| searching
for Storage Area Networks? |
by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - StorageSearch.com
I
first published a directory of Fibre-channel adapters way back in 1994 - as one
of the many buyers guides within the
SPARC Product
Directory.
When I moved all the storage stuff here to
StorageSearch.com in 1998 - SANs were one of the most popular subjects - and I
expanded our coverage to include many other topics which mushroomed around the
SAN space such as routers, switches, GBICs,
SSDs, training, security
etc
Today - with hundreds of companies in the SAN market the old
long lists which used to be on this page are no longer useful for helping you
find SAN content.
Instead I suggest you can use site search below to
find SAN related vendors, guides and articles - or click
on this link to get a prepulated search for SAN which you can extend by
adding your own terms. |
|
|
In recent years I've been using "FC" as
an abbreviation for "fibre-channel" - particularly when it comes to
adapters and drives. So using FC in your searches will also get you useful
results:- as for example in this link
FC
SSDs (search).
Because I've written about the SAN market since the
technology started I've been consistent about the way I used terms in news
stories and vendor profiles.
Therefore
NAS and
iSCSI - which started as
much later ethernet related terms are not going to get scrambled with your SAN
search results - unless there's a good reason.
The exception is "IP
SAN" - which is a term I resisted using for many years - but has become
widely adopted by vendors as a (they think it's cool but I think it's
misleading) alternative to the perfectly good legacy terms which existed before.
In
the early 2000s I started a list of SAN software vendors. That became irrelevant
as a directory after a few years when it became clear that most serious
enterprise software vendors had to support storage networks of all types
otherwise they weren't doing anything useful in the market.
Although
all the content here on the mouse site is transitioning to
solid state
storage - you'll still find hundreds of articles and thousands of news
stories about traditional FC storage products on this site by using the
searches above. | | |
| . |
|
| . |
classic SAN articles from
storage history
SAN Applications
SAN History's 1st Decade
A Storage
Architecture Guide
Tuning SANs with Solid
State Disks
SAN
Data Security & Fabric Management |
| . |
I was talking to an end user whose organization has spent hundreds of
millions of dollars on EMC storage. They'd love to decouple themselves and
benefit from modern lower cost flash.
But the flash marketers in
startups aren't doing those kinds of conversations.
For many of
them a single customer like that is bigger than their whole business plan.
|
| "compared
to EMC" - the unreal positioning of AFA startups | | |
| . |
| "The decades
old architectures of SAN
and NAS, originally devised for the physical world, are still the dominant
enterprise deployment architectures and are not particularly well suited for the
virtual world. These architectures are still based on the notion of a storage
box or storage array... The constructs used for storage abstraction, such as
LUNs, volumes, files, etc., do not align well with virtual machine constructs." |
| Enterprise
storage is broken! - blog by
Maxta (2013) | | |
| . |
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| . |
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| SAN news |
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
who's well regarded in networked storage?
Editor:-
February 1, 2017, 2017 - IT Brand Pulse
today
announced
the results of its recent survey covering brand perceptions in the networked
storage market.
See also:-
Branding Strategies
in the SSD Market, Storage
SoothSayers
from industrial controllers to AFAs HPC - a tale of SSD
market influences
Editor:- November 15, 2016 - Recently I spoke
to AccelStor's
President - Charles Tsai.
We talked
about many changing influences in the SSD market. I thought you might be
interested to see some of the things we spoke about in a new blog on StorageSearch.com because it will
give you an idea of how many strategic changes in the SSD market can now
influence every business decision about what new products to create - even when
those changing factors seem at first to be only loosely connected like the
flash controller, industrial SSD, SCM, software and enterprise rackmount SSD
markets. But all those factors entwined the flow of this SSD conversation
which really started 2 years before. ...read the
article
69,000 flash dies per U in Nimbus's ExaFlash
Editor:-
September 9, 2016 - Efficiency
of the internal design and architecture is one of the competitive marketing
differences between SSD boxes and drives. Because when customers see vastly
different size packages claiming to do the same thing. It's one of the
aspects which accounts for
cost
difference.
In simpler times it was easy to estimate how many memory
chips were being used inside any SSD. Now it's difficult due to many different
flash memory generations
co-existing in the market and delivering similar roles (from a
DWPD angle) while using
dissimilar controller IP
and software.
