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rackmount SSDs - by Zsolt Kerekes, editor
I've been reporting on the rackmount SSD market since the early 1990s.

What's the main reason that most users look for rackmount SSDs today?

It's still mostly speed (IOPS performance and low latency).

But as predicted in my enterprise SSD market silos report - a new emerging trend is for fast-enough SSD racks to find an economic place between the performance levels of HDD arrays and the fast end of flash arrays.

Looking ahead further - yet another new segment for SSD racks - which is still to come - will be SSD arrays to implement the lowest cost bulk / archive / cloud storage at a lower cost than high capacity hard drive arrays. But despite some vendor price claims from companies like Skyera and Pure Storage I don't think we've quite got there yet. An essential ingredient in the value proposition for rackmount SSDs today is still performance - even though the market is big enough to recognize that different levels of performance at graduated price points creates economic openings for using this technology more widely.

The top rackmount server vendors which appeared in StorageSearch.com's search stats in the 3rd quarter of 2012 were (in order) See also:- auto-tiering / auto caching (SSD ASAPs) news, and the business case for SSD ASAPs
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Editor:- are you searching for rackmount SSD companies? When the number of companies marketing rackmount SSDs started heading into the 100+ region I removed the long dangly vendor list which used to be on this page - because it was becoming unusable. Instead I suggest using the siet search below - and insert the words "rackmount SSD" along with another criterion which matters to you - such as iSCSI, FC SAN, fastest etc.
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Notes from SSD market history

The product shown below, from Imperial Technology
(which is no longer in business) is an example of a
rackmount SSD accelerated SAN router which was
featured here on StorageSearch.com in June 2003.
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MegaRam-5000 from  Imperial Technology
MegaRam-5000 Enterprise SSD SAN router
from Imperial Technology
rackmount SSD news
Skyera unifies 19/20 nm MLC flash arrays with 100x life

Editor:- May 21, 2013 - Skyera today announced it has added unified storage operation (concurrent NAS and SAN) to its pre-existing SSD box.

Editor's comments:- this was already anticipated and factored in by potential systems competitors that I've spoken to in the past several quarters.

More interesting for me - is the "100x MLC life amplification" figure quoted in a recent blog by Skyera's CEO.

When you're asking what's possible from combining controller technologies (like adaptive R/W) with software efficiencies (don't do things which are unnecessary to access the true app data - as opposed to emulating every just-in-case-we-need-it lookahead or spurious hard drive traffic request) the 100x figure is a useful competitive metric.

It's all about being at the leading edge of the system SSD price curve. See also:- MLC Seniors live longer in my SSD care home


...Next on the SSD world domination agenda - create better value in the cost sensitive iSCSI market

Editor:- April 23, 2013 - The iSCSI market hasn't been a fertile business development ground for SSD sales - a factor which I ascribe to the mood prevailing at its birth.

At the start of 2001 - when the idea of iSCSI first attracted interest on the web - the storage market was still in a recession which would continue for another 2 years. Users could buy new or little used servers and storage recycled from the spending spree of failed dotcom companies for next to nothing. There was already a proven fast way of doing fast network storage - fibre-channel which had been around since 1994 (but it was complex to set up). Those various factors meant that iSCSI evolved - by necessity - into a cheap, simple to set up and maintain storage ecosystem for frugal applications which needed data.

Although there was nothing hard wired into the technology which prevented it from being scaled up - most of the early attempts by vendors to nudge iSCSI into the fast lane with dedicated hardware accelerators failed. There was no real customer appetite in the iSCSI base to encourage vendors to push for fast random IOPS or low latency. iSCSI was the frugal way of doing complicated network storage.

That's another reason why - prior to 2013 - none of the top 10 enterprise pure SSD array companies started in iSCSI. There wasn't enough market demand for the kind of low latency and fast IOPS which could open enough doors for SSDs in storage cabinets to make it worthwhile. Instead, most of the iSCSI arrays which have been in the market until recently were originally developed around technology optimized for FC SAN or were simply iSCSI HDD arrays with some SSDs thrown into some of the bays. When you saw "iSCSI" on the datasheet of a fast SSD you knew it had most likely been added to a model which had already been optimized for another market.

