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SSDs  ASAP
Terrorbyte didn't know where he was going.
But he wanted to get there as fast as possible.

Need SSD Acceleration ASAP?

say hello to SSD ASAPs - Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage

StorageSearch.com invented the term "ASAPs" to describe a new class of SSDs - which eliminate waits for the SSD Hot-Shot / Hot-Spot Engineer.

This directory lists the growing number of vendors entering the market, and also comment on "the old pretenders" which aren't really ASAPs at all - but older products (with some HSM features) designed for rotating storage - and merely brushed over with a thin lick of "SSD" touch-up paint.

click for more info about the revolutionary auto tuning XcelaSAN SSD accelerator from Dataram
XcelaSAN is a "revolutionary" self optimizing
2U enterprise SSD accelerator
from Dataram
by Zsolt Kerekes, editor storagesearch.com - December 18, 2009
the Fastest SSDs
the Top 10 SSD oems
2010 - Year of the SSD Bubble?
RAM Cache Ratios in flash SSDs
Why I Tire of - "Tier Zero Storage"
the Problem with Write IOPS - in flash SSDs
Can you trust flash SSD specs & benchmarks?
Are MLC SSDs Ever Safe in Enterprise Apps?
Clarifying SSD Pricing - where does all the money go?
Why Some Users Need ASAPs

In an article published in 2003 StorageSearch.com predicted that server SSDs had the potential to become a $10 billion / year market. I had used SSDs with multi-user servers in the 1980s - and I surprised myself (as well as many SSD vendors) when I extrapolated various readers and technology trends and saw how 4 factors would intersect to create the massive new market for SSD server acceleration whose growing pains we're witnessing today. Those were:-

1 - the relentless and ever growing need for application performance

2 - the declining growth rate in processor frequencies since the end of the 1990s due to the physical limits caused by signal skew on fat data busses as they came out of the chip. (You could more CPU cores in these chips - but you couldn't get faster signals out.)

3 - the declining cost of semiconductor memory

4 - the brick wall in hard disk latencies which hadn't altered a jot since the 1st 15K RPM hard drives started shipping in 2000. Most industry analysts never expected to see 20K RPM drives. Although shrinking magnetic geometries increased capacity and throughput - the random access times remained unchanged.

The point at which users would turn to SSDs to speed up their servers would be different in different markets - the user value proposition being the point where it's cheaper to add SSDs than add new servers, or impossible to get the same performance in any other way. These factors had been well known by a small number of SSD experts for many years - but while memory prices put SSDs out of reach - and while server oems could still sell fatter CPUs (with more cores) rather than faster CPUs (with better peak performance) these solutions remained the tools of last resort used by power users in the defense, intelligence, broadcast and financial markets. And another factor stopping the secret getting out was that customers who had got success in using these tools didn't want their competitors (or enemies) knowing how they'd done it.

Now of course the SSD server acceleration paradigm is common knowledge - helped to some degree - by marketing hype from the SSD notebook market. And it's reasonable for users to ask the question - "If SSDs can make our notebooks faster - why not our servers too?"

The answer is - "Yes they can - but it may still cost more than you can afford."

If your corporate data sits in 10TB, 100TB or multiple petabytes it's not economically feasible to place all your data in an SSD. That's one difference to the situation with notebooks. It's not just the cost of the memory - the cost of the SSD controllers rise astronomically as the speed goes up the levels needed to support servers apps too.

Tactically - what server owners have done since the dawn of the SSD server market is try to get as much acceleration as they can afford by using as little SSD capacity as possible.

Traditionally in RAID systems and SANs that process has meant analyzing the bottlenecks in server apps - where the most IOPS occur in the smallest identifiable part of the disk storage system. With some apps - like databases - whole books have been written on the subject. It's still a difficult and time consuming task - but if you can get hold of a good SSD hot shot and the right analysis tools - the data hot spots can be migrated to the fast SSD storage - and if you're lucky you can get 2x to 40x application speedups by logically replacing a small percentage of your disk bound data.

And that's where another economic factor comes in.

