 |
| leading the way to the
new storage frontier | |
... |
| ..... |
|
after AFAs -
what's next?
a winter's tale
of SSD market influences
endurance? -
changes in the forever war
Capacitor
hold up times in 2.5" military SSDs
where are we
heading with memory intensive systems?
optimizing
CPUs for use in SSDs in the Post Modernist Era
when flash is faster
than DRAM - the Memory1 benchmarks
|
|
| ... |
|
| After 23 years of writing
SSD guides and articles and many waves of change and disruption it's not
unreasonable to ask... |
| Are we
there yet? - state of SSD in Q2 2017 | | |
|
| ... |
|
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|
... |
|
| NVMe over
Fabrics - market experiences |
Editor:- March 31, 2017 - The state of the NVMe
SSD and fabric market and its growth expectations are conveniently summarized in
a new presentation -
Experiences
with NVMe over Fabrics (pdf) - by Mellanox. Among other
things:-
- 40% of AFAs will be NVMe based by 2020
- shipments of NVMe SSDs will grow to 25+ million by 2020
The idea
of having a
PCIe
based SSD fabric which can be accessed by many servers and which combines
the latency advantages of local
PCIe SSDs with the
essential hooks from past low latency server interconnects - specifically -
RDMA
- has been many years in the telling.
There have been 3 main
ingredients to this market brew:-
- something worthwhile sharing as a resource (low latency SSD pools)
- a convenient way of connecting to them (a large installed base of server
PCIe interface chips were
the essential starting point - but it took many years for industry standards to
get agreed)
- software support
- which ranges from the storage stack to multi-vendor fabric support.
This
paper captures current expectations for how the market is expected to grow.
...read
the article (pdf) | | |
|
... |
|
| Web-Feet Reports on
NVM Market Shares in 2016 |
| by Alan Niebel
, CEO - Web-Feet
Research - March 29, 2017 |
Not since 2000, have the memory suppliers
been in an undersupply situation. It is the force which in 2H 2016 resulted
in increasing memory prices for a number of reasons.
NAND
vendors are producing 2D (planar) NAND at full capacity, while concurrently
making the costly shift in production to 3D NAND.
DRAM has been so hot
that the Big Three (Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron) are shrinking their
lithography below 1x and 1y, while maintaining their production at capacity.
Other foundries, like the memory manufacturers, are also running at
capacity, trying to maintain balance with IoT, M-2-M, mobile and computing
demands.
Even the NOR Flash market saw a reversal of 15+ years of
market declines has been caught in the allocation/shortage scenario.
Yet,
with all this current production building additional capacity takes time and has
been fraught with technology hurdles that slowdown bit increases.
Although the NOR market is around 5% of NAND, NORs challenges
represent a microcosm of the larger Flash and memory markets.
With
the stronger demand for SoC (System on Chip) to satisfy the IoT and edge
terminal requirements, foundries and ODMs are shifting their wafer mix away from
standalone memories.
These SoCs are also being built at lithography
nodes below 40nm, where most embedded NOR Flash cannot be built. Consequently,
these SoCs will need KGD and standalone serial NOR components at 512Kbit-256Mbit
densities and larger to fulfill the IoT system memory requirements.
In
China, GigaDevice who supplies serial NOR is caught in a wafer allocation
squeeze in not getting enough serial Flash wafers from their foundry who is
making more SoCs (that need serial NOR).
Winbond who makes both DRAM
and NOR/NAND has been riding the higher price DRAM wave and has limited any
additional wafer allocations to NOR.
Micron has been rumored to have
shut down NOR production at their Singapore fab in favor of NAND, which removes
some NOR wafer capacity.
Cypress the NOR market leader is gradually
moving their emphasis from commodity standalone NOR to a IoT systems memory
module especially for the automotive market.
Finally, Macronix has
regained more NOR market presence in allocating more NOR wafer production is
still facing long lead times since demand is ever increasing on the constrained
industry supply.
The net effect is NOR and other memory prices are
increasing with supply constraints and vendors are on allocation for the
foreseeable future.
In consolidating its annual results of each Flash memory vendors
shipments, WebFeet Research found the 2016 Flash memory market to be $36.8
billion, an increase of 10% from 2015.
A substantial increase in 2016
revenues came from the NAND Flash market with a 10.7% growth rate, while the NOR
market contracted flatly from 2015 by only -1.8 %.
Samsung was the
perennial 2016 revenue market leader for all NV Memories and NAND, Cypress
(Spansion) established itself as the NOR Flash and the NVRAM market leader,
while Macronix regained the serial NOR leadership position.