You could say that iSCSI has been a safe haven for enterprise hard drives - because whenever there has been a tension in the feature set between the cost of incremental capacity versus the value of incremental performance - it was cost - and getting the cost down as low as possible - which usually won.

I explained in my Petabyte SSD roadmap article a few years ago why one day - even the mantle of low cost per raw terabyte wouldn't be enough to protect delinquently slow and ineffcient hard drives from being evicted from enterprise network storage racks. And this culture shock will be knocking at the door of the iSCSI market from various different vendor directions in the coming year - with increasing urgency.

I was pondering these factors last week when I was waiting to dial Len Rosenthal, Senior VP Marketing Astute Networks who wanted to talk about the launch of new models in their ViSX family of fast-enough iSCSI rackmount SSDs - which have upto 45TB of raw SSD storage in a 2U rack which with dedupe enabled can deliver $2,000 / TB and even with dedupe switched off - comes in at about $5,000 / TB while being able to offer more than double the IOPS of much higher priced competing SSD systems.

The first thing I asked about was the company's iSCSI accelerator chip - which is one of the two technology factors which give them an edge in iSCSI. I had heard about it many years ago - but the company doesn't say much about it now. Len told me they were now on the 3rd generation of their iSCSI accelerator chip. The 1st generation had been designed for a US Navy project to enable fast access to embedded storage located around a ship while using COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) servers and storage.

In Astute's current ViSX systems I think you can view the iSCSI accelerator as being the technology which buys the time (in latency cost) which can then be spent on dependable real-time dedupe.

Len told me that although Astute have always known this gives them a theoretical performance advantage compared to competitors who use similar types of flash - it's only when he engaged Demartek to do some comparative testing recently and gave them a free hand to explore the differences - that they realized just how good their systems were. (I've seen summaries of these benchmarks - and they do confirm the advantages of the iSCSI silicon.)

Astute's new systems do now seem to offer a hard to beat SSD package for users in the mainstream iSCSI market. Len described this as "making flash affordable for the mid market."

Astute's earlier generations of iSCSI flash were too expensive for most users. But the current generation - not only offers attractive pricing - but comes with proven technologies - and cost effective replication - by what the company calls "high availability groups" (pdf)- which enables users to choose which systems provide failover clustering - and whether that's local or remote. In addition to providing data continuity when things fail - this scheme can also provide load balancing and imporved performance in the normal (unfailed) state.

One of the things which came across clearly from talking to Len is that Astute Networks is totally focused on the iSCSI SSD market. They know the market, they know the apps - and they aim to be one of the leading suppliers in this niche. For them iSCSI isn't something on the tick list - it's the whole list.


Kaminario drops PCIe and turns to SAS to get costs down in new HA rackmount

Editor:- April 18, 2013 - "You don't have to be an investment bank like JP Morgan to afford our style of fast, scalable high availability SSD systems any more" - was the key message I got talking to Phil Williams, VP Business Development at Kaminario earlier this week when discussing with me aspects of the company's newest series of FC SAN compatible SSD arrays - the K2 v4 (6TB usable per U at a cost of $10K to $15K per TB) which was launched yesterday.

Phil was referring to the expectation that their products - which in the first generation were entirely RAM based SSDs - and then moved onto RAM / flash hybrids and then mostly pure flash (the flash components being implemented in the previous generation of K2's by Fusion-io's PCIe SSDs - a relationship direction which I suggested in a much earlier briefing conversation with Kaminario's CEO few years ago BTW ) - had acquired a reputation of being out of reach pricewise - and not just in a class of their own for resilience and scalability.

One of the ways that Kaminario has pulled off the affordability trick is to drop PCIe SSDs as the internal flash components and use instead SAS SSDs.

