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SNIA opens new SSD survey
Editor:-
October 11, 2013 - 9 years ago StorageSearch.com
funded and conducted the world's
first marketwide SSD survey asking SSD users about their preferences and
what they viewed as inhibitors to the adoption of SSDs?
Since then
I haven't had to do any formal surveys because I've spoken to thousands of you
by email and phone and my web stats (analyzing millions of my past SSD readers)
have also provided useful advance pointers to changing preferences in
interfaces, technologies and suppliers - which I have shared with you in
articles on this
site.
I returned to the theme of -
what do
enterprise SSD users want? - in a major article last year - pointing out
some of the problems which the SSD industry still needs to address.
Standards organizations move
at a slower pace - because they need everyone to agree who's sitting in which
chair and who brings the coffee - before they can even start discussing
anything new - but when they reach consensus the results can be worth the
wait.
So it's good to see that SNIA is now running an
online survey on SSD features
(interfaces, apps etc) - in order to learn more about the market. The survy
is open till the end of November - and the results will be announced at
Storage Visions next January.
If you think the SSD industry doesn't understand what you're doing - you would
mostly be right - because users are different (not all the same) and in the
enterprise
rules are made to be broken - as users learn from and adapt to new ways of
doing old things and realize that new things are possible too. The SSD industry
would like to understand you better so they can design more of the products
which you'd feel comfortable buying.
There are many ways you can
participate in this vendor education process. Buy more of the stuff you like and
less of the stuff you don't. That's very effective. Or you can tell vendors
what you think, email publications and blog about your views or participate in
market research. Or just sit back and watch everyone else get it wrong. Anyway
the survey link is here .
See
also:- the SSD
education problem, market
research directory
Fusion-io accelerates shopping in China
Editor:-
October 10, 2013 - The largest B2C online shopping site in China - which has 51
million registered users who make an average of 500,000 purchases daily -
generating over 100 million pages / day - has improved its Microsoft SQL
Server database query response times
9x by accelerating its infrastructure with ioMemory (PCIe SSDs) from Fusion-io -
according to a
press
release yesterday.
According to the linked
case study - the
customer JD.com - also reduced its server
count by 3 to 1, saved money on software licenses and other running costs and
also improved operational reliability.
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.
the revolution is in the software architected for flash and built
for the modern data center - says Kaminario
Editor:- October 9,
2013 - In a blog yesterday -
You Say You
Want a Revolution? - Kaminario says - "the
revolution (about enterprise flash) is in the software architected for flash
and built for the modern data center... We have competed against legacy storage
and watched as customers went through the progression of adding flash in their
current arrays. We've competed against the all-flash stovepipe builders with
their one-workload wonders. Customers always seem to come to the same
conclusion..." ...read the
article
Editor's comments:- the title of the blog
comes from the first line in a
Beatles
track - because I guess that's the music generation which it's safe to
assume that many customers in the datacenter will be able to recognize and
relate to.
But let's not forget there's a lot of good newer songs out
there too.
Among other things I've been listening to this month -
while I've been unintentionally painting myself as well as the porch which I
was originally aiming at (comes from picking things up from the wrong end
without looking) I've been enjoying Deer
Tick.
OK I haven't given any thought yet to how Deer Tick's
lyrics could be worked into the title of an enterprise SSD blog - but I'm sure
that someone will do it. When you do - send me the link.
wonder why all big SSD users will inevitably pedal back their
buying?
Editor:- October 8, 2013 - Before you make that next
presentation about what's happening in the business world of enterprise
flash, or before you commit to any future datelines for hard drives being
sold into the enterprise you'd be well advised to
meet Ken and the enterprise SSD
software event horizon - the (long anticipated) new home page blog on StorageSearch.com.
Blancco announces recovery-proof SSD erase
Editor:-
October 8, 2013 - Blancco
today
launched
a new SSD erasing
software product - which the company says has been validated as being
data recovery
resistant.
See also:-
fast purge / secure erase
SSDs
by
2017 most flash will be 3D - says iSuppli
Editor:- October 4,
2013 - In a
market
forecast yesterday IHS
iSuppli said - "by 2017 65% of all NAND flash memory chips
shipped worldwide will be produced using 3-D manufacturing processes, up from
less than 1% this year."
Editor's comments:- the
transition towards a new way of making flash memory (by vertical stacking of
deposition layers at the chip level) currently looks like a more viable way of
increasing flash densities in the long term - compared to shrinking the geometry
of cells - which is already straining the ingenuity of circuit designers to
counteract and manage
the impact of intrinsic defects in the materials which become more significant
as the stored charge for each virtual data bit gets smaller.
