeat the disclosure in a few years time and selectively extract
the up-time of systems over different run times, upto 1 year, 1 to 2 years etc.
If indeed Nimble is still in a position to do so, and if it would
still meaningful given the
consolidation
in hardware and software which lies ahead for the enterprise SSD market may
mean that vendors will be using the same hardware.
shared vulnerabilities may be another factor in pausing Cisco's
UCS Invicta shipments
Editor:- October 24, 2014 - The discovery of
single points of failure which could compromise the availability of the
rackmount SSD
family acquired
by Cisco last
year - are among several design issues contributing to the continuing pause in
shipments - according to
reports
by CRN.
HA SSD arrays - are now mainstream
Editor:- October
13, 2014 - I've long had an abiding interest in the architecture of fault
tolerant / high availability electronic systems - ever since learning that such
concepts existed - when (in about 1976) our digital systems design
lecturer Dr
R G 'Ben' Bennetts at Southampton
University suggested we should read a paper about how
NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs used triple
modular redundancy.
(I can't remember the details of that paper - but
the JPL people and their collaborators and descendants have never stopped
inspiring and writing a rich literature about the design aspects of computer
systems which operate a long way from a service engineer.)
In the early
part of my career - such ideas were good to know about - but far too exotic and
expensive to incorporate into most products. But I was reminded about them in
the 1990s - when in the publication
which preceded StorageSearch.com - some of my customers were advertising
their FT/ HA SPARC servers for the telco market.
The more you
investigate the architecture of FT/ HA computer systems the more you realize
it's a philosophy rather than a technology which you can implement as a plug
and play inconsequentially within the cost goals of mere mortals.
The
results are always compromises - which balance reliability (aka functionable
survivability) against other tradeoffs - such as performance. (And
performance itself has many internal
dimensions of
fault tolerance too.)
Violin's 6000 SSD and HA
3
years ago (in September
2011) when I was talking to Violin's CEO (at that
time) Don
Basile about the launch of Violin's first 6000 series (the first no
single point of failure, competitively priced, fast flash rackmount SSD) he
expressed some concern about how I would tell you (my readers) what was unique
about this product and signal whether it was relevant to you or not - as it was
competing for attention with thousands of other SSD stories for applications
ranging from phones to drones.
I didn't see that as a problem - because
my readers are smart - and I had been publishing a directory page dedicated to
SSD Reliability
since 2008.
But just to make sure that the systems embodiments of
FT/HA/SSD architecture from a growing base of competitors didn't get washed
away by other stories - I launched
a dedicated ft/HA
enterprise SSD directory in
January 2012 - to
serve an emerging base of reliability focused readers - which in those days
measured around 10,000 readers / year in that niche topic. (Until recently
HA SSDs have rarely entered the
top 30 SSD
articles viewed by my readers.)
But something in the market has
changed.
I noticed this week that the topic of
HA/FT SSDs
has risen to be 1 of the top 10 topics that you've been looking at this month.
Which means it's mainstream.
Looking back at other past niche
topics...
10 years ago I didn't think that more than a few hundred
people would be interested in the intricacies of
flash endurance.
And to begin with - SSD vendors were nervous about even acknowledging that
there was such a thing as SSD wear out. Now you can't shut them up. They all
want to show you how clever they are at handling it
The different
types of flash memory and
different generations of arcane
flash care schemes spawned a huge industry literature of understanding and
misunderstanding - so I wouldn't be surprised if the enterprise FT/HA flash
array market now started to do something similar.
PS - After a
communications gap of 37 years - I exchanged some emails with my old
university lecturer - Ben Bennetts while writing this - to see if I had
remembered things correctly.
He said - "Yes, that was me. I
lectured on fault-tolerant systems and JPLs Self-Test And Repair, STAR,
computer, based on triple modular redundancy, used to feature in my
presentations."