So
it was useful to see in a recent
press
release (from Nimbus)
that 276,480 NAND dies are used to implement 4.5 petabytes of raw storage in a
4U system which was launched recently.
Plexistor demonstrates low latency memory fabric on commodity
hardware
Editor:- August 19, 2016 - If you don't want to be tied
to any particular proprietary big memory hardware - but do need memory fabric -
what kind of performance can you expect using
software absrtaction
products?
Plexistor
recently demonstrated it can handle millions of remote writes per second at
latencies as low as a few microseconds in a benchmark on Mellanox
infrastructure over 100GbE using Plexistor's persistent memory over fabric
software.
Benchmarks performed on a Mellanox infrastructure over 100GbE
using Plexistor's PMoF Brick demonstrated record performance: more than 1.6
million random 4KB IOPS at less than 6µs with throughput of 7GB/sec.
thinking about latency?
Editor:- May 9, 2016 - "Little's
Law is key to understanding why lower latency is good" says Woody Hutsell,
Technologist, Evangelist - IBM in
series 2, episode 4
- the SSD
Bookmarks - published recently on StorageSearch.com ...read the article
Editor's
comments:- you'll need to set aside some serious reading time when you
follow up Woody's article suggestions.
3D TLC is good enough to last 7 years
in 1 DWPD Kaminario
customer base
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.
U2 EMC
Editor:-
July 18, 2015 - A ruggedized rackmount SSD from EMC - the
VNXe3200
(pdf) - is part of the electronics tour kit which the rock band U2 uses to refine and capture its audience
experience according to a new blog -
U2
tours with AFA to rock the latest video effects on Computerworld written by editorial
director Elizabeth
Heichler who says the group's technical support crew captures data from
than 20 video cameras during each show. ...read
the article
Editor's comments:- now every supergroup
will want their own EMC flash array. A BBC online video -Play it Loud - the Story of
the Marshall Amp - tells the story of an earlier generation of must-have
stackable boxes.
Alas my own experience in my brother's
school band
in 1973 was the opposite of Loud on the 2nd and final public occasion when my
home made guitar amp blew up while we were playing the same Chuck Berry number
for about the 3rd time. I never truly appreciated the need for heat sinks
until a mandatory thermodynamics unit appeared in my electronics course 3
years later.
hyper-converged storage weighed against SANs - in small
configurations - new blog
Editor:- June 16, 2015 - One of the
problems with traditional SANs - particularly in low end sites - is the
reliability of the SAN itself - says Sushant Rao, Senior
Director, Product Marketing - DataCore in a new
slideshare -
How
SDS enhances hyper-converged storage.
Sushant says - "If the
SAN goes offline for any reason, it doesn't matter that you may have 2 servers -
the applications have an outage - which disrupts the business."
His
article then goes on to look at the advantages of hyper-converged systems -
from the conceptual point of view - and then in more detail how SDS can be a
practical and reliable architectural choice of implementation for regional
offices etc. ...read
the article
less than 10% of FC SAN sites rely on 3rd party benchmarks
Editor:-
June 9, 2015 - Load DynamiX
(a storage performance
testing and validation
company) recently released the
results
of a survey (pdf) characterized by heavy users of FC SANs (71%) and 2PB or
more of data (76%).
Among the findings in this set of 115
participants:-
- over half (54%) planned to add all flash arrays to their storage assets in
the next year
- one third (34%) used custom performance scripts as part of their pre
purchase and deployment evaluations
- users were heavily reliant on their current and potential vendors for news
about new products and technologies - and nearly twice as likely (83%) to
rely on news from vendors compared to online magazines (44%)
...read
the article (pdf)
Nimble's progress in FC SAN
Editor:- May 26 , 2015 -
Nimble Storage's
CEO,
Suresh
Vasudevan said "Fibre Channel was 14% of our total bookings"
- in questions and answers related to the company's recent earnings report (transcript).
FalconStor shows why it took so many years to launch an SSDcentric
next software thing
Editor:-
February 19, 2015 - You might think there are enough SDS companies already -
but SSDcentric data architectures are pulling system solutions in
different
directions - so until the dust settles and the landscape looks clearer -
there are plenty of gaps for new companies to enter the market.
The
most significant this week was FalconStor - who
announced
a new SSDcentric storage pool redeployment and management platform called
FreeStor - which the
company says works across legacy, modern and virtual environments.
