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by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - September
29, 2010 |
You may think that the so
called "enterprise
SSD" market is already complicated enough - but there are many more
product implementation choices and technologies which will make the spectrum of
enterprise SSDs clamoring for your attention wider than it is now and harder to
focus on and latch onto quickly.
I'm not just talking about the
proliferation of memory types. There are
5 different
memory types currently being marketed in "enterprise SSDs" and
more on the way. |
And I'm not talking about the
different architectures (open versus proprietary)
which already occur in vanilla
rackmount SSDs.
And
I'm not just talking about whether users are better off with SSDs which can
tune themselves (using one of the many different types of algorithms embedded in
SSD ASAPs) versus the
old fashioned way of getting
SSD tuning done
manually.
And I'm not just talking about application specific SSDs -
which already exist in some market segments - and will be a much bigger part
of the future SSD
market.
What I'm proposing is a simplistic way to view all these
products (and those still to come) through a technology-agnostic lens (mental
trick) which quickly helps you decide whether you should invest more time
reading about new SSD products which fall under the "enterprise SSD"
umbrella.
In my view all enterprise SSDs can be thought of as
belonging in one of 2 categories
- Legacy - the SSDs are going into an architecture originally
purchased by the user with just
HDDs in mind.
- New Dynasty - the SSDs are going into a user base or factory fitted
box always intended to have SSDs from the initial purchase order.
Despite
the names "Legacy" and "New Dynasty" - both types of SSDs
will both be around for the foreseeable future.
PCIe SSD examples
In
the
PCIe SSD market you
get both types of SSD. Some products are legacy while others are new dynasty.
And knowing which is which can help you comprehend some puzzling market
nuances.
You may think that products with superficially similar
performance envelopes like the
RamSan-20 from
Texas Memory Systems
and the ioDrive from
Fusion-io compete
head to head.
But that is rarely the case for most commercial end
users.
The RamSan-20 (which has an onboard offload
SSD controller) is in
the Legacy camp. It's a product which a user might retrofit to an existing bunch
of servers running existing apps.
The ioDrive is undoubtedly in the New
Dynasty camp - because it will usually be a factory fitted option supplied by
the server oem. Although you can use ioDrive's in some older servers - these
products work better with newer servers (with faster CPUs) because that's the
market they were designed for - with the
host CPU doing
the memory gymnastics traditionally done by an SSD resident hardware
controller.
The Legacy / New Dynasty way of looking at things works at
the next level up in the application hierarchy too.
A New Dynasty SSD
accelerated server (whether it's got a factory fitted PCIe ioDrive inside or
some SandForce driven
SAS SSDs) simply looks
to the external world like a faster server. A year or so after you've installed
a couple of hundred New Dynasty accelerated servers into your environment - you
may hit some new IOPS bottlenecks in another hot spot further up the data food
chain. In most user sites that bottleneck will be architected on a classic
storage network (SAN or
NAS) and the solution to
the next level of bottleneck will actually be a Legacy SSD - maybe even a RAM
SSD.
The RAM SSD
market (the oldest part of the enterprise SSD market) may - in my analysis
-paradoxically see a resurgence and continue growing for many years.
Although
lower priced flash SSDs killed off the entry level RAM SSD market - only RAM
SSDs have the fast latency and symmetric performance which can cope with the
increased data demands which will be created by bigger populations of flash SSD
accelerated servers.
And meanwhile - all that propaganda spewing out
from the flash SSD
market in the past 5 years has
educated users and
made the market more receptive to the idea of an SSD solution.
In the
old days
of the enterprise SSD market - pre 2005 - the server accelerator SSD was
parachuted into performance distressed customer sites as a previously
unlooked for expensive fix when all else had failed.
I'll talk more
about this new way of looking at enterprise SSDs - in future articles. | |
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| sugaring nand flash
for the enterprise |
When flash SSDs started to be used as
enterprise server accelerators in 2004 - competing
RAM SSD makers said
flash wasn't reliable
enough.
Since then flash has dominated the installed base of
enterprise SSD starting with SLC, followed by MLC, then a correction to eMLC
and now some SSD makers are saying TLC (x3) may be good enough.
But
it's not just the raw memory
type which determines the suitability of which flash can work reliably in
what type of enterprise SSD. The
controller IP and
cache architecture
can make a difference to the
endurance
of x5, x10, x20 - and I've even heard
claims of x100...
That
means TLC (aka x3) - with the right SSD IP - may be as good as SLC in some types
of applications. And it costs a lot less and has higher capacity.
What
do you need to know?
Who are you going to believe? |
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... |
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Megabyte's enterprise
accelerator
had elements of both traditional and
futuristic design with
built-in
redundancy and seamless failover. | |
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| 90% of the enterprise SSD
companies which you know have no good reasons to survive
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In one of the most highly read
articles
on StorageSearch.com in
recent years - I looked at drivers, mechanisms and routes towards
consolidation in the enterprise SSD systems market along with some other
outrageous and dangerous ideas. The conclusion?
"90% of
the enterprise SSD companies which you know have no good reasons to survive."
Before
publication - I discussed these ideas with various readers for about 3
months and since publication you won't be surprised when I tell you it has
been at the core of many conversations since. ...read
the article | | |
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| "Across the whole
enterprise - a single petabyte of SSD with new software could replace 10 to
50 petabytes of raw legacy HDD storage and still enable all the apps to run
much faster while being hosted on a shrunken population of SSD enhanced
servers." |
| the enterprise SSD
software event horizon | | |
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| How big was the
thinking in this SSD's design? |
| When it comes to SSDs - Big versus Small
SSD architecture - is something which was in the designer's mind. Even if they
didn't think about it that way at the time.
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For designers, integrators,
end users and investors alike - understanding what follows from these simple
choices predicts a lot of important consequences. ...read the article | | | |
| . |
| how fast can your
SSD run backwards? |
Underlying all the important aspects of
SSD behavior are
11 key asymmetries
which arise from the intrinsic technologies and architecture inside the SSD.
There's no such thing as - the perfect SSD - existing in the
market today - but the SSD symmetry list helps you to understand where any SSD
in any memory technology stands relative to the ideal.
...click to read
the article | | |
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| "This article previews
the final chapter in the SSD vs HDD wars. The elimination of hard drives from
what was its strongest bastion - the bulk data storage market in the data
center." |
| this way to the Petabyte
SSD | | | |
