HDS CEO Jack Domme shares the company’s vision and strategy with Influencer Summit attendees #HDSday by HDScorp

Attended #HDSday yesterday in San Jose.  Listened to what seemed like the majority of the executive team. The festivities were MCed by Asim Zaheer, VP Corp and Product Marketing, a long time friend and employee, that came to HDS with the acquisition of Archivas five or so years ago.   Some highlights of the day’s sessions are included below.

The first presenter was Jack Domme, HDS CEO, and his message was that there is a new, more aggressive HDS, focused on executing and growing the business.

Jack said there will be almost a half a ZB by 2015 and ~80% of that will be unstructured data.  HDS firmly believes that much of this growing body of  data today lives in silos, locked into application environments and can’t become truly information until it can be liberated from this box.  Getting information out of the unstructured data is one of the key problems facing the IT industry.

To that end, Jack talked about the three clouds appearing on the horizon:

• infrastructure cloud – cloud as we know and love it today where infrastructure services can be paid for on a per use basis, where data and applications move seemlessly across various infrastructural boundaries.
• content cloud - this is somewhat new but here we take on the governance, analytics and management of the millions to billions pieces of content using the infrastructure cloud as a basic service.
• information cloud – the end game, where any and all data streams can be analyzed in real time to provide information and insight to the business.

Jack mentioned the example of when Japan had their earthquake earlier this year they automatically stopped all the trains operating in the country to prevent further injury and accidents, until they could assess the extent of track damage.  Now this was a specialized example in a narrow vertical but the idea is that the information cloud does that sort of real-time analysis of data streaming in all the time.

For much of the rest of the day the executive team filled out the details that surrounded Jack’s talk.

For example Randy DeMont, Executive VP & GM Global Sales, Services and Support talked about the new, more focused sales team. On that has moved to concentrate on better opportunities and expanded to take on new verticals/new emerging markets.

Then Brian Householder, SVP WW Marketing and Business Development got up and talked about some of the key drivers to their growth:

• Current economic climate has everyone doing more with less.  Hitachi VSP and storage virtualization is a unique position to be able to obtain more value out of current assets, not a rip and replace strategy.  With VSP one layers better management on top of your current infrastructure, that helps get more done with the same equipment.
• Focus on the channel and verticals are starting to pay off.  More than 50% of HDS revenues now come from indirect channels.  Also, healthcare and life sciences are starting to emerge as a crucial vertical for HDS.
• Scaleability of their storage solutions is significant. Used to be a PB was a good sized data center but these days we are starting to talk about multiple PBs and even much more.  I think earlier Jack mentioned that in the next couple of years HDS will see their first 1EB customer.

Mark Mike Gustafson,  SVP & GM NAS (former CEO BlueArc) got up and talked about the long and significant partnership between the two companies regarding their HNAS product.  He mentioned that ~30% of BlueArc’s revenue came from HDS.  He also talked about some of the verticals that BlueArc had done well in such as eDiscovery and Media and Entertainment.  Now these verticals will become new focus areas for HDS storage as well.

John Mansfield, SVP Global Solutions Strategy and Developmentcame up and talked about the successes they have had in the product arena.  Apparently they have over 2000 VSPs intsalled, (announced just a year ago), and over 50% of the new systems are going in with virtualization. When asked later what has led to the acceleration in virtualization adoption, the consensus view was that server virtualization and in general, doing more with less (storage efficiency) were driving increased use of this capability.

Hicham Abdessamad, SVP, Global Services got up and talked about what has been happening in the services end of the business.  Apparently there has been a serious shift in HDS services revenue stream from break fix over to professional services (PS).  Such service offerings now include taking over customer data center infrastructure and leasing it back to the customer at a monthly fee.   Hicham re-iterated that ~68% of all IT initiatives fail, while 44% of those that succeed are completed over time and/or over budget.  HDS is providing professional services to help turn this around.  His main problem is finding experienced personnel to help deliver these services.

After this there was a Q&A panel of John Mansfield’s team, Roberto Bassilio, VP Storage Platforms and Product Management, Sean Moser,  VP Software Products, and Scan Putegnat, VP File and Content Services, CME.  There were a number of questions one of which was on the floods in Thailand and their impact on HDS’s business.

Apparently, the flood problems are causing supply disruptions in the consumer end of the drive market and are not having serious repercussions for their enterprise customers. But they did mention that they were nudging customers to purchase the right form factor (LFF?) disk drives while the supply problems work themselves out.

Also, there was some indication that HDS would be going after more SSD and/or NAND flash capabilities similar to other major vendors in their space. But there was no clarification of when or exactly what they would be doing.

After lunch the GMs of all the Geographic regions around the globe got up and talked about how they were doing in their particular arena.