FalconStor
says - "The heart of FreeStor is the Intelligent Abstraction layer. It's a
virtual Rosetta Stone that allows data - in all its forms - to migrate to,
from and across all platforms, be it physical or virtual."
They've posted a good
video which describes it all.
FalconStor's natural partners are
enterprise SSD systems vendors and integrators who have good products but who
don't have a complete (user environmentally rounded) software stack.
Editor's
comments:- For 4 years FalconStor gave me the impression of a storage
software company which didn't know what it wa going to do with the SSD market -
despite having a base of thousands of customers in the enterprise storage
software market.
FalconStor's delay can now be explained. They were
studying what needed to be done - and it took a lot of work.
If you
want to understand who else is offering a product concept which is similar in
vision to FalconStor's FreeStor - I'd say
Primary Data.
Although due to a difference in ultimate scaling aspirations and markets - I
would say that FalconStor's product is lower end and currently more accessible.
Part of the reason being that FalconStor already has a customer base for pre SSD
era software - which they are hoping to convert incrementally.
Emulex's 16GFC technology supported by DataCore
Editor:-
January 28, 2015 - Emulex
today
announced that DataCore is
releasing target mode support in its new SANsymphony V10 software-defined
storage platform, for Emulex's Gen 5 (16GFC) HBA technology.
Kaminario gets another $53 million funding
Editor:-
December 2, 2014 - Kaminario
today
announced
it has closed an oversubscribed $53 million financing round, bringing total
raised capital to $128 million. Kaminario says it will use the new investment
to accelerate business growth.
Editor's comments:- Kaminario
rose 3 places compared to the previous quarter - in the recently published
Top SSD Companies in
Q3 2014.
Dot Hill's messages today
Editor:- November 4, 2014
- I haven't mentioned Dot
Hill on these news pages for a while - but a
press
release from the company today triggered a bunch of random reactions in my
brain which almost - for me - drowned out the significance of the central idea
of their new product announcement (a new SAN compatible hybrid storage box - and
software).
2 of the distracting internal noises (in my head) were
sparked by product names:-
- "Dot Hill's entire line of storage systems (are) equipped with the
latest generation AssuredSAN 4004 storage controllers."
I'm sorry guys. I know numbers are just numbers. But for me the 4004 controller
will always be
that
chip family from Intel which was the first rumble in the microprocessor
revolution.
- RealTier, RealCache, RealQuick, RealPool - and others in Dot Hill 's
real-suffix list of product feature names - distracted me with the
recollection that 3 years before sampling its first ever real
PCIe SSD - the
so-called
RealSSD
P320h (in June
2011) - Micron had
demonstrated a less real (prototype / concept demonstrator) PCIe SSD - which
never made it to market. So - for me - the word "Real" attached to
an SSD related product - already has many associations.
These notes
show that the names
you give to SSD related products matter a lot - because the concepts which
spring to mind when people read these words and numbers - depend on what else
they have read before.
On the other hand - I congratulate Dot Hill for
having planted these 2 messages in their press release text today.
- The idea of a 37-month "bumper-to-bumper" warranty.
- And this great
customer
quote...
"This is absolutely the best product we've purchased
in the last 25 years."
HA SSD arrays - are now mainstream
Editor:- October
13, 2014 - It's strange how a subject which I first heard about as an exotic
reference in a lecture 38 years ago keeps coming back to me in different ways.
But coming back to the present day - I can confidently tell you
that
fault tolerant /
high availability SSD systems have now entered the mainstream of the
SSD market.
Furthermore I suspect that debates about all the
differing faiths of
SSD systems level reliability (and what "reliability" itself
means) could (one day soon) come to consume nearly as much of your time
on the web (when researching
enterprise flash)
as reading about
endurance
did before.
See how this journey began for me - and also how you
may have come into this equation too - in my
new blog on StorageSearch.com
rackmount SSDs - new reports from Evaluator Group
Editor:-
September 24, 2014 - Evaluator Group
today
announced
it's expanding its comparison report coverage (priced from around $2,750 for
IT end-users) related to
rackmount SSD and
hybrid array
vendors.
The latest addition to EV's research area are product
analyses for 15 vendors, including:
Cisco,
EMC,
HDS,
HP,
IBM,
Kaminario,
NetApp,
Nimble,
Nimbus,
Pure Storage,
SanDisk,
SolidFire,
Tegile,
Tintri and
Violin.