The supply of SSD hot shots - engineers who really understand SSD tuning issues - is limited. Most work for SSD vendors - and their time is best utilized by focusing on the biggest new customer prospects. If you work in a user organization where your SSD budget is less than a million dollars - it's unlikely you will get to meet one of these people (unless you are willing to be a beta site for a new product from a new company.)

So - for most of you - the options are:-
  • become your own SSD tuning expert (risky unless you work in an environment which encourages research and trial and error), or
  • get someone who's an inexperienced SSD expert to do the job for you. (Ask them how many SSD tune ups they did in 2005?), or
  • test a product which does some of the tuning process for you. This is the market niche for SSD ASAPs - which in my view is a very big market - because most small and medium sized organizations don't have million dollar SSD server budgets yet (December 2009) - even if their organization is already deploying millions of dollars worth of servers.
There are many flavors of "auto tuning" within the ASAP market space - and there will be more to come. Currently they are segmented by interface type. In the future there will be ASAPs which have been optimized for particular classes of application.

An important argument in favor of the SSDs ASAP type solution - is that unlike a human tuned system - the ASAP should maintain its initial effectiveness for longer - because it's always learning. Whereas in a traditionally tuned system it may be necessary from time to time to revisit the initial design assumptions if factors in the application environment change considerably.

Important Warning! No matter how fast the SSD in the ASAP - you will only get an economic speed up if the assumptions about data use (designed into the box) correlate well with the actual frequency and shape of the data usage patterns in your application. If that's not the case - then shuffling data into a fast cache at a time when that particular data is not the bottleneck - is simply an expensive way to achieve nothing at all. This is something which you only learn by trial and error, and experience in modeling. And another lesson I learned for myself in 1990 (which is still true today) is that for some applications and some data sets - the bottleneck is not the disk system but something else! And adding an SSD in these circumstances achieves no speedup at all - even if all the data is sitting on the SSD.

To summarize this important point - adding an SSD does not make the application faster - if the data in the SSD is the wrong data (at that time) or if the old hard disk system wasn't the bottleneck in the first place.

I'm an evangelist for using SSDs in the right places for the right reasons when they are economic. They have many advantages. But like any tool - you have to know when its use is appropriate.

I just wanted to get that out of the way. It's an important sanity check. Now let's assume that you might have an application which might speedup economically using SSDs. You're trying to investigate this subject in more detail and will do testing on whatever you shortlist on a try before you buy basis (which the SSD industry started to adopt more widely after seeing results from our 2004 SSD buyer survey).

Deciding if you are an ideal user who should be looking at the SSD ASAP market (or not) sounds like a complicated process. But I think there are some simple filtering questions you can ask yourself - shown in the table below - which might be helpful.
What type of SSD server acceleration tuning should I be looking at? - © 2009 StorageSearch.com

Which of the these best describes your application?
thousands of servers
homogene ous environment
Google style architecture. All servers have about the same weight and run the same or very similar apps.
Congratulations! Your budget is big enough to attract an SSD hot shot.

They will probably steer you to embedded SSDs (either PCIe SSDs or 2.5" SSDs integrated in each server rack.
thousands of servers
heterogeneous environment
Command and control style architecture. Some servers are heavy weight, others are light weight. They interact at many points in many complex ways.
Congratulations! Your budget is big enough to attract an SSD hot shot.

If your low end servers are bottlenecks - those may benefit from embedded SSDs (like above).

But that also places more IOPS stress upstream - where the only solutions may be SAN (or Infiniband) compatible RAM SSDs. In addition to the embedded SSDs downstream.
tens to hundreds of servers
any environment
any architecture.
This is a gray area where you may or may not attract an SSD hot shot.

At the top end of this range you will most likely benefit from some kind of human adjusted tuning - because ASAPs are an expensive option when scaled up (compared to the alternatives.)

At the bottom end of this range using ASAPs (if they work for your type of application) may be worth testing - because the cost of analyzing and tuning your system using a human SSD expert may outweigh the theoretical cost differences between an ASAP and a dumb vanilla SSD.
1 to 10 servers
any environment
any architecture.
It's almost certain you won't attract an SSD hot shot. (Unless you want to be a beta site.)