So that enables me to pin point the original
source of that inspirational IEEE Transactions paper about fault tolerant
computing - which I remember having read in 1976 (although I haven't read it
since) to Prof.
Algirdas Antanas Avižienis - whose visionary work on - what is
today called - "Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerant Systems" -
continues today.
You don't need to worry about the endurance of our FlashSystems -
says IBM
Editor:- October 7, 2014 - Worried about
endurance?
"None of the thousands of
FlashSystem
products (fast rackmount SSDs) which IBM has shipped has ever
worn out yet! - says Erik
Eyberg, Flash Strategy & Business Development at IBM - in his new
blog -
Flash
storage reliability: Aligning technology and marketing. "And our
metrics suggest that will remain true in almost all cases for many, many years
(certainly well beyond any normal and expected data center life cycle)"
Erik
goes on to explain that's the reason IBM can now officially cover flash
storage media wear-out as part of its standard IBM FlashSystem warranty and
maintenance policies - without changing the prices for these services.
And
his blog has a
link
to a white paper about the reliability architecture underlying this product
(although it's behind a sign-up wall - which seems counter productive to me.)
Editor's
comments:- Don't expect all other flash array vendors to follow suit (with
no cost endurance guarantees) - because this product range from IBM is based on
design rules and memory reliability architectures experience in FC SAN
compatible enterprise SSD racks which have evolved since the 1st generation
RamSan from TMS (in
2000). And for more than a decade
before that
using other popular enterprise storage interfaces.
Holly Frost - who founded
Texas Memory Systems - and who was the CEO when TMS was acquired - told me a
revealing story about TMS's policies concerning the reliability of their SSD
systems and customer care procedures.
This conversation took place
in December 2011
- when the company was launching its first high availability SSD - which
became the basis of IBM's FlashSystem.
It still makes interesting
reading today. You can see it in
this article -
in the right hand column - scroll down to the box titled - "no single point
of failure - except..."
HGST announces 2nd generation clustering software for FlashMAX
PCIe SSDs
Editor:- September 9, 2014 - HGST today
announced
a new improved version of the
high availability
clustering capability previously available in the
PCIe SSD product line
acquired last year from Virident.
HGST's
Virident Space
allows clustering of up to 128 servers and 16 PCIe storage devices to deliver
one or more shared volumes of high performance flash storage with a total usable
capacity of more than 38TB.
HGST says its Virident HA provides a "high-throughput,
low-latency synchronous replication across servers for data residing on FlashMAX
PCIe devices. If the primary server fails, the secondary server can
automatically start a standby copy of your application using the secondary
replica of the data."
For more details see -
HGST
Virident Software 2.0 (pdf)
Editor's comments:- This
capability had already been demonstrated last year - and
ESG reported on the
technology in January
2014.
But at that time - the clustering product called vShare -
was restricted to a small number of servers - and the data access fabric was
restricted to Infiniband
only.
With the rev 2.0 software - the number of connected devices has
increased - and users also have the lower cost option of using
Ethernet as an alternative
supported fabric.
say hello to high availability CacheIO
Editor:- June
10, 2014 - CacheIO
today
announced results of a
benchmark which is
described by their collaborator Orange
Silicon Valley (a telco) as - "One of the top tpm benchmark results
accelerating low cost iSCSI
SATA storage."
CacheIO says that the 2 million tpm benchmark on
CacheIO accelerated commodity servers and storage shows that users can
deploy its flash cache to accelerate their database performance without
replacing or disrupting their existing servers and storage.
Editor's
comments:- The only reason I mention this otherwise me-too sounding
benchmark is because although I've known about CacheIO and what they've been
doing with various organizations in the broadcast and telco markets for over a
year - I didn't list them on StorageSearch.com before.
That was
partly because they didn't want me to name the customers they were working with
at that time - but also because with
SSD caching companies
becoming almost as numerous as tv channels on a satellite dish - I wanted to
wait and see if they would be worth a repeat viewing. (And now I think they
they are.)