The 2016 Non Volatile Memory Market Shares by Vendor report (by
Web-Feet Research)
discusses the impact of the mergers and acquisitions on the memory market,
qualifies the migration of planar to 3D NAND, quantifies how fast the emerging
NVM are growing including STT-MRAM and XPoint as well as the reemergence of RRAM
and NRAM, and presents two forecasts for serial EEPROM showing the impact (slow
initial adoption) of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its aggressive scenario.
This report, CS700MS-2017, is available for $2.5K and providers of
the market share data can obtain the report at a discount.
For
more info about these reports contact WebFeet Research at +1 831-869-8274 or
alan.niebel@web-feetresearch.com. | | |
|
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| M.2 PCIe SSDs for secure
rugged applications? |
Editor:- March 20, 2017 - Do you know who makes
M.2 PCIe SSDs which can
operate at
industrial
temperatures and have security
strong enough for a military application?
That's a question I was
asked recently by a reader in the
defense sector.
So
I looked into it. He was right. They are hard to find. Nearly all the
industrial M.2 SSDs are
SATA and not
PCIe.
The
only companies which I have been able to confirm in this category (by direct
contact rather than a promissory future product statement on a web page)
are:-
I
became interested in the technical difficulties which might explain why
there are so few suppliers right now.
Here's what I think is part of
the explanation.
As you add operational requirements to the datasheet
moving up from consumer to enterprise and then to industrial SSDs you also add
circuits and components which compete for physical space, electrical power and
cost in the total SSD
design budget.
- use of larger
flash
memory cell geometry (nanometer generation and coding type - for example
SLC rather than MLC, or MLC rather than TLC) to ensure data integrity over a
wider range of temperature and power supply quality environments
- use of different flash
SSD controllers
Consumer and enterprise SSDs can use controllers
which use more electrical power than industrial or embedded SSDs due to the ease
of fitting the design into the heat rise budget.
Industrial designs
can't afford the same wattage in their controllers - because the heat generated
would reduce the reliability
of the SSD at the high end of its operating temperature range (70 to 85
degress C and sometimes 95 degrees) - or force the use of more expensive
components elsewhere (to cope with the incremental heat rise.
The
tradeoffs made (typically lower wattage controller) is why industrial SSDs
tend not to use CPU intensive data integrity management schemes like
adaptive DSP.
And that in turn means they need to use intrinsically higher quality memory.
When you add all the requirements together to make an industrial /
military SSD capable of working reliably and shrink the size budget from a
bigger to smaller form factor (2.5" to M.2) while at the same time asking
for high performance too - it's a tough design problem to solve for the first
time.
But once such products do became available from multiple sources
then demand will grow (due to confidence in the equipment design community
that they won't get stuck in an
EOL rut from a single
source dependency).
If you know of other secure erase, industrial
operation M.2 PCIe SSD companies which are shipping products let me know and
I'll mention them here.
I placed a query via linkedin but that didn't
generated any other confirmed vendors. | | |
|
... |
|
| "Samsung Electronics
will invest about 10 trillion won (US$8.7 billion) in Hwaseong Campus in
Gyeonggi Province, South Korea to build a new line to produce DRAM." |
| news
report in Business Korea (March 15, 2017) | | |
|
... |
|
"In the most recent
quarter
(ending January 31, 2017) we had more than one customer running large scale
simulations and analytics replace over 20 racks (think 20 refrigerators of
equipment) with a single FlashBlade (at 4U about the size of a microwave oven).
Such dramatic consolidation depends on storage software that has been designed
for silicon rather than mechanical disk." |
Scott Dietzen, CEO -
Pure Storage
- in his blog
Delivering
the data platform for the cloud era and the secular shift to flash memory
(March 1, 2017)
Editor's comments:- this is another
confirmation of the replacement ratio predictions in my (2013) blog -
meet Ken - and the
enterprise SSD software event horizon.
PS - Another thing which
Scott Dietzen said in his new blog was...
"This year, the 8th
since our founding and our 6th of selling, we expect to reach $1 billion in
revenues." | | |
|
... |
|
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|
... |
|
When Diablo was designing
their Memory1 (flash as RAM in a DDR-4 DIMM solution) they used machine learning
to model the real world behavior of DRAM memory controllers which would be
resident on the same server motherboards.