"Over
the next 3 years Evaluator Group expects Solid State Storage Systems to be the
architecture adopted for primary storage," said Camberley Bates,
Managing Partner & Analyst at Evaluator Group. "Performance to reduce
latency and improve consistency,
along with reliability
and efficiency
functionality
will drive this change. It is important IT end users understand the trade-offs
of design and technical implementation to best suit their needs."
Using
the
Solid
State Evaluation Guide to understand the critical technology characteristics
EV says IT end users can clearly identify their requirements and priorities. The
Solid State Comparison Matrix allows for side-by-side comparison of product
specifications and capabilities. Evaluator Group guides IT end users through the
process with product reviews and expertise on managing and conducting a Proof of
Concept. Evaluator Group Solid State Storage Systems coverage includes products
specifically designed to exploit the characteristics of all solid state
deployment.
What will you be getting?
EV is offering a
free
evaluation copy of their report for the IBM FlashSystem to people who
sign up for it.
Editor's comments:- with so many different
architectural roles
for enterprise SSDs and
different
user preferences - it's unrealistic to suppose that any simple side by side
product comparisons will suit all permutations of user needs. But having said
that - any reliable information which assists
user education and
comprehension into SSD arrays is a good thing.
Some flash array
vendors - realizing the futility of expecting that users will understand what
their products do and how they will interact with the
bottlenecks
and demands of user installations and workloads - have instead opted to
side-step these delay laden hard user selection quandries -
which are exaggerated by
the concerns of getting it wrong - by instead offering new risk
delineated pricing models - as described in my article -
Exiting
the Astrological Age of Enterprise SSD Pricing.
See also:-
playing the
enterprise SSD box riddle game,
storage market research,
what do
enterprise SSD users want?
real-world performance of flash storage systems
Editor:-
July 23, 2014 - Editor:- July 23, 2014 - How does flash storage perform in the
real world? - Demartek
aims to provide some answers by reporting on the performance tests
which it has carried out on SSD and hybrid systems from many of the leading
enterprise SSD companies in a session next month at the Flash Memory Summit (August
5).
Demartek says attendees will come away with reasonable estimates
of what they can expect in practice and the results also reveal additional
advantages of flash-based storage, with what Dennis Martin, President
- Demartek calls "happy side effects". ...more
info (pdf)
See also:-
SSD testing & analyzer
news, how fast
can your SSD run backwards?
A3CUBE unveils PCIe memory fabric for 10,000 node-class PCIe
SSD architectures
Editor:- February 25, 2014 -
PCIe SSDs can now
access a true PCIe connected shared memory fabric designed by A3CUBE - which exited
stealth today with the
launch
of their remote shared broadcast memory network -
RONNIEE Express -
which provides 700nS (nanoseconds) raw latency (4 byte message) and which
enables message throughput - via standard PCIe - which is 8x better
than InfiniBand.
Editor's comments:- I spoke to the
company's luminaries
recently - who say they intend to make this an affordable mainstream
solution.
The idea of using PCIe as a fabric to share data at low
latency and with fast throughput across a set of closely located servers
isn't a new one.
The world's leading PCIe chipmaker
PLX started educating
designers and systems architects about these possibilities
a
few years ago - as a way to elegantly answer a new set of scalability
problems caused by the increasing adoption of PCIe SSDs. These questions
include:-
- how do you make this expensive resource available to more servers?
- how do you enable a simple to implement failover mechanism - so that data
remains accessible in the event of either a server or SSD fault?
In
the least year or so - we've seen most of the leading vendors in the enterprise
PCIe SSD market leverage some of the new features in PCIe chips - to
implement high availability SSDs with low latency.
But although there
are many ways of doing this - the details are different for each vendor.
And
- until now - if you wanted to share data at PCIe-like latency across a bunch
of PCIe SSDs from different companies - located in different boxes - the
simplest way to do that was to bridge across ethernet or infiniband. - And even
though it has been technically possible with standard software packages - the
integration, education and support issues - compared to legacy SAN or NAS
techniques would be extremely daunting.
That's where A3CUBE comes into
the picture. Their concept is to provide a box which enables any supported PCIe
device to connect to any other - at low latency and with high throughput -
in an architecture which scales to many thousands of nodes.