I've said before that in the enterprise arrays space - "SAS is the new SATA" - because there are so many companies which have moved into this segment that there's stiff competition. Unlike the PCIe SSD market -which is mostly sold on high performance - the SAS market includes a number of vendors who have been using adaptive R/W ECC to enable them to use cheap flash to build reliable fast-enough SSDs

Because Kaminario still has a lot of RAM cache in its server based architecture - it doesn't need the raw endurance and performance of FIO's ioMemory to deliver multi-gigabyte throughput at the rack level. And another factor is that Fusion-io itself is on course to become a significant supplier of rackmount SSDs (although not aimed at the same kind of customers.)

Kaminario didn't want to say which SAS product they're using. They might say later. But it doesn't really matter.

The K2 v4 also demonstrates that the key IP component in Kaminario's box is SSD software. When I suggested that future boxes could equally well discard SAS SSDs if 2.5" PCIe SSDs offered a better set of characteristics - Phil agreed that the company wasn't tied to any particular internal SSD drive form factor or interface.

Kaminario has paid Taneja Group to do some new testing on the performance aspects of simulated hard faults. These will be very useful for customers - and take the uncertainty out of the picture - giving hard numbers for various scenarios.

For example - when running at just under 200K IOPS and 5GB/s throughput - an entire node (controller) was removed to simulate a fault. I/O resumed after 23 seconds and performance dropped by less than 15% for 2 minutes before recovering fully.


Nimbus brings flash SMART plus stats to SSD rackmounts

Editor:- March 25, 2013 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced new software APIs which support its proprietary HALO OS based family of rackmount SSDs - and report on hundreds of real-time and historical metrics such as:- flash endurance, capacity utilization, latency, power consumption, deduplication rates, and overall system health. Another new feature is that sys admins can monitor their Nimbus SSD arrays via new apps on Android / Apple phones and tablets.

Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder of Nimbus Data said the new software framework would enable cloud architects and enterprise customers to gain greater insight into their flash storage by viewing internal aspects of their flash storage which mattered to them - rather than simply relying on benchmark indicators which have been cherry picked by vendors or reviewers


EMC samples XtremIO flash arrays

Editor:- March 5, 2013 - EMC today announced new models of PCIe SSDs which the company claims offer nearly 60% better TCO than (unnamed competitors) due to new levels of efficiency.

EMC's XtremSF half - height, half - length PCIe SSDs are currently available in eMLC upto 2.2TB, while SLC models upto 1.4TB will ship in the 2nd quarter.

EMC also said it's sampling flash arrays which are designed and managed using the big SSD controller architecture based on leveraging IP from its acquisition of XtremIO.

Editor's comments:- the industry has been anticipating flash SSDs which use XtremIO's RAID busting architecture.

Details are sketchy right now - but the efficiency gains from throwing away the old drive array design rulebook and starting again with a flash foundation while at the same time having control of the complete SSD software stack can be impressive - as I learned last year talking to Rado Danilak CEO of another leading company taking this approach - Skyera.

Can we expect EMC's array pricing to come down to Skyera levels?

That will never happen - because EMC's business carries the legacy burden of too many hard drives and too many old suits.

But what we could see instead - is EMC's flash arrays coming down to a price point where the customer pain is low enough to delay many of them from switching away to other flash. Which means EMC could still have a future in the solid state storage business.


Nimbus ships petabyte SSDs / month

Editor:- January 22, 2013 - Nimbus Data Systems today announced it has been shipping at the rate of over 1 petabyte of SSD storage / month.


Violin acquires GridIron

Editor:- January 21, 2013 - Violin today announced it has acquired GridIron Systems.

Editor's comments:- in October 2012 I listed GridIron as 1 of the 3 main contenders to Fusion-io in the enterprise SSD software stakes -with the qualifying comment...

"GridIron - probably has the most sophisticated SSD ASAP software in the industry. But it's a shame it has been tied (until recently) to their hardware - an SSD HDD hybrid box."

Today's announcement - which adds to the growing list of notable SSD acquisitions in the modern era of the SSD market - will enable Violin to strengthen its already established authority in the enterprise SSD rack market.