Predicting what DRAM
controllers do in microscopic detail is important for latency optimization
when your tiered memory software has ultimate control over what data stays in
DRAM and what can be moved to flash. |
| controllernomics and
benchmarks in flash as RAM | | |
|
... |
|
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|
... |
|
| Locality and latency are
well understood related concepts in the design of tiered memory and caches.
Before 2016 business models in the SSD market had something similar. That's
no longer true. |
| 1 big
market lesson in SSD year 2016 | | |
| |
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| ..... |
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| ..... |
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|
Transcend's new M.2 SSD
Editor:-
March 27, 2017 -
Transcend
today launched the MTE850
- a family of PCIe Gen 3 x 4 M.2
SSDs with 512GB of 3D MLC NAND capacity and R/W speeds upto 2.5GB/s and
1.1GB/s, respectively aimed at the
consumer market.
Fastest Growing Storage Companies in 2017?
Editor:-
March 25, 2017 - 3 SSD companies were among those listed in a new article -
10
Fastest Growing Storage Companies 2017 - by Silicon Review .
Editor's
comments:- all 3 companies operate in the
rackmount SSD market
- which is an interesting indicator of where the action is. There's still
everything to play for for as the market is still still
"under
construction".
See also:-
storage market research -
news and who's who
CPUs for use with SSDs in the Post Modernist Era of SSD
Editor:-
March 22, 2017 - A new blog on StorageSearch.com
-
optimizing
CPUs for use with SSDs in the Post Modernist Era of SSD and Memory Systems
- was prompted by a question from a startup which is designing new processors
for the SSD market. ...read the
article
Google joins investors in Avere Systems
Editor:-
March 21, 2017 - Avere
Systems today
announced
the closing of a $14 million Series E funding with participation from existing
investors Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners,
Tenaya Capital and Western Digital Capital and new investor Google Inc.
The
new investment brings Avere's total funds raised to $97 million, and will be
used to expand the company's hybrid cloud product offerings so that more
organizations can easily take advantage of the public cloud.
Editor's
comments:- A year
ago Avere announced it had been named "Google Cloud Platform
Technology Partner of the Year" for 2015.
See also:-
VCs in SSDs
NVMdurance has US patent for Adaptive Flash Tuning
Editor:-
March 21, 2017 - NVMdurance
today
announced
that it has been granted US patent 9,569,120 for Adaptive Flash Tuning.
This
patent covers NVMdurance's
Pathfinder and
Navigator software, which discover optimal flash trim sets for the target
application and implement a set of optimization techniques that constantly
monitor the NAND flash health and autonomically adjusts the operating parameters
in real time.
Before the flash memory product goes into production, NVMdurance
Pathfinder determines multiple sets of viable flash register values, using a
custom-built suite of machine-learning techniques. Then, running on the flash
memory controller utilized in SSDs or other storage product, NVMdurance
Navigator chooses which of these predetermined sets to use for each stage of
life to increase the flash memory endurance.
Editor's comments:- The things which make NVMdurance's
technology processes a viable business model for SSD partners are that the
heavyweight processing is done back at HQ as part of the memory characterization
and controller modeling which means that the delivery overhead in each shipped
product is lightweight and protects the stakeholder's IP.
And another
thing is that no one has come up with any better ideas for a way to roll out a
new SSD with new flash memory encapsulated in such a predictable set of
algorithmically bounded phases which reduces the worst risks (of delay and
misfire) which come from picking such magic numbers via the organic talent
(human) alternatives.
See also:-
Adaptive
flash care management & DSP IP in SSDs,
the limericks of
SSD endurance,
the 5 stage
life cycle budget of extended flash endurance (pdf)
Intel is sampling 3DXpoint PCIe SSDs
Editor:- March
19, 2017 - Intel
today
announced
that it is sampling its long awaited first enterprise SSD which uses 3DXpoint
(Optane) memory and which is aimed at the HHHL
PCIe SSD market.
The
P4800X
Series (pdf) has a PCIe 3.0 x 4 NVMe interface and provides upto 375GB
capacity, 500K mixed
IOPS (4KB),
block level R/W latency 150/200S (queue depth 16), and endurance of 30
DWPD for 3 years
(equivalent to 18 on a 5 year adjusted basis).
The new drives are
supported by caching / tiering software (Intel Memory Drive Technology) which
collaborates with motherboard DRAM resources to transparently provide an
emulated 3DX as RAM memory pool.
This is similar in concept to earlier
software products in the market from various vendors which have supported
flash as RAM.
As widely expected the new SSDs have worse
performance and higher pricing than Intel had indicated at the first public
unveiling in the summer of 2015.
