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| rackmount SSDs -
by Zsolt Kerekes,
editor - January 16, 2012 |
I've been reporting on the rackmount SSD
market since the early 1990s.
But what's the main reason that most
users look for rackmount SSDs today?
That hasn't changed. It's
speed (IOPS
performance and low latency). The evidence for this is that in the 4th quarter
of 2011 - the top 3 rackmount server vendors which appeared in
StorageSearch.com's search stats were (in order)
all of
whom focus on high performance
SAN compatible rackmount
SSDs.
This focus on speed is understandable - but I expect it will
change.
As the SSD market grows in size and users become more
sophisticated - they will learn that rackmount SSDs can also represent the
lowest cost way to
buy storage. (The SSD racks don't have to be the fastest - just fast enough to
do what they're supposed to do.)
That's the model of
bulk SSD storage /
cloud SSD storage -
whatever you want to call it - where the SSD systems will be cheaper to own than
hard disk based storage arrays. I described the roadmap to that market and the
typical product characteristics in my article -
this way to the
Petabyte SSD.
By 2016 I expect that upto 50% of the
searches for rackmount SSDs will be driven by the need to find the lowest cost
storage capacity - instead of (as today) 98% being driven by the need
for faster storage performance.
See also:-
if Fusion-io
sells more (PCIe) SSDs does that mean Violin will sell less
(rackmounts)? | | |
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| looking for
rackmount SSD vendors? |
| 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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| rackmount SSD news |
SSD rack FAQs you
shouldn't have to struggle to answer
Editor:- February 1, 2012 -
what do you need to know about any new
rackmount SSD? - is a new article published today on our home page.
Nimbus does that "no spof SSD" thing
Editor:-
January 31, 2012 - Nimbus
Data Systems today
announced
its entry into the
high availability
enterprise SSD market with the uveiling of the company's -
E-Class systems -
which are 2U rackmount SSDs with 10TB
eMLC per U of
usable capacity and no single point of failure. Unified interface
support includes 10GbE,
FC, and
Infiniband.
Pricing starts at $150K approx for a 10TB dual configuration system.
Micron acquires PCIe SSD array IP for rackmounts
Editor:-
January 20, 2012 - Micron
today
announced
it has acquired the assets of UK based Virtensys which marketed
rackmount SSDs stuffed
with Micron's PCIe SSDs and supported by a patented multi-server sharing
virtualization interface.
Editor's comments:- if buying an
SSD software company
was a good idea for leading
PCIe SSD makers
Fusion-io and
OCZ - then Micron has to
follow suit or get out of the game.
Chipmakers generally dislike
buying "systems" software companies - because they don't understand
systems and risk alienating their oem customers. But Micron's reputation won't
be dented if they can't leverage the Virtensys software. Everyone knows how hard
it is to get real value out of a software acquisition. And in the next few weeks
more people will take another look at Micron's
Micron's SSD pages.
So it's paid for itself already.
will new RamSan rattle Violin?
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.
Editor's comments:- I've
been talking to TMS every month for over 10 years - and I've been writing
about their memory appliances since the early 1990s - so you might think that I
would have run out of things to say by now. When I saw the preliminary specs
for the new RS-720 - the features which jumped out at me were:-
- the low R/W latency for this class of SPOF product. Which is 2x as
good as the next fastest product I know - the 6000 series fron
Violin - and several
times faster than some other tier 1 SSD vendors such as
Kaminario and
Huawei Symantec
- the high storage density - over 3x better than
Violin delivers in SLC -
and close to the usable RAIDed capacity that a
Fusion-io 1U server
can deliver in MLC when using Octal.
A few days ago I spoke to
Holly Frost, CEO
and Dan Scheel,
President of Texas Memory Systems about their new SSD, what they think about
what's going on in the SSD market, and the philosophy that steers the design
of their SSDs. In a hour long discussion I learned enough new stuff to write
several new articles. So instead of condensing it down here into a couple of
bullet points - I'm going to give you the benefit of what I learned in a
new article tomorrow called - "StorageSearch talks SSD with Holly Frost."