• Jeff Henry, SVP &GM Americas talked about their success in the F500 and some of the emerging markets in Latin America.  In fact, they have been so successful in Brazil, they had to split the country into two regions.
• Niels Svenningsen, SVP&GM EMAE talked about the emerging markets in his area of the globe, primarily eastern Europe, Russia and Africa. He mentioned that many believe Africa will be the next area to take off like Asia did in the last couple of decades of last century.  Apparently there are a Billion people in Africa today.
• Kevin Eggleston, SVP&GM APAC, talked about the high rate of server and storage virtualization, the explosive growth and heavy adoption of Cloud pay as you go services. His major growth areas were India and China.

The rest of the afternoon was NDA presentations on future roadmap items.

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All in all a good overview of HDS’s business over the past couple of quarters and their vision for tomorrow.  It was a long day and there was probably more than I could absorb in the time we had together.

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Post tags: analyst meetings, HDS Influencers Summit, HDSday, Hitachi VSP, HNAS

T-Finity library at SpectraLogic's test facility (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Today I met with Spectra Logic execs and some of their Media and Entertainment (M&E) customers, and toured their manufacturing, test labs and briefing center.  The tour was a blast and the customers Kyle Knack from National Geographic (Nat Geo) Global Media, Toni Perez from Medcom (Panama based entertainment company) and Lee Coleman from Entertainment Tonight (ET) all talked about their use of the T-950 Spectra Logic tape libraries in the media ingest, editing and production processes.

Mr. Collins from ET spoke almost reverently about their T-950 and how it has enabled ET to access over 30 years of video interviews, movie segments and other media they can now use to put together clips on just about any entertainment subject imaginable.

He  talked specifically about the obit they did for Michael Jackson and how they were able to grab footage from an interview they did years ago and splice it together with more recent media to show a more complete story.  He also showed a piece on some early Eddie Murphy film footage and interviews they had done at the time which they used in a recent segment about his new movie.

All this was made possible by moving to digital file formats and placing digital media in their T-950 tape libraries.

Spectra Logic T-950 (I think) with TeraPack loaded in robot (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Mr. Knack from Nat Geo Media said every bit of media they get anymore, automatically goes into the library archive and becomes the “original copy” of the media used in case other copies are corrupted or lost.  Nat Geo started out only putting important media in the library but found it just cost so much less to just store it in the tape archive that they decided it made more sense to just move all media to the tape library.

Typically they keep two copies in their tape library and important media is also copied to tape and shipped offsite (3 copies for this data).  They have a 4-frame T-950 with around 4000 slots and 14 drives (combination of LTO-4 and -5).  They use FC and FCoE storage for their primary storage and depend on 1000s of SATA drives for primary storage access.

He said they only use SSDs for some metadata support for their web site. He found that SATA drives can handle their big block sequential and provide consistent throughput and especially important to M&E companies consistent latency.

3D printer at Spectra Logic (for mechanical parts fabrication) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Mr. Perez from MedCom had much the same story. They were in the process of moving off of proprietary video tape format (Sony Betacam) to LTO media and digital files. The process is still ongoing although they are more than halfway there for current production.

They still have a lot of old media in Betacam format which will take them years to convert to digital files but they are at least starting this activity.  He said a recent move from one site to another revealed that much of the Betacam tapes were no longer readable.  Digital files on LTO tape should solve that problem for them when they finally get there.

Matt Starr Spectra Logic CTO talked about the history of tape libraries at Spectra Logic which was founded in 1998 and has been laser focused on tape data protection and tape libraries.

I find it pleasantly surprising that a company today can just supply tape libraries with software and make a ongoing concern of it. Spectra Logic must be doing something right, revenue grew 30% YoY last year and they are outgrowing their current (88K sq ft) office, lab, and manufacturing building they just moved into earlier this year and have just signed to occupy another building providing 55K sq ft of more space.

T-Series robot returning TeraPack to shelf (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Molly Rector Spectra Logic CMO talked about the shift in the market from peta-scale (10**15 bytes) storage repositories to exa-scale (10**18 bytes) ones.  Ms. Rector believed that today’s cloud storage environments can take advantage of these large tape based, archives to provide much more economical storage for their users without suffering any performance penalty.

At lunch with Matt Starr, Fred Moore (Horison Information Strategies), Mark Peters (Enterprise Strategy Group) and I were talking about HPSS (High Performance Storage System) developed in conjunction with IBM and 5 US national labs that supports vast amounts of data residing across primary disk and tape libraries.

Matt said that there are about a dozen large HPSS sites (HPSS website shows at least 30 sites using it) that store a significant portion of the worlds 1ZB (10**21 bytes) of digital data created this past year (see my 3.3 exabytes of data a day!? post).  Later that day talking with Nathan Thompson Spectra Logic CEO, he said these large HPSS sites probably store ~10% of the worlds data, or 100EB.  I find that difficult to comprehend that much data at only ~12 sites but the national labs do have lots of data on hand.

Nowadays you can get a Spectra Logic T-Finity tape complex with 122K slot, using LTO-4/-5 or IBM TS1140 (enterprise class) tape drives.  This large a T-Finity has 4 rows of tape libraries which uses the ‘Skyway’ to transport a terