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| leading the way to the
new storage frontier | |
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SSD history
top SSD companies
what's the state of DWPD?
popular SSD articles
on StorageSearch.com
Capacitor
hold up times in 2.5" military SSDs
is remanence in
persistent memory a new security risk?
where are we
heading with memory intensive systems?
what were
the big SSD memory architecture ideas in 2016?
miscellaneous
consequences of the 2017 memory shortages |
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| the impact
of file metadata on applications performance |
Editor:- October 5, 2016 - The interdependency
of storage software,
physical storage and applications performance is one of the constantly recurring
themes in the SSD era.
When you change one variable - such as the
assumption that storage has a single type of characteristic - the old west 6
shooter rotational model which underpinned all data IO requests in legacy
systems software - to a faster machine gun model - with futuristic
options verging towards the light saber and photonic data shots - thanks to
solid state storage - then data systems architects have more degrees of freedom
around which they can optimise system effectiveness.
A recent blog
from Primary Data
-
Accelerate
Applications by Offloading File Metadata Operations - gives a top level view
of why it can be useful to offload file metadata operations from storage
arrays. Among other things the blog reminds us that...
"Storage
array CPUs can spend significant processing cycles keeping up with all the
metadata operations such as managing file permissions and tracking open and
close events that might otherwise be used for processing data I/O. In some
cases, this can bring both storage and client application performance to a
crawl." ...read
the blog | | |
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| what were
the big SSD ideas which emerged in 2016? |
"From Mangstor's
perspective, we are heavily invested in NVMe over Fabric (NVMf) technology for
which our NX-Series Storage Arrays are based.
With the ratification
of the NVMf specification this past June, flash devices such as SSDs and storage
arrays can now communicate over RDMA networks (such as RoCE or InfiniBand),
delivering the same high performance, low latency benefits as local attached
NVMe.
Storage arrays based on NVMf, such as our award-winning NX6320,
avoid the lower level SCSI transport layer, which results in faster data
throughput and accelerated data access making NVMf solutions ideal for
compute-intensive HPC and database applications."
Scott Harlin,
Director of MarComms - Mangstor
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past Octobers in
SSD market
history |
| October 2001 |
Adtron was named one of
America's entrepreneurial growth leaders by Inc magazine in its annual ranking
of the Inc 500, the nation's fastest-growing private companies. |
| October 2003 |
Memtech announced that its
Wolverine - a military 5GB 2.5" 9.5mm high PATA SSD designed for use in
submarines, space vehicles and aircraft carriers - was guaranteed to exceed a
minimum of 8 million erase/write cycles. |
| October 2004 |
Sun
Microsystems signed an agreement to resell rackmount SSD accelerators from
Texas Memory Systems.
The RamSan product line from TMS was later acquired by
IBM and renamed to
FlashSystems. |
| October 2006 |
STEC acquired UK SSD maker
Gnutek. Gnutek's
Maracite - a 3.5" FC flash SSD with R/W IOPS performance of 52K and 18K -
provided core founding IP for what later became STEC's most successful
enterprise focused SSD product line - the ZeusIOPS. |
| October 2007 |
Samsung developed the
world's first 64Gb MLC NANDflash
memory chip using 30nm technology. |
| October 2010 |
DensBits got series B
funding for its Memory Modem (adaptive DSP) controller IP. |
| October 2011 |
LSI announced it would
acquire SandForce
(the best known SSD controller company). |
| October 2012 |
Hybrid storage arrays from
Tegile Systems were part
of the technology which supported the US Presidential Debate at Lynn
University. |
| October 2013 |
McObject showed that its
in-memory database operating in NVDIMMs could survive the power cord being
pulled during intensive memory operations.
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more
pages like this? - archived storage news before and after |
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Toshiba is a key SSD supplier for NetApp FIPS
certified products
Editor:- October 25, 2016 - Toshiba today
announced
that its PX04S 12Gbit/s SAS SSDs, which are FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certified, are
shipping in NetApp's
hybrid FAS and E-Series systems.
SSDs outsell HDDs in European storage distribution channels
Editor:-
October 18, 2016 - "Revenues from sales of oem SSDs through Western
European distribution channels in September 2016 again exceeded revenues from
oem HDDs" - is the key message from a
research
note posted by Mehari
Goitom, Enterprise Account Manager - Context World.
Mehari
says - "This confirms SSDs as the leading storage technology in the
dedicated storage market for the 3rd calendar quarter as large enterprise
customers use them to replace HDDs." ...read
the article
See also:-
storage market
research
FalconStor offers new pricing model for use with cloud
Editor:-
October 17, 2016 - FalconStor
Software today
announced
a new version of its FreeStor software - FreeStor for the hybrid cloud - which
the company says has a new pricing model which removes the barrier of cloud
adoption. Among other things organizations now pay only for licensing of
their primary instance of data, not the total amount of storage consumed.