PS - I asked Bang Chang,
CEO of CacheIO if he had a white paper which talked more about the company's
cache architecture and philosophy. He sent me this -
CacheIO High
Availability Deployment (pdf) - from which I've extracted these quotes...
- re network cache appliances - "At CacheIO we believe that network
cache appliance is the best storage architecture to decouple performance from
capacity and achieve the best of both worlds.
Once deployed as a "bump
in the wire" performance accelerator, our network cache appliance can also
deliver additional value added services... Compared to server-side Flash cache,
our network cache appliance is a shared resource that is more scalable, more
reliable, supports clustered applications, and most importantly allows
customers, especially cloud service providers, to monetize performance by
dynamically allocating resources based on changing SLAs."
- re operational transparency - "Implementing CacheIO network appliance
requires no change to existing applications, servers, or storage. CacheIO can be
slotted in, turned on to accelerate applications, and turned off if necessary,
often without needing to stop the applications."
I found it
interesting to see that in addition to conventional connections (SAN and
InfiniBand) their HA
paper also mentions emerging PCIe fabric.
new blog by PernixData describes the intermediate states of play
for its HA clustered write acceleration SSD cache
Editor:-
November 5, 2013 - In a clustered,
SSD ASAP VM
environment which supports both read and write acceleration it's essential to
know the detailed policies of any products you're considering - to see if the
consequences - on data vulnerability and performance comply with strategies
which are acceptable for your own intended uses.
In a new blog -
Fault
Tolerant Write Acceleration by Frank Denneman
Technology Evangelist at PernixData
describes in a rarely seen level of detail the various states which his
company's FVP goes through when it recognizes that a fault has occured in
either server or flash. And the blog describes the temporary consequences - such
as loss of acceleration - which occur until replacement hardware is pulled in
and configured automatically by the system software.
Stating the design
principles of this product - Frank Denneman says - "Data loss needs to be
avoided at all times, therefore the FVP platform is designed from the ground up
to provide data consistency and availability. By replicating write data to
neighboring flash devices data loss caused by host or component failure is
prevented. Due to the clustered nature of the platform FVP is capable to keep
the state between the write data on the source and replica hosts consistent and
reduce the required space to a minimum without taxing the network connection too
much." ...read
the article
SSD ASAPs - auto tiering /
caching appliances
high availability
enterprise SSDs
McObject shows in-memory database resilience in NVDIMM
Editor:-
October 9, 2013 - what happens if you pull out the power plug during
intensive in-memory database transactions? For those who don't want to rely on
batteries - but who also need ultimate speed - this is more than just an
academic question.
Recently on these pages I've been talking a lot
about a new type of
memory channel
SSDs which are hoping to break into the application space owned by
PCIe SSDs. But another
solution in this area has always been DRAM with power fail features which save
data to flash in the event of
sudden power
loss. (The only disadvantages being that the memory density and cost are
constrained by the nature of DRAM.)
McObject (whose
products include in-memory database software) yesterday
published the results of
benchmarks using AGIGA
Tech's NVDIMM in which
they did some unthinkable things which you would never wish to try out for
yourself - like rebooting the server while it was running... The result?
Everything was OK.
"The idea that there must be a tradeoff
between performance and persistence/durability has become so ingrained in the
database field that it is rarely questioned. This test shows that mission
critical applications needn't accept latency as the price for recoverability.
Developers working in a variety of application categories will view this as a
breakthrough" said Steve Graves,
CEO McObject.
Here's a quote from the whitepaper -
Database
Persistence, Without The Performance Penalty (pdf) - "In these tests
eXtremeDB's inserts and updates with AGIGA's NVDIMM for main memory storage
were 2x as fast as using the same IMDS with transaction logging, and
approximately 5x faster for database updates (and this with the
transaction log stored on RAM-disk, a solution that is (even) faster than
storing the log on an SSD). The possibility of gaining so much speed while
giving up nothing in terms of data durability or recoverability makes the IMDS
with NVDIMM combination impossible to ignore in many application categories,
including capital markets, telecom/networking, aerospace and industrial
systems."