The good news is - there are many possible different ways in which you could use SSDs (inside the box, outside the box etc). The bad news is there are so many possible solutions which might work too.

The entry level price for some types of ASAP may be the determining factor which rules them in our out. Performance scalability is not an important issue for this low server count. Total disk capacity may be.

You may have to become your own SSD hot shot expert.
In the current state of the market - with only a handful of vendors offering genuine SSDs ASAP products - there is a limited range of choices for users who have any particular interface preference. But I expect this to change in 2010 as the scale of the market opportunity becomes better understood. This will be driven by the growing gap between trained SSD hot shots and demand for SSD acceleration.

I'll be adding more articles on this subject in the new year.
network storage ad click for more info
SSD ASAPs (and not quite ASAPs / "pretenders") news extracts from recent SSD Market History

FalconStor tunes Violin's SSD

Editor:- March 2, 2010 - FalconStor today announced technical and VAR channel support for Violin Memory's 2U rackmount FC flash SSD - the Violin 1010 .

Although the headline specs of this very fast flash SSD are substantially the same as when it was launched in November 2008 the 2 important things which have changed are:-
  • the price point - $32,000 for the 500GB (lite capacity) version, and
  • the availability of SSD ASAP-like features implemented by FalconStor's SafeCache and HotZone software.



Tiering SAN Shifts Real Estate without Costly Tears

Editor:- February 22, 2010 - Compellent published a case study (pdf) - which shows the benefits of automated tiering SAN storage - applied to the online marketing of real estate.

Demonstrating the flexibility of Compellent's "Fluid Architecture" their customer - WhereToLive.com - is quoted as saying - "With the Compellent system... I'm able to get a million-dollar SAN over time and without that one-time million-dollar capital expenditure."

What is Fluid Architecture? - Compellent's VP of marketing, Bruce Kornfeld, explains...

"Compellent'sFluid Data storage enables automated tiering at a granular level between any drive technology, speed and even RAID level. Shifting data between SSD, FC, SATA, and SAS works quietly and unobtrusively in the background. Businesses want a "set it and forget it approach" and that's why automated tiering has proven popular – because it saves customers a lot on disk drives, space and power costs. The fact that most large, legacy storage vendors are now introducing their own solutions only validate that customers are asking for automated tiered storage. Automatic tiering is one party no storage vendor can afford to miss."

Editor's comments:- this month is the 8th anniversary of the "Affordable SAN Initiative." Like $$Ds - there's affordable and AFFORDABLE.


Solaris, SSDs and Sun-Oracle - past failures - future challenges

Editor:- February 3, 2010 - in a new article today I look ahead to the next 5 years of Oracle, Solaris and SSDs.

I also look back and give you my list of Sun's biggest market successes and failures. ...read the article


Avere Adds SLC SSD Options to 2U ASAPs

Editor:- January 26, 2010 - Avere Systems today announced it's shipping new SLC flash SSD options in its FXT Series 10GbE NAS compatible SSD ASAPs.

The 2U Avere FXT 2700 appliance (from $82,500) features 64GB of DRAM, 1GB of NVRAM, and 512GB of SLC flash SSD. FXT clusters can scale to 25 appliances and support millions of operations/sec and tens of GB/sec throughput.

"One of the main assumptions of Demand-Driven Storage is that data access requirements are different across applications," said Ron Bianchini, President and CEO of Avere Systems. "Applications that produce heavy random read workloads are best addressed by SSDs and the FXT 2700 is Avere's answer for those users who have a high-end NAS infrastructure that under delivers when it comes to these types of applications."

EMC Casts SSD Divining Rod into Hard Disk Arrays
Editor:- December 8, 2009 - EMC today published a report on its new fully automated storage tiering concept which the company says will simplify user operations needed to optimize storage allocation between hard drives and SSDs within the company's arrays.

The company says some of this functionality is now available on some models.

Editor's comments:- although better than nothing - adding a software manager retrospectively to storage arrays which were never designed for SSDs in the 1st place can never deliver as much performance as a true native ASAP SSD appliance (where some of the support is built into the hardware) - and nowhere near as much performance as the fastest SSDs (EMC has never been in this list) when optimized by human SSD hot shots.