Going
back to my headline - will new RamSan rattle Violin? - I'm sure that Violin
would say that this simply validates what they are doing (and shipping) already
- and that the enterprise SSD market is big enough for all vendors in this
category to keep
growing at a healthy clip.
Kove snapshots financial markets 12x faster
Editor:-
October 14, 2011 - STAC
(a specialist in testing low latency platforms used in financial markets) has
released
audited benchmarks for Kove's
XPD2 - a
RAM SSD - in a setup
configured with InfiniBand
adapters.
This solution stack set several new official records. For
example, the Market Snapshot benchmark was over 12x the previous best
published speed. See also:-
the fastest SSDs,
record breaking
storage
SDS shrinks SSD IOPS in VMware
Editor:- September 15,
2011 - the use of
SSDs
with VMware has popped up in these news pages in recent years more times
than I care to count. But I got a new angle on this a few days ago in a
discussion with Linda LaPorta,
President of Superior
Data Solutions .
Now you may ask - who is SDS? (the spelling is
important here) and what do they know about SSDs? (It had been several
years since I last heard from them too.) But you've all heard about
STEC's ZeusIOPS - right?
- Well SDS was
selling this particular enterprise flash SSD design in 2006 - before STEC
acquired it from Gnutek.
An SDS platform was also one of
Sun's early SSD offerings
too. But SDS have switched focus from raw hardware to applications - and they
are the US distributor for a product called
VirtualStorm.
Linda
LaPorta told me - "...Our software is changing the game in VDI. Right now
IOPs is a big barrier to the acceptance of VDI because the cost to implement
storage can be very high. (Windows 7 users are figuring 24-28 IOPs per VM…gets
pricey if you need to provision HDAs for 10,000). We need a fast IO device to
store the virtual applications. We like a fast SSD, but it only needs to be 100
to 200GB. It is a read only drive that stores the master image of each
application. All the VM's go to a well cached
raid system. This is
where we reduce the IOPs to 2-4 /VM and we keep the capacity requirement
to 3GB/per VM (which is actually making it AFFORDABLE to consider all SSD
instead of HDDs)..."
How big was the thinking in the SSD design?
Editor:-
July 5, 2011 -
Why size really
does matter in SSD design architecture is a new article recently
published on StorageSearch.com
For
designers, integrators, end users and investors - understanding what follows
from simple Big versus Small architectural choices predicts a lot of
important consequences. ...read the article
Kaminario carves new market for RAM SSDs
Editor:-
March 28, 2011 -
Kaminario
announced immediate availability of its
K2
DRAM storage appliance a family of enterprise
FC SAN
rackmount
RAM SSDs which scales
up to 12TB and delivers 1.5 million IOPS with 16 GB/s throughput.
K2's
entry level configuration provides 500GB of storage and delivers 150,000 IOPS
with 1.6 GB/s throughput for $50,000. Kaminario's K2 has true N+1 high
availability, including mirrored storage with automatic data recovery, redundant
fibre channel connectivity and a
UPS, to
reduce the risk of losing data access.
Editor's comments:- I
spoke to
Gareth Taube,
VP of Marketing and Dani Golan
CEO about the new product and how they see Kaminario in the SSD market. We had a
wide ranging discussion about the challenges in the enterprise SSD market,
the growing new role of RAM SSDs, and how they solve the competing demands of
reliability and
speed. You can see
those details in a new article published later today.
Overall I got
the impression this is a company which really understands its market niche well
and fills an important gap in the enterprise acceleration space which is not
catered for economically by other vendors.
Re customers:- Kaminario
said most of their customers already had experience with 2 or 3 previous SSD
projects. Like all new SSD companies they like to talk about the successes
they've had with accelerating enterprise apps performance in what I call the "usual
suspects" - banks and other financial institutions - 10x speedup here, 25x
speedup there. We've heard all that stuff
before.