Editor's comments:- last year McObject
published a paper showing the benefits of using PCIe SSDs for the transaction
log too. They seem to have all angles covered for mission critical ultrafast
databases that can be squeezed into memory.
OCZ ships PCIe SSD based SQL accelerator
Editor:-
July 23, 2013 - OCZ
today
announced
the general availability of its
ZD-XL SQL
Accelerator - an SSD
ASAP appliance - delivered as a PCIe SSD (600GB, 800GB or 1.6TB) and
bundled software - which optimizes caching of SQL Server data in Windows
environments - and can provide upto 25x faster database performance.
HA
functionality works through Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn technology, so that
in the event of planned or unplanned downtime, can continue operations from the
stopping point, retaining all of its data as if no downtime had occurred.
"We believe that the industry is primed for this type of tightly
integrated, plug-and-play use-case acceleration solution..." said Ralph Schmitt,
CEO - OCZ Technology.
Editor's comments:- One of the
differentiators in SSD caching products is the sophistication of their
behavior when viewed from a time basis. This is 1 of the
11 key SSD
symmetries - which I call "age symmetry".
In this respect
- a key feature of ZD-XL SQL Accelerator is its business-rule pre-warming
cache engine and cache warm-up analyzer that monitors SQL Server workloads and
automatically pre-loads the cache in advance of critical, demanding or important
SQL Server jobs. It achieves this by identifying repeated access patterns that
enable DBAs to set periodic time schedules to pre-load the cache.
This
product won Best of Show Award at an event called Interop in
May.
HA Support in Fusion-io's ION SAN kit
Editor:- August
2, 2012 - Yesterday - Fusion-io
launched
its new ION software
- which is a toolkit for bulding your own network compatible
SSD rack by
adding some Fusion-io SSD cards and their new software to any leading server.
The concept isn't entirely new - because oems have been doing this
with various different brands of
PCIe SSDs for years
and this is a well
established alternative market segment for PCIe SSDs. What is new - is
that it makes the whole thing much easier.
Fusion-io says this new
software product "delivers breakthrough performance over
Fibre Channel,
InfiniBand and
iSCSI using standard
protocols." (1 million random IOPs (4kB), 6GB/s throughput and 60
microseconds latency in a 1U rack.)
It also supports fault tolerance
between racks.
HA support in OCZ's PCIe SSD software
Editor:- July
3, 2012 - OCZ
published a white paper today -
Accelerating
MS SQL Server 2012 with OCZ Flash Virtualization (pdf) which describes
the performance of the company's
PCIe SSDs (Z-Drive R4)
and its
VXL
caching and virtualization software in this kind of environment.
The
interesting angle (for me) was in the aspect of
SSD fault
tolerance rather than the 16x VM speedup.
The paper's
author Allon Cohen
(who has written many thought provoking
performance blogs)
explains in this paper - "VXL software has a unique storage virtualization
feature-set that enables transparent mirroring of SQL Server logs between 2
flash cards, thereby assuring that the log files can be accessed with ultra high
performance, while at the same time, are highly available for recovery if
required." ...read
the article (pdf)
SSD FITs & reliability
Editor:- June 20, 2012
-the component level isn't always the best level of abstraction in modeling
enterprise SSD reliability.
Extrapolating from the single SSD
component level can give you a misleading idea - because SSDs are data
architecture components.
A
recent article on my SSD news
page on this subject started with an email from a reader who knew a lot more
about SSD component reliability than me.
GridIron's SSDs can serve hundreds of concurrent databases
effectively
Editor:- May 30, 2012 - GridIron Systems
describes the setup required to exceed 1 million (4kB) IOPS in a 40x MySQL
environment with mirroring - all in a single cabinet (including servers) using
its FlashCube
SSD systems (upto 80TB in this configuration), and some 10GbE and 16GbFC
fabric switches in a new
whitepaper
(pdf)
published
today.