SanDisk invests in WhipTail

Editor:- December 13, 2012 - WhipTail today announced it has secured $31 million series C funding from a group of investors which include SanDisk, an unnamed "Silicon Valley industry titan" and some named private equity companies and VCs.


Oracle users evenly split between server and SAN when it comes to SSD speedup

Editor:- October 11, 2012 - Among other findings in a survey of 400 attendees (pdf) which was run by Kaminario at the recent Oracle OpenWorld event - it was found that among the 30% of those who had already used flash SSD acceleration - the use of internal (server based) and external (SAN rack based) SSDs was split nearly evenly - 48% and 52% respectively.

See also:- where are we now with SSD software?, relative SSD capacities in the server and SAN


Texas Memory Systems to be acquired by IBM

Editor:- August 16, 2012 - IBM today announced it will acquire Texas Memory Systems.

The deal is expected to close later this year. Following acquisition close, IBM plans to invest in and support the TMS product portfolio, and will look to integrate over time TMS technologies into a variety of solutions. ...read more in SSD news


Pure Storage announces $1 million funding per system shipped

Editor:- August 15, 2012 - Pure Storage recently cranked up the heat on its funding to $95 million with a new $40 million Series D funding round - which will help expand its international presence towards Europe.

The company says it has shipped more than 100 of its production FlashArrays to customers since emerging from stealth a year ago.


Fusion-io does a few new things

Editor:- August 2, 2012 - the performance and strategic importance of SSD software was reinforced in 2 recent announcements by Fusion-io.

Yesterday - FIO launched its new ION software - which is a toolkit for bulding your own network compatible SSD rack by adding some Fusion-io SSD cards and their new software to any leading server.

The concept isn't entirely new - because oems have been doing this with various different brands of PCIe SSDs for years and this is a well established alternative market segment for PCIe SSDs. What is new - is that it makes the whole thing much easier.

Fusion-io says this new software product "delivers breakthrough performance over Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and iSCSI using standard protocols." (1 million random IOPs (4kB), 6GB/s throughput and 60 microseconds latency in a 1U rack.)

Earlier this week FIO announced it was collaborating on getting interoperability in server-side flash and caching software with NetApp. It's easier now to write a list of major storage systems oems who aren't doing something significant with FIO.

Going back to SSD software...

In the 1990s Sun Microsystems created and leveraged the phrase - the Network is the Computer.

I have long thought an apt reinterpretation of that in this decade is "the SSD is the computer" - or maybe the "SSD software is the computer" - because the ultimate characteristics of fast computers are determined more by the SSD architecture which is installed - than by the same old CPU chips.GridIron's SSDs can serve hundreds of concurrent databases effectively

Editor:- May 30, 2012 - GridIron Systems describes the setup required to exceed 1 million (4kB) IOPS in a 40x MySQL environment with mirroring - all in a single cabinet (including servers) using its FlashCube SSD systems (upto 80TB in this configuration), and some 10GbE and 16GbFC fabric switches in a new whitepaper (pdf) published today.

"In large-scale MySQL environments it's not uncommon to see hundreds or even thousands of database servers," said Dennis Martin, President of Demartek (which tested this configuration). "This reference architecture opens a new, more efficient architectural approach for serving increasing numbers of users and database queries per cabinet."


Pure Storage says what you can do with those hard drive arrays

Editor:- May 16, 2012 - Pure Storage today published a new video on YouTube which pokes fun at the idea of hanging onto hard drive arrays and suggests what you can do with them. The 142 second video packs a lot of humor into its tour of why their way of doing dedupe with flash is cheaper and better. And it includes animals too.

The company also unveiled a new generation of fast-enough (100K write IOPS) HA/FT SSD arrays today - with upto 100TB compressed capacity - which are clustered around InfiniBand.

I'm not great fan of SSD videos - because they mostly waste time - but this one will be added to my favorites list later today - because it's amusing and speaks for the SSD industry.
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