A rounded perspective can be seen
in a new blog
Intel
Announces Optane SSDs for the Enterprise - by Jim Handy - founder Objective Analysis.
Among
other things Jim says "Intel has announced an SSD whose performance is
close to that of NAND flash at a price that is close to that of DRAM. How did
that happen?" ...read
the article
Editor's comments:- As the new P4800X is
not hot pluggable and as its main difference to previous flash SSDs from Intel
is its support as a tiered memory - the most obvious role for a competitive
comparison is memory channel based NVDIMM solutions - in particular the Memory1
product from Diablo
which provides 128GB of flash as RAM per DIMM socket - and upto 2TB in a 2
socket server.
Density comparison - Optane PCIe and Flash DDR-4
On
a density level the current technology at a superficial level appears to be 1x
HHHL Optane PCIe SSD gives the equivalent emulated memory as 3x DDR-4 Memory1
DIMMs.
Although this doesn't take into account how much DRAM is needed
to support each type of configuration it's a good enough comparison point to
start with.
But there are some areas of doubt in making such a
comparison.
1 - Due to the scarcity of the new Optane products we
haven't seen published benchmarks yet which could show how effectively the
Optane system works (as an integrated memory and software solution). The raw
latency figures (at the SSD datasheet level) don't conclusively point towards
it being either a better or worse performer (than the flash based Memory1).
2
- From a customer point of view a key factor between the 2 products isn't just
the level of density today. (Let's assume they're both similar right now).
If we compare the potential capacity roadmaps - 3DXpoint (as a new
technology) has been difficult for Intel /
Micron to get started
and we can't have any confidence yet that density will improve (from the
technology difficulty angle) or indeed that new generations will even get the
investment
to improve at all.
In contrast - all flash based solutions get a
helping hand from the entire flash industry's striving to keep improving
density. So it's less risky to assume that a flash based system will probably
increase in storage density during the next 3 years than any new alternative
NVRAM.
It's the density in a single motherboard which makes
or breaks the big memory market (as we have already seen with
DRAM).
Electrical
power consumption (wattage) is more important than small differences in
latency.
Because if you can get more memory into one box then you save
the interbox fabric latency which already makes nand flash (as RAM) faster
and cheaper than DRAM at scales of tens to hundreds of terabytes.
It's
refreshing to see that there are so many genuinely different competing solutions
being offered for the future memory fabric market.
Compatibility
with SSDeverywhere
software (and useful agility with the new big memory
killer
apps) along with rationally
affordable
granular value
propositions for integration with the
cloud will be just as
important as any of the raw memory technologies we see assembled into cards and
modules.
As I said at the
close
of 2016 - everything in the SSD market now affects everything else.
CNEX Labs has amassed $60 million for new SSD controller
Editor:-
March 15, 2017 - CNEX Labs
today announced its
Series C round of financing which brings total funding to date over $60
million. The company will use the funding for mass production and system
integration for lead customers of its NVMe-compliant SSD controllers for
hyperscale markets. The new controllers will enable full host control over
data placement, I/O scheduling, and other application-specific optimizations, in
both kernel and user space.
See also:-
adaptive
intelligence flow symmetry (1 of 11 Key Symmetries in SSD design).
BeSang says 3D Super-DRAM could fix multi-billion dollar money
pit of memory industry's fab capacity roadmap
Editor:- March
15, 2017 - Just as we're starting to get used to a world view that memory
fabrication capacity
may
not be enough to make all the memory parts needed - and that a pragmatic
global optimization from the user point of view may be to plan ahead for
advanced
memory systems which use tiering, flash as RAM, freshly minted shiny
nvms and new
SSD aware software to get
more storage and processing
done with less
chips - a journey which - depending who you are - begins or ends with the
idea of reducing
the ratio of DRAM to storage - and just as we're getting our heads adjusted
to the huge investments which would be needed to make DRAM technology
better and to believe that no sane investor (not even a
VC who loves SSDs)
would want to toss their money in that direction - a seemingly different
alternate get out of jail free option is offered in a new blog by Sang-Yun Lee,
CEO - BeSang -
in EE Times -
Why 3D
Super-DRAM?.
Among other things Sang says...
"If
you consider planar DRAM shrinking from 18nm to 16nm, then, 20% more
dice-per-wafer could be achieved. To do so, multi-billion dollar should be
invested for R&D and
EUV
is required. In case of 3D Super-DRAM, it needs less than $50 million for R&D
and no EUV; and even so, it could produce 400% more die-per-wafer."