At the
heart of this is a shared broadcast memory window - of 128Mbytes - which can be
viewed simultaneously by any of the attached ports.
If you've
ever used shared remote memory in a supercomputer style of system design at
any time in the past 20 years or so - you'll know that the critical thing is how
the latency grows as you add more ports. So that was one of the questions I
asked.
Here's what I was told - "The latency is related to the
dimension of the packet for example: In a real application using a range of
64-256 bytes of messages the 3D torus latency doubled after 1,000 nodes.
With larger packets, the number of nodes to double the latency becomes grater.
But the real point is that the latency of a simple p2p in a standard 10GE is
reached after 29,000 nodes.
"A more clear example of the scalability of the system is this.
Imagine that an application experiences a max latency of 4 us with 64 nodes, now
we want to scale to 1,000 nodes the max latency that the same application
experience will became 4.9 us. 0.9 us of extra latency for 936 more nodes."
Editor again:- Those are very impressive examples - and demonstrates that the
"scalability" is inherent in the original product design.
A3CUBE
didn't want to say publicly what the costs of the nodes and the box are at this
stage. But they answered the question a different way.
Their aim is to
price the architecture so that it works out cheaper to run than the legacy
(pre-PCIe SSD era) alternatives - and they're hoping that server oems and fast
SSD oems will find A3CUBE's way of doing this PCIe fabric scalability stuff -
is the ideal way they want to go.
There's a lot more we have to learn
- and a lot of testing to be done and software to be written - but for users
whose nightmare questions have been - how do I easily scale up to a 10,000
PCIe SSD resource - and when I've got it - how can I simplify changing
suppliers? - there's a new safety net being woven. Here are the
essential
details (pdf).
IBM shows off what's it's been doing with the RamSan rackmount
SSD product line it acquired from TMS - and also launches first memory
channel SSD based servers
Editor:- January 16, 2014 - For most of
the previous decade (2000 to 2009) Texas Memory Systems
was THE company which competitors aspired to match in market position when it
came to fast
rackmount SSDs.
In the early part of this decade (2010 to
2012) TMS lost
its monopoly on rackmounts as it inevitably had to share the expanding market
with a lot of other companies - starting with
Violin (which overtook
TMS in
brand strength
in 2011) and then
other companies like WhipTail,
Kaminario,
Pure Storage,
Nimbus and
Skyera which had all
established strong market recognition by the end of
2012.
But
in those latter years (from
2009 onwards)
not only was TMS competing against all those newbie rackmount vendors - but
it was also engaged in another hotly contested
part of the enterprise
SSD market in fast PCIe
SSDs - where its product line was trying to find a place somewhere in the
narrowing gaps between Fusion-io
and Virident.
Then a year ago - in January 2013 -
IBM completed the
acquisition of TMS (which had been announced in
August 2012) and
since then we haven't heard much about these products apart from a few
glimpses - which enabled us to observe that TMS's rackmount products had been
retained and renamed - while their PCIe products were quietly end of lifed.
This
week - among other things - IBM has launched a new fast rackmount SSD family -
whose controller
architecture is effectively an enhanced adaptation of TMS's 8th
generation RamSan with some tweaks to incorporate newer memory, iron
out some RAS wrinkles (you can now change everything inside from the front or
back - without sliding the rack out) and a big investment to present a
software friendly face. The new software capabilities are being done by
products which are being offered as external-to-the-box unbundled
subsystems (control enclosures) for those who want them. This means that the
performance and efficiency of the raw flash array isn't compromised in any way.
IBM's
new SSD box (a 2U
HA 16GB
FC fast rackmount SSD with
upto 48TB usable capacity,
priced at $683K
approx list) is called the
IBM
FlashSystem 840.
Earlier this week I spent an hour talking about
this new product with Woody Hutsell
and Levi Norman -
who are both now back in the IBM branded TMS fold having both sampled the
delights of some other leading SSD companies in recent years. Woody wrote about
his experiences
in a recent blog.
As I've known both of them for many years - I
couldn't help but start by saying - "This feels like one of those movies -
where they decide to make a sequel many years after - but all the actors look
much older. It's lucky for us this conversation isn't going out on YouTube."
You
can get a flavor of what IBM thinks it's doing with this new product - and more
details in its
briefing
document (pdf) - and I won't repeat much of that detail here.