In order to get the full benefits of the SSD acceleration paradigm EMC will need to dump its legacy storage array designs and start offering boxes which have been designed from the outset to support large amounts of PCIe SSD capacity. Without that - its systems will remain moderate performers at immoderate prices.

To put it another way - bolting SSD tiering onto controllers designed for hard drives is like trying to do air traffic control by having a traffic cop standing on the ground and waving his stick. You can make the stick a brighter color and give the pilot stronger glasses - but it's not going to give you the traffic movements you get from integrated avionics.


Symantec Adds SSDs to Storage Migration Classes

Editor:- December 7, 2009 - Symantec announced an upgrade to its Storage Foundation management software which enables it to automatically discover SSDs from leading vendors and optimize data placement on SSD devices transparently.

Editor's comments:- this is a tool within the context of a complex and expensive data migration service - rather than an auto-tuning SSD acceleration tool.

You'll still need the SSD Hot Spot Engineer to tell you where to migrate those files to. As we head into 2010 - Year of the SSD Market Bubble - you're going to see the word "SSD" appearing in a lot of press releases from software vendors as a way of making their products sound sexier.


Panasas Supports SSD Layer in ActiveStor

Editor:- October 21, 2009 - Panasas has announced support for SSD acceleration within its Series 9 ActiveStor hybrid storage systems (ASAPs).

A single 42U rack configured with the new Series 9 system is capable of delivering an estimated 80,000 NFS operations per second, as well as 6 gigabytes per second of throughput.


Avere Launches Hybrid NAS SSD Rackmounts

Editor:- October 5, 2009 - Avere Systems unveiled its FXT Series of clusterable 2U rackmount hybrid NAS appliances.

Each module contains upto 8x 3.5" SAS hard drives, 64GB DRAM and 1GB of nv RAM. The embedded Avere OS provides storage acceleration by dynamically tiering between the internal rotating and solid state storage. List pricing starts at $52,500.

"The FXT Series is a milestone in the evolution of storage products with its dynamic use of storage media to maximize speed while minimizing cost," said Ron Bianchini, co-founder and CEO of Avere Systems. "The end-result is a product line that can deliver tremendous business value to customers by providing high performance and high efficiency to the storage network simultaneously."

Editor's comments:- Avere is the 3rd company in recent weeks to announce an automatic solution for the age old problem of accelerating legacy hard disk array applications with solid state storage. There are some interesting differences in approach and target markets.

Avere's product is aimed at NAS systems. It's a complete end user solution which includes the hard disks which are to be accelerated. Avere says the new product can be configured with upto 1.6TB of DRAM per cluster.

Dataram's product is aimed at SAN systems. It's an end user upgrade solution which fits between the customer's FC switch and pre-existing SAN rotating storage arrays. In some cases where users have already over provisioned hard disks - the XcelaSAN may also, as a side effect, increase the usable storage capacity as well as speed up the apps.

Adaptec's product is aimed at DAS systems. The MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Kit is an integrator / oem solution which simplifies the task of building a hybrid storage pool.

Key questions for customers are going to be:- Does it work? How does the price / performance compare to vanilla SSDs and human tuning? And how reliable are the new products going to be? Understanding the failure modes in large SSD arrays is not something that traditional storage designers know very much about.


Dataram eliminates waits for the SSD Hot Shot / Hot Spot Engineer

Editor:- September 28, 2009 - Dataram launched the XcelaSAN - a fast 2U rackmount flash SSD with 450,000 random IOPS performance (assuming 50/50 R/W and 4k blocks), and upto 8x 4Gbps FC ports - aimed at the SAN application acceleration market. Pricing starts at $65,000 for a unit with approx 360GB internal flash, of which 128GB is effectively used as a cache.

"It is now well understood that the benefit of a solid state infrastructure for compute-intensive environments is higher application performance with less equipment and lower operational costs," said Jason Caulkins, Dataram Chief Technologist. "The question is no longer 'How can I benefit from solid state storage?' but 'How do I best implement solid state in my existing infrastructure?' With XcelaSAN, we enable organizations with performance intensive applications to seamlessly add a dynamic, intelligent solid state storage tier to their existing SAN environment."