Some
aspects of this trend toward shrinking 2D (aka planar) geometry - at the SSD
level - manifest as worsening raw metrics such as -
endurance,
remanence,
reliability and
data integrity.
Fusion-io still #1 SSD search volume - 19th quarter
Editor:-
October 3, 2013 - the next edition of the
Top SSD Companies -
the 26th in this series - based on search metrics in the 3rd quarter of 2013 -
will be published here on
StorageSearch.com or before October
15.
I can reveal that the #1 company for this period - Fusion-io
- hasn't changed from the previous 18 quarters - despite some spikes in
September during which month it dropped by 2 places. (As reported lower down
this page on September 24.)
Samsung's SAS SSD VMware certified
Editor:- October
2, 2013 - Samsung
today
announced
that its
SM1625
(pdf) - dual port SAS
SSD - has been certified for use with VMware Virtual SAN.
Nimbus IPO date? - this may be the leading indicator to watch out
for
Editor:- October 1, 2013 - I was talking recently to Tom Isakovich,
CEO and founder of Nimbus
Data Systems...
I asked Tom if he thought the air of
uncertainty hanging around competitors in the
SSD systems market
was affecting the competitive situation for his own company. In particular
I raised the subject of Whiptail's
announced acquisition by Cisco
(would the products still be available? or would some get dropped - like when
IBM acquired
TMS). The ticker ride
for VMEM was still a week into the future when we spoke but anyone who had
read Violin's IPO
disclosures could see their predicament.
He said Nimbus rarely
encounters those other SSD companies as competitors in customer sites - so he
didn't expect to see any short term impact either way. Tom views his real
competitors as being the big traditional storage companies and so when Nimbus
gets an order from a customer who has been using big name storage - he regards
that as being far more significant than beating another SSD systems "startup"
- because Nimbus is competing against prevailing customer inertia.
He
also said that apart from any technical differences between Nimbus and Violin
(he thinks Nimbus's software stack is better) - the other difference is that
Violin hasn't been profitable and its revenue growth rate has been
unreliable.
In contrast to many other SSD companies at the present time
- he said:-
- Nimbus is profitable,
- their sales have tripled this year and
- he expects sales to triple again next year
Being funded by
customers - like a traditional business - means there's no urgency to rush to an
IPO. Tom said the likeliest date he could envisage for an IPO would be
towards the end of 2014.
We moved onto the subject of
why enterprise
customers buy SSD arrays - and we traded stories about some of the
explanations which get tossed around like
IOPS per dollar -
which when you scrutinize them in any detail are ridiculous. We've both seen
leading edge silicon SSD companies put nonsensical graphs into their marketing
presentations which don't lead you anywhere useful in the real world if you
follow the superficial analysis. (That's because these vendors don't make
systems - and are many steps removed from genuine enterprise thinking.)
Tom
said most of his customers couldn't tell you how many
IOPS their
apps were demanding.
I said I've been writing about the "cost
of satisfying a given number of virtual users for a particular type of app"
as being a useful comparison figure (for storage). We both agreed that even if
enterprises don't know for sure what their throughputs or IOPS are - they have a
good idea of how many users they're trying to serve within their organization or
at customer facing web interfaces. The payroll tells you one, the marketing
people can tell you the other. And accounting can tell you how much it all
costs. You don't need storage
analyzer tools to get a feeling for where the ground level lies.
After
we had been talking for about 40 minutes I said - what was it you originally
wanted to talk to me about? - because I knew this conversation had been set up
to coincide with some sort of announcement - but I hadn't seen any details yet.
Tom said he knows that after talking to me for over 10 years I rarely look at
any briefing documents in advance and when I do I never stick to any planned
presentation agenda - so he hadn't sent me anything.
But as our
conversation had already veered towards the subject of a simple way that users
can compare the costs of SSD storage for particular types of apps - and as I'd
asked the question - he said there was a benchmark called IOmark-VDI which
Nimbus had participated in recently with the
Evaluator Group.
He said he went into the process because he thought it might be a good thing to
try out - and was gratified to found out that it shows the Nimbus product in a
very good light with a
cost
under $40 per virtual desktop (pdf) achieved by a 2U Nimbus system
supporting up to 4,032 linked clone VDI images. So that was a good note to end
on.
Now - if any of you have seen
Tom's SSD blogs -
then you'll know that he's been averaging somewhere between one and two a
year. And a few minutes after our conversation had ended - and while
pondering these various matters I thought of a good way to summarize things.
So I sent Tom this email - "when I see you updating your blog
on a weekly basis I'll know that your IPO date is impending." | |
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