Woody
said "It's interesting to me how much attention the flash operation is
getting within IBM's storage organization."
He went on to say
that IBM's big commitments to flash such as the $1 billion investment
announced last April
are seen within IBM as popular actions "which are important as we need to
compete." As a result - many competent people (in IBM) want to be a part
of the flashsystems effort.
Anther change in scale since TMS became
part of IBM is that the size of the development team for the flash systems
rackmount has quadrupled.
Sales are good too. IBM has shipped
over 1,500 of these flashsystems. In effect Woody said this was
limited by the fact that for 3 quarters IBM shipped everything they had planned
to make.
Woody said he thought that this alone - even without all the
other SSDs which IBM was selling into the enterprise market meant that IBM was
probably on its way to be one of the biggest vendors in the market.
I
said - a dominant market share in enterprise flash in 2014 might look like 5
or 10 per cent as there are hundreds of companies in the market. - We'll have
to see how things work
out.
But my guess is that with a few assumptions about density,
channels etc this means this rackmount IBM product line has possibly been
generating about $500 million of revenue in the past year - which explains where
some of the revenue missing from competitors' reports may have gone to.
Something
else which appeared in the briefing paper singing the praises of IBM's
expanding universe of enterprise flash product offerings - eXFlash DIMMs -
sounded to me like just another name for
SanDisk's
memory channel
SSDs (later
confirmed
to be the case) which appeared in another announcement
IBM
server announcements today - see footnotes for more.
What's my
final take on this? (FlashSystem 840 announcement)
IBM is now the
company to make comparisons with if you're looking for fast rackmount SSDs with
some high availability options. Particularly if you're working in a complex
environment - are a big customer and think you will be reassured by the
availability of compatible products and pre sales technical sales support.
IBM's
density - in terms of rack units needed to build a
petabyte SSD - is
better than some other fast systems - but remains an order of magnitude less
efficient than
Skyera - due to the
difference between IBM's use of eMLC compared to Skyera's claimed ability to
use TLC due to
adaptive
controller architecture - which is 2 generations (4 years) ahead of what's
used in this particular IBM box. (Having said that - IBM does already use some
degree of adaptive flash SSD technology in other systems - by virtue of the
SSDs it designed in from
SMART.)
Going
back to scary Skyera
- "On the other hand" - I said to Woody - "Skyera doesn't have
the same HA
or software in place
yet. But not everyone needs all these features."
Overall - for
competitors in the same high performance and reliability class as this new IBM
box (which includes companies like Violin,
Fusion-io etc) - IBM
can still be beaten on
price. It was ever
thus.
Footnotes - IBM's first memory channel SSD servers
In
another
IBM
SSD announcement today (alluded to above) about its new server
architecture which leverages
memory channel
SSDs - and making a comparison with
PCIe SSDs - IBM said -
"Our evaluators are seeing 5-10 microseconds write latency for eXFlash
DIMMs in preliminary testing vs. 15-19 microseconds latency for PCIe-based flash
storage from Fusion-io,
Micron, and
Virident, and 65
microseconds latency for
Intel S3500 and S3700
SSDs."
We've seen increasing granularity of detail emerge about
the system characteristics of memory channel SSDs emerging in a trickle of
announcements, and experimental user reports in the past year. Now that the new
flash DIMM SSD products are becoming generally available - there will soon be
better clarity on real world costs and performance.
WhipTail is now part of Cisco
Editor:- October 29,
2013 - Cisco
today announced it
has completed the acquisition
of WhipTail.
WhipTail's solid state memory systems will be integrated as efficient
performance accelerators into the computing fabric of Cisco's
UCS
Permabit has shrunk data storage market by $300 million
already
Editor:- September 30, 2013 - Permabit today
announced
that its
flash
and hard disk customers have shipped more than 1,000 arrays running its
Albireo (dedupe,
compression
and efficient
RAID) software in the past 6 months.
"We estimate that our
partners have delivered an astonishing $300 million in data efficiency savings
to their customers" said Tom Cook, CEO of Permabit
who anticipates license shipments to double in the next 6 months.
See
also:- SSD
efficiency, new RAID in
SSDs, SSD software
EMC's acquisition of ScaleIO hints at an SSD server
afterlife for legacy SANs
Editor:- July 16, 2013 - EMC recently
announced
it has agreed to acquire another storage software company - called ScaleIO.