See
also:- Exiting
the Astrological Age of Enterprise SSD Pricing,
SSDs in the cloud
Pure says it's ready to ship petabyte SSDs
Editor:-
October 12, 2016 - Pure Storage
today
announced
availability of its of petabyte-scale rackmount SSD - the
FlashArray//m
- which in 7U includes 512TB of raw flash delivering 1.5PB of effective
capacity (based on its customer use metrics).
Re
resilience
Pure says this product family has 99.9999% availability across the installed
base, which equates to only 31.5 seconds of downtime on average per year.
Editor's
comments:- In my 2013 article -
impacts of the
enterprise SSD software event horizon - I discussed the improving
efficiencies we could still expect to see in pure SSD arrays as more layers of
ancient HDD architecture were removed from archeologically stratified
software stacks.
Pure disclosed in a 2015 white paper -
Building HA
enterprise flash storage from commodity components (pdf) - that in
real-world applications its customer base averaged 5.4x more effective
storage than the physical storage in the system excluding gains from thin
provisioning. And that provides some context for their effective to raw flash
capacity ratio of 3 in the press release - which seems reasonable after you
take into account that some raw capacity is "lost" due to reliability
strategies.
You can also see the signficance of 30 seconds in the
above pdf too.
You can get a comparitive idea of the elasticity of SSD
vendor promises about
effective
capacity by clicking on the link which mines archived news.
See
also:- petabyte SSDs
Micron wraps up funding to own all Inotera
Editor:-
October 12, 2016 - Micron's
long delayed plan (announced in
December 2015)
to complete its ownership of Inotera now has an end
date in sight - December 6th, 2016.
Inotera
announced
yesterday Micron Semiconductor Taiwan Co. Ltd. and Inotera signed a syndicated
loan agreement of NT$80BN with a group of banks which will enable MST to
acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Inotera for
cash.
recently
shipped HDD capacity averages 1.7TB
Editor:- October 11, 2016 -
the average capacity of hard
drives shipped by Seagate
in the quarter ended September 30, 2016 was 1.7TB according to a preliminary
financial report
from the company today.
NVMe flash as RAM - new software from OmniTier
Editor:-
October 5, 2016 - OmniTier today
announced the availability of its software MemStac which for
cloud workloads can
shrink DRAM requirements
by about 8x using standard NVMe SSDs as caches for DRAM.
MemStac
supports up to 4TB cache capacity per server node at a fraction of the
cost of
pure DRAM-only solutions.
OmniTier says that SSD performance in a
standard Intel dual-socket server is upto 3.7M operations per second (100% Get
operations) and 3.2M operations per second (80% Get operations / 20% Set
operations) for 100 byte records.
These levels of performance are
achieved with less than 1mS average latency. In addition, MemStac seamlessly
delivers 10GbE network-limited throughput with typical workloads exceeding 250
bytes in average size, similar to the DRAM-only open-source solutions.
Maxim
samples deep cover security chip
Editor:- October 5, 2016 - A
nonvolatile, decrement-only counter with authenticated read and tiny amount -
8Kbits - of EEPROM for user data, keys, and certificates are part of an
interesting
DeepCover
Secure Authenticator chip which is now sampling and was
announced
today by Maxim .
Kaminario offers free iPads to boost K2 tryouts
Editor:-
October 4, 2016 - I saw a promotional email offer from Kaminario today which
I think may backfire as it seems to be in direct conflict with the ethical
principles of buyers in many large organizations.
The promotional
email says "Test and evaluate a Kaminario K2 all flash array with up to
50TB capacity for as little as $1.25 per GB and iPAD management console for 45
days. Try it today and the iPad is yours to keep."
There's also a
supporting sign up web page for the offer.
Editor's comments:- I
think the offer will turn off buyers in big companies - because the inducement
of a free iPad to take part in the evaluation sounds like a personal gift
rather than having any benefit for the evaluating organization. Seems to me
that the marketers in Kaminario have been reading too many consumer marketing
comics.
See also:- Marketing
Views
Rambus and Xilinx partner on FPGA in DRAM array technology
Editor:-
October 4, 2016 - Rambus
recently
announced
a license agreement with Xilinx
that covers Rambus' patented memory controller, SerDes and security
technologies.
Rambus is also exploring the use of Xilinx FPGAs in its
Smart
Data Acceleration research program. The SDA - powered by an FPGA paired
with 24 DIMMS - offers high DRAM memory densities and has potential uses as a
CPU offload agent (in-situ
memory computing). | |
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| What happened before?
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| I noticed that whenever I
repeated the power off and power back on again cycling (into what we'd now call
a "cold boot" condition) most of the contents of the RAM looked
similar to what they had been before, instead of scrambled which is what I
expected. |
| does storage class
memory pose new new security risks? | | |
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do you
understand all the
words in SSD headlines? |
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| I think it's not too strong
to say that the enterprise PCIe SSD market (as we once knew it) has exploded and
fragmented into many different directions. |
| what's changed in enterprise
PCIe SSD? | | |
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NVMe is the new SCSI.
Over a 30 year period SCSI was adopted by
many markets, rejuvenated and then supported by other connectivity fabrics.
NVMe has done something similar in a much shorter span of time -
around 5 years. |
| 2.5" NVMe PCIe SSDs
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