And
at the risk of repeating some of that:- 4x as much DRAM from the same fabs
without huge investments... How is that possible? ...read
the article
Editor's comments:- You can get an idea of
the complex decision matrices facing memory makers. In past decades the product
types which determined the demand mix for memories (PCs, phones, servers) were
few in number and had predictable roadmaps. Now big demands for memory are
coming from cloud, IoT and new intelligence based markets which are creating
entirely new ratios and rules of what is possible with memory systems.
new edition - the Top SSD Companies
Editor:- March
10, 2017 - StorageSearch.com
today published the new
39th quarterly edition of the Top SSD Companies.
Hyperstone,
NVMdurance
and SymbolicIO
all made their first appearances in this list.
Although a lot has
changed in the past 10 years of tracking future SSD winners in this series the
next wave of dusruptive change in memory systems architecture has barely begun.
...read the
article
a new name in SSD fabric software
Editor:- March 8,
2017 - A new
SSD software company
- Excelero -
has emerged from stealth today.
Excelero which describes itself as
- "a disruptor in software-defined block storage"
announced
version 1.1 of its NVMesh® Server SAN software "for exceptional Flash
performance for web and enterprise applications at any scale."
The
company was funded in part by Fusion-io's founder
David Flynn.
Editor's comments:- An easy way to understand what this kind
of software can do for you is to see how Excelero created a petabyte-scale
shared NVMe pool for exploratory computing for an early customer - NASA/Ames.
The mitigation of latency and bandwidth penalties enabled by the new
environment enabled "compute nodes to access data anywhere within a data
set without worrying about locality" and helped to change the way that
researchers could interact with the data sets which previously had been
constrained in many small islands of low latency. ...read
the white paper (pdf).
SSD
fabrics - companies and past mentions
NVMe over
Fabric and other SSD ideas which defined 2016
Inanimate Power,
Speed and Strength Metaphors in SSD brands
Everspin enters NVMe PCIe SSD market
Editor:- March
8, 2017 - Everspin
today
announced
it is sampling its first SSD product an HHHL NVMe
PCIe SSD with upto 4GB
ST-MRAM based on the company's own 256Mb DDR-3 memory.
The new nvNITRO
ES2GB has end to end latency of 6µS and supports 2 access modes:- NVMe
SSD and memory mapped IO (MMIO).
Everspin says that products for the
M.2 and
U.2 markets will
become available later this year. And so too will be higher capacity models
using the company's next generation Gb DDR-4 ST-MRAM.
Editor's
comments:- Yes - you read the capacity right. That's 4GB not
4TB and certainly not 24TB.
So why
would you want a PCIe SSD which offers similar capacity to a backed
RAM SSD from
DDRdrive in 2009?
And the new ST-MRAM SSD card also offers worse latency, performance and
capacity than an typical
hybrid NVDIMM
using flash backed DRAM today.
What's the application gap?
The
answer I came up with is fast boot time.
If you want a small amount of
low latency, randomly accessible persistent memory then ST-MRAM has the
advantage (over flash backed DRAM such as you can get from
Netlist etc) that the
data which was saved on power down doesn't have to be restored from flash
into the DRAM - because it's always there.
The boot time advantage of
ST-MRAM grows with capacity. And depending on the memory architecture can be on
the order of tens of seconds.
So - if you have a system whose
reliability and accessibility and performance depends on healing and recovery
processes which take into account the boot times of its persistent memory
subsystems - then you either have the choice of battery backup (which occupies a
large space and maintenance footprint) or a native NVRAM.
The new
cards will make it easier for software developers to test persistent RAM
tradeoffs in new equipment designs. And also will provide an easy way to
evaluate the data integrity of the new memories.
HP values Nimble at $109K / customer
Editor:- March
7, 2017 - HP today
announced
it has agreed to acquire Nimble Storage for just
over $1 billion.
Kingston ships HHHL NVMe PCIe SSD using Liqid controller
Editor:-
March 7, 2017 - Kingston
today
announced
shipments of a another new NVMe
PCIe SSD based on its
partnership with Liqid.
The DCP1000 has a Gen. 3.0 x8 interface and delivers upto 6.8GB/s and 6GB/s
sequential R/W throughput respectively. The HHHL form factor SSD has upto
raw 3.2TB capacity and is rated at under 0.5
DWPD for 5 years.