EMC indicated that
ScaleIO's software - which emulates the capabilities of virtual SAN style
storage within the physical implementation of pools of server attached DAS
- makes it easier for users to manage expanding data volumes and reduces the
need for performance planning. The new software will be applied to extend the
application functionality of EMC's
PCIe SSD product lines
and XtremIO rack based flash systems.
Editor's comments:- One
way to view this is it will give EMC similar capabilities to
Nutanix. Or another is
that the EMC/ScaleIO solution (if and when it's done) can be seen as a shot
back across the bows aimed at
Fusion-io's ION
software. (You came into our market space - so we're coming into yours.)
Take
a step back however, and it doesn't have to be so personal.
Most legacy
systems have shapes and architectures which date back to a command and control
SAN style architecture
dating back to the 1990s.
If you were trying to solve the same data
processing and content management functions from a clean sheet start today -
you'd probably go for a more "democratic" Google style architecture -
in which most racks in the datacenter are similar - and their function is
defined and can be changed by software - rather than being hardwired by the
description of the box at the time it was invoiced.
It's long been
known that SSD acceleration lets you speed up legacy architectures - but SSD
performance also gives you the freedom to emulate entire applications
environments on cheaper, and more
efficient, modern
hardware.
FIO's ION software in HP boxes enables Breakthrough Shared
Storage Performance
Editor:- June 13, 2013 - The performance of
Fusion-io's
ION Data
Accelerator software - which you can add to its PCIe SSD cards, any
standard server and some FC adapters to roll your own SAN
rackmount SSD -
is the point of a new
blog by the company
today which celebrates recent benchmarks for
2, 4 and 8
processor HP server configuartions (pdf).
QLogic launches FabricCache PCIe SSD
Editor:- March
22, 2013 - QLogic
yesterday entered the
enterprise SSD market
(in the PCI SSD and
SSD ASAPs segments)
with the
launch
its first product - the
FabricCache
10000 Series adapter (pdf) - which provides transparent sharable and
clusterable caching for FC SANs.
The 2 card set (upto 400GB flash,
and 2x 8Gbps FC ports) can deliver upto 310,000 initiator IOPS and
supports upto 2,048 concurrent logins.
future SSD capacity ratios in the server, SAN and archive?
Editor:-
September 14, 2012 - Have you ever wondered... how much SSD storage should sit
inside servers compared to being located on the SAN?
Obviously the
exact ratio depends on the diverse spread of your data processing activities and
the type of business you're engaged in.
At the extreme boundary
cases the answer will be different if you're Google (say) compared to if you're
an international bank.
For most enterprises the ratio will be something in between.
But
if you're looking for an ideal magic number - I think an interesting debating
point is to look at what people already do in HPC (high performance computing)
apps.
In these situations users have already tried to optimize
performance and the inevitable constraint of cost - but the starting premise is
to place weight on performance.
The storage ratios which emerged
from a recently published
HPC survey
by Intersect360 Research were
- 36% of storage in compute servers
- 63% of storage at the site level (NAS or SAN)
Now I have
to remind you that those numbers were for storage and not for SSDs. But in not
too many years from now when all enterprise storage will be solid state - the
SSDs will still follow application and performance heirarchies too - and I think
the split shown in that report is a reasonable analog to describe
enterprise SSDs in the
silos from the ultrafast through to the fast-enough.
But what about
bulk archive storage?
That will be SSD too -
it almost goes without
saying - but if you try to estimate how much SSD storage will be bulk
archive (performing similar roles to old style
tape libraries and
VTLs) compared to active
SSD storage - during the next decade - some curious factors creep in.
Today
- in legacy storage systems - archive backups and storage are high multiples (in
capacity terms) of active working / online storage. You need copies of stuff for
legal and compliance
reasons, for backup,
disaster recovery etc.
And in the next 5 years or so that may continue to be the case - because it
takes a long time for enterprise architectures to change.
But as we
move towards the pure SSD driven economy - most enterprises will be creating
new data faster than they ever did before (1 month of new date could be more
than the whole year before) and at the same time the inefficiency of
architectures like RAID
will be replaced by the new efficiencies of
large controller
architectures - like XtremIO
and Skyera. I'm
tempted to say cloud
-like - but that would be inaccurate - because in raw implementation - there are
both very efficient and some inefficient clouds too.