Editor's comments:- At 1st glance this product looks like many others which have aimed at the traditional market of SAN users. But its revolutionary design opens a new market which has been inaccessible to traditional FC SSD vendors. Dataram's product includes proprietary software - which does away with the need for an SSD expert engineer to identify hotspots and relocate critical data. The company says the XcelaSAN will automatically learn and self optimize during the 1st few hours of operation - and it will maintain application speedups even when applications and loads change - which is not possible with human tuned systems.

The search for a self tuning agnostic SSD software layer which sits between a SAN server and conventional rotating disk bulk storage has been the Holy Grail of SSD oems for over a decade. None have actually achieved it - till now. Although many vendors have developed semi-automated tuning kits and strategies for common applications - they require considerable expertise on the part of the applications engineer to make them work well. That has slowed down the adoption rate of SSDs in many midsized organizations which don't have a big enough installed base to attract the start SSD talent to look at their problems. And it's also why SSD accelerators, have not been viable as a reseller product.

When I spoke to Dataram's CTO, Jason Caulkins, I was impressed by the depth of marketing thinking behind the new product launch.

Dataram realized that simply launching a me-too SSD box would have an uncertain outcome in a market that's already so crowded. And Dataram's corporate memory goes back over 30 years to pioneering SSDs for minicomputers which they launched in 1976. But all memory companies know that in the future SSDs will use more memory than traditional markets - such as server or pc motherboards. So it's important to stake out ground in the SSD market.

I asked - where did the technology come from? Jason said some of it came from Dataram's acquisition of Cenatek - where he had already been thinking about the SSD business model problem for many years. With much bigger resources available after Dataram's acquisition - he's had teams of software engineers working on the XcelaSAN concepts and licensed essential glue where needed.

Will it work? Dataram says the XcelaSAN has been tested and working in customer sites. Product shipments in the US start in the next quarter. And the product is storage agnostic - meaning the customer can replace their SAN arrays at a future date and retain the acceleration speedup. XcelaSAN seems to offer a viable route for mid-budget user enterprises - who have been neglected by SSD vendors for economic reasons - to join the march of the SSD Revolution.

Is it competitive? - If you use my quick and dirty magic number for SSD sever accelerators - (write IOPS divided by cost per TB) - it's in the same order of magnitude as leading PCIe SLC flash SSD cards - so it's definitely worth a look.


Adaptec Enters the SSD Market

Editor:- September 9, 2009 - Adaptec announced a new platform for integrators building hybrid storage pools using SSDs (ASAPs).

Its MaxIQ SSD Cache Performance Kit (which operates with upto 4x customized 32GB Intel SSDs) includes software that identifies frequently (hot) read data blocks and optimizes subsequent "reads" by moving "hot" data directly into the SSD cache for lower latencies and higher system performance.

Adaptec president and CEO Sundi Sundaresh said that the new product "Underscores the potential that we see for significant future management and conditioning of data through the I/O path, which is central to our new ... strategy."


Nimbus Makes "SSD Acceleration ASAP" a Breeze

San Francisco, CA - April 2, 2008 - Nimbus Data Systems today unveiled its Breeze Hybrid series of multi-protocol 10GbE IP storage systems.

Nimbus claims this offers 2.5x the throughput and 75% lower cost than a 4Gbps Fibre Channel SAN.

The Breeze H-series runs Nimbus' HALO storage operating system which combines storage virtualization and advanced data protection and supports an SSD acceleration option. ...Nimbus profile

Editor's comments:-
Nimbus carries on the torch of a network storage operating system - which under the name "Cloudbreak" - was first developed by Nimbus's founder at TrueSAN Networks .

That kind of groundwork thinking may help to make an SSD work economically as part of a hybrid HDD-SSD accelerated array - while avoiding the traditional high costs of manual setup and tuning. Like space-time - cost is relativistic and depends if you're in the right dimension. A fully-configured Breeze MH860 - with all software, 34TB of storage, and 64GB of mirrored SSD starts under $120,000.

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