Micron chooses Hyperstone's USB controller for reliable IoT SSDs
Editor:-
March 6, 2017 -
Hyperstone's
U9 - USB 3.1 flash Memory controller has been integrated into Micron's new eU500- a
USB SSD aimed at the industrial IoT and telco market.
The eU500
has sequential read/write speed of up to 170/120 MB/s and a steady state 4K
random read/write performance of 3,000/1,000 IOPS.
Parallel Machines gets patent for recovering distributed memory
Editor:-
March 2, 2017 - Parallel
Machines has been assigned a patent related to healing broken data in
shared memory pools according to a
news
report in StorageNewsletter.com.
See
also:- data recovery,
SSD data integrity,
security risks
in persistent memory,
fault tolerant
SSDs
OpenMP is 20
Editor:- March 2, 2017 - The OpenMP ARB (Architecture Review Board)
today announced
the 20th anniversary of its incorporation. Since its advent in 1997, the
OpenMP programming model has proved to be a key driver behind parallel
programming for shared-memory architectures.
Editor's comments:-
The way I remember it - the commoditization of enterprise grade multiprocessor
architecture came a little time before that and was inspired by a company
called Solbourne
Computer which operated in the
SPARC systems
market. | |
. |
market research
popular SSD articles
a historic perspective
of the SSD market |
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Megabyte was still
going through his
Michelangelo phase |
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| after AFAs?
- the next box |
Throughout the
history of
the data storage market we've always expected the capacity of enterprise user
memory systems to be much smaller than the capacity of all the other attached
storage in the same data processing environment.
 A
new blog on StorageSearch.com
- cloud
adapted memory systems - asks (among other things) if this will always be
true.
Like many of you - I've been thinking a lot about the
evolution of memory technologies and data architectures in the past year. I
wasn't sure when would be the best time to share my thoughts about this one.
But the timing seems right now. ...read the
article | | |
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|
"The
MLB Network uses Tegile flash storage in
their post-production environment.
During the regular season, they
need to record all of the games and produce content for shows like MLB Tonight,
The Rundown, Intentional Talk, MLB Now, and Quick Pitch, which focus on the
day's activities and give a snapshot of what's going on around the league.
In the off-season, they produce ... other programming that goes behind the
daily game and into more of the storytelling about baseball.
That's
over 500,000 hours of digital content!" |
| Brandon Farris,
Director of Marketing Tegile
Systems in his blog -
Flash Storage
Goes to Hollywood (March 7, 2017 ) | | |
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| Should we set higher
expectations for the future of memory systems and storage? |
| beyond SSD DIMM
wars | | |
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| would you
buy an SSD array for $1 million a pop? |
Editor:- March 3, 2017 - Dell EMC has end of lifed
the DSSD product line (an NVMe array and one of the
fastest SSD systems
in the market) and the
storyline
discussed in StorageReview.com
is the missmatch between Dell's high volume commodity business and this niche
HPC storage box.
The warm up to such an ending came in a
news
story in December 2016 by the
Register which revealed the $1 billion gap between the cost of
acquiring and developing the product and sales ($6 million).
Editor's
comments:- In the short term this is good news for
IBM's
FlashSystem
which is the most mature storage product line in this class.
And it's
good news for startups and other specialist SSD companies which engage with the
high performance end of the market.
One question I guess about the DSSD
product line is that the market which it might have been aimed at 3 years ago
doesn't exist any more.
Most computer companies who would be looking
for HPC storage of the NVMe array variety are easily able to produce such
systems from a competitive market of
2.5" NVMe SSDs.
So why pay a premium to EMC or anyone else?
But a more deep rooted
problem is that the DSSD is an old fashioned systems designer's prototype
implementation of a modern persistent memory box. And the nvm memory changes
in recent years (in cell technology and
controllernomics
tiering) makes the design about as useful as a TTL minicomputer competing with
an NMOS microprocessor.
No matter how much cooling or SRAM you pack
into a card - the cheapest place to solve latency problems is in the
semiconductor chip itself before the data hits the external brake pads of the
physical interface to copper.
We're going to see a lot of different
permutations of big memory coming into the market. Generally the smaller the box
and the closer it is to the applications processor the less waste there is in
intersystems latency.
The DSSD approach has been blown away by
commodity arrays at the low end of its performance ramge and by genuine memory
systems technology advances at the high end.
Storage systems thinking
can't compete for performance with semiconductor integrated memory systems
architecture.
And here's another angle...
If you were looking
for a low cost companion ultra fast compute box to work as a companion to
DSSD class storage -
Symbolic IO have got
their own way to do it and can do it faster with less hardware. | | |
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