I'm tempted to
think that the combined result of these 2 factors coming together will be to
shrink down the ratio of raw online to bulk archive storage to one - in best
of breed enterprises - (or maybe even less than one - because of
dedupe,
compression etc).
Are there any useful consequences of any of these
insights?
It can be usefule for sizing markets. One example came up on
the same day I was writing this article - related to the possible
cannibalization of 2.5"
PCIe SSDs (including 2.5" SCSIe SSDs) relative to
SAS. But there are many
others too.
CWCDS offers 5TB version of SANbric SSD JBOD
Editor:-
June 19, 2012 - today Curtiss-Wright
Controls Defense Solutions announced a new version of its
FC compatible SSDs the
SANbric
which supports just under 5TB and weighs about 5 lbs and is designed for
deployment in high speed rugged
data streaming apps such as on-board wide body aircraft, and helicopter
platforms.
highest density FC SAN SLC SSD racks with no SPOF
Editor:-
December 6, 2011 - Texas Memory Systems
today
announced
imminent availability of the
RamSan-720
- a 4 port (FC/IB) 1U
rackmount SSD
which provides 10TB of usable 2D (FPGA implemented)
RAID protected and hot
swappable - SLC
capacity with 100/25 microseconds R/W latency (with all protections in
place) delivering 400K IOPS (4KB), 5GB/s throughput - with no single point of
failure (at $20K/TB approx list).
The new SSD uses a
regular RAM cache
flash architecture which in the event of
sudden power
loss has an ultra reliable battery array which holds up the SSD power for 30
seconds while automatically backing
up all data in flight and translation tables to nonvolatile flash storage. On
power up - the SSD is ready for full speed operation in less than a minute.
Aimed
at HA tier 1 storage markets - the RamSan-720 consumes only 300-400 W - which
makes it practical for high end users to install nearly 1/2
petabyte of SSD
storage in a single cabinet - without having to worry about the secondary
reliability and
data integrity
risks which can arise from high temperature build-ups in such enclosures.
The high density and low power consumption of this SSD made it
feasible to stuff over 400TB of usable SSD capacity into a single cabinet
without fear of over
heating.
finally SAN-bound - Fusion-io inside Kaminario's K2
Editor:-
September 13, 2011 - Kaminario
announced
it has integrated Fusion-io's
PCIe SSDs as a new
option in its
K2
FC SAN compatible SSD
product line (which was until now
RAM SSD only) to
provide flash and
hybrid storage
options.
Using the new options the K2 can provide from 3 to 30TB of
non-stop, protected and self healing, blade server based flash storage in 4U
to 12U of rack space with R/W latency of 260 / 150 microseconds at a list price
of $30K / TB. ...click to
read comments and analysis
SAN Shared File Systems with SSDs
Editor:- July 11,
2011 -
SAN
Shared File Systems with SSDs is the subject of a new blog from Texas Memory Systems.
Author
Jamon Bowen
says in the article - "There is a new option that I have seen
getting deployed more and more often: using high capacity SSDs and a
SAN shared file system. A
SAN shared filesystem provides the locking to allow multiple servers to directly
access the block storage concurrently."
Editor's comments:-
The "new option" above is narrative license - because I know that
TMS has been doing this for years - but this type of configuration is more
common now - because of
declining SSD costs.
I like this article for its conceptual purity (sticks to the theme and
doesn't waffle on about SANs or SSDs) - and it has a nice picture too. ...read
the article
A new way of looking at the Enterprise SSD market
Editor:-
October 4, 2010 - StorageSearch.com
recently published a new article -
Legacy versus New
Dynasty - A new way of looking at the Enterprise SSD market
It
proposes a new classification method for "enterprise SSDs" which
will help you get through the jungle of new SSD web content - and see all
new products in a new light. |
| Storage History................................................................. | |
| |
| "Storage standards
are weak standards that are driven by component considerations. Network
standards are strong standards that are driven by system considerations." |
| A Storage Architecture Guide | | |
| .. |
| "That whole
dominant storage architecture thing has totally flipped. It was already slowly
turning 180 degrees a couple years ago, but it is beginning to be much more
obvious now. SAN is on the decline..." |
| Chin-Fah Heoh, StorageGaga - in his reminiscent blog -
the
reverse wars – DAS vs NAS vs SAN (March 13, 2014) | | |
| ... |
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| . |
|
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|
|
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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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