"In large-scale MySQL environments it's not uncommon to see
hundreds or even thousands of database servers," said Dennis Martin,
President of Demartek
(which tested this configuration). "This reference architecture opens a
new, more efficient architectural approach for serving increasing numbers of
users and database queries per cabinet."
Pure Storage unveils new HA deduped array
Editor:-
May 16, 2012 - Pure
Storage today
unveiled
a new generation of fast-enough
(100K write IOPS)
HA/FT SSD arrays
today - with upto 100TB compressed capacity - which are clustered around
InfiniBand.
new article on Enterprise SSD Array Reliability
Editor:-
March 1, 2012 - Objective Analysis
has published an article -Enterprise
Reliability, Solid State Speed (pdf) - which examines the conflicts which
arise from wanting to use SSD for enterprise acceleration - while also
preserving data protection in the event of SSD failure.
New approaches
and architectures are required - because traditional methods can negatively
impact performance - or - as in the case of RAID - don't always work.
"RAID is configured for
HDDs that fail
infrequently and randomly. SSDs
fail rarely as well, but fail predictably" says the author Jim Handy -
who warns that "SSDs in the same RAID and given similar workloads can be
expected to wear
out at about the same time."
He examines in detail one of the
many new aproaches to high availability enterprise SSD design - that's used in
Kaminario's
K2.
...read
the article (pdf)
See also:-
the SSD reliability
papers, storage
reliability, high
availability enterprise SSD directory and
SSD market analysts.
TMS packs 24TB fastest HA eMLC in 1U
Editor:-
February 28, 2012 - I was just getting used to getting the measure of how much
enterprise flash capacity can fit into 1U rackspace - when Texas Memory Systems
changed things yet again by doing even more.
TMS today
announced a 24TB
high availability
system called the
RamSan-820.
This has similar internal architecture to their 720 which
I discussed with
their CEO Holly Frost last December - but it uses
eMLC instead of
SLC - hence the doubling of the storage density.
TMS today revealed
more about the internal features of their proprietary rackmount SSDs. Their
RamSan-OS has been in continuous development for over 5 years, initially
shipping with the RamSan-500
flash SSD in 2007.
The RamSan-OS is designed from the ground up to run on a cluster of CPU
nodes and FPGAs distributed throughout the RamSan systems.
Speed
is still a core differentiator from TMS.
"Many of our competitors
claim they are software companies and that their products are Application
Accelerators. While this may be fundamentally true, all TMS products are 2x
faster than any other Application Accelerators shipping today,"
according to TMS CEO Holly Frost. "It comes down to very simple
technical and business questions: Why put key functions into slow software when
you can speed up these functions in fast hardware?"
Power
consumption is an important part of the
reliability budget
- and to drive this point home TMS say they are happy to supply customers with
a wattmeter so they can compare these new SSDs with competing products.
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
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. | |
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| Bottlenecks in the pure SSD
datacenter will be more serious than in the HDD world - because responding
slowly will be equivalent to transaction failure. |
| will SSDs end
bottlenecks? | | |
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| a new
market for factory configured HA / FT SSDs |
by
Zsolt Kerekes ,
editor - January 26,
2012
It's always been relatively easy for users and
systems integrators to configure high availability rackmount SSD systems by
using legacy
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:-
fault symmetry
(performance in the failed vs unfailed state), ease of use, risk, complexity,
and scalability.
Customer designed fault tolerant wrap arounds
usually operate outside the
SSD controller loop.
(The rare exceptions are
big web / cloud
entities like Baidu, Google etc.)
In cases - where the HA / FT
scheme doesn't have native controller support - and simply engages data at the
host interface level - these schemes 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 - and is aware of what's
happening between the host interface and 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 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. | | |
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