But Kaminario's products also match the budgets and performance needs
of smaller companies in new markets. One of their customers in this category
is
Digital Trowel which extracts data
from web sites and uses analysis and inference techniques to provide real-time
alerts and predictions about stocks, prices, news and other significant
market
developments. That's the kind of "only with an SSD" can you do
this - data factory model - I had in mind in my
petabyte SSD article
last year.
Digital Trowel 's CTO,
Anton Bar said - "Other
SSD storage had the same price, but much lower speed than the Kaminario K2 -
a clear no-brainer. The bottom line is, the K2 shortened our identity
resolution process by about 50%, and that's very important in our line of
business."
Kaminario said its sweet spot in the hot data capacity range upto
12TB which is on the SAN
and which has very high IOPS demand. Because Kaminario is unashamedly a RAM
SSD company. Their "IOPS performance" doesn't need to be
qualified by
small print and hedging statements like those of flash SSDs. And I'll be
saying more about the internal technology elsewhere. The best way to think about
their ideal customer is the department in a large enterprise.
Kaminario
said that many of their customers - having experienced the K2 - were now
acting as internal evangelists to other parts of their organizations to advise
them how to solve performance problems which had previously proved intractable
to solutions by flash SSDs (due to latency) and traditional RAM SSDs (due to the
complexities
and side effects of failover architectures).
Surveys show SSDs still have low adoption in SANs
Editor:-
February 24, 2011 -Dataram
recently announced the results of a survey which they funded into
FC SAN performance.
200
people responded to the survey which was carried out by a 3rd party.
48%
said they add more storage and/or spindles to solve performance problems.
(This is the tradional solution.)
45% said they are
considering solid state storage for improved performance and efficiency, but
less than 15% have already implemented a solid state solution.
Jason Caulkins,
Dataram's Chief Technologist said "The fact that only 15% of respondents
have deployed solid state indicates that there is plenty of room for growth in
this market..."
Editor's comments:- these results are in
tune with a different recent
survey by Xiotech which said "only 9% already use or are evaluating
SSDs. Another 8% responded that SSDs were in 2011 plans."
These
results support the view that there is plenty of
upside potential
for the enterprise accelerator SSD market - because maybe as many as 80% of
organizations which use SANs haven't yet deployed SSD accelerators. See also:-
SSD market research.
Who buys enterprise accelerator SSDs? - and why?
Editor:-
January 12, 2011 - In a new blog published today -
Application
Owners versus Data Center Operators - written by Woody Hutsell,
Application Acceleration Practice Director at ViON - the author talks
about what he learned in more than 10 years marketing
very fast SSDs.
Woody
Hutsell also suggests that some SSD vendors might benefit from changing their
marketing tactics to segment the different interests in the user community.
...read
the article
Kove launches 20 Gigabytes/s RAM SSD
Editor:-
November 22, 2010 -
Kove recently
demonstrated a 4U InfiniBand
& FC compatible
terabyte class RAM SSD
product line (with under 25 µS latency) called
Xpress Disk - which can sustain
20GB/s throughput via 6x InfiniBand ports and 600,000 read IOPS and 500,000
write IOPS.
Editor's comments:- despite costing an order of
magnitude more - the market for
RAM SSDs hasn't been
killed by flash.
On the contrary - all the vendors of high end RAM SSDs that I've
spoken to in the past year say they have been pleasantly suprised to see demand
for this type of product growing. The reason? - When a bunch of flash SSD
accelerated servers hits a storage performance bottleneck - the only way to go
faster is to interpose RAM SSDs. And unlike
the old days
when the first terabyte RAM SSDs became commercially available (2003) - users
today are already amenable to the concept of SSD acceleration. |
notes from SSD market
history
You'd be surprised how long I've been writing about
rackmount SSDs.
The banner ad (shown below) - ran here in April 2002.
And my editorial SSD coverage started 10 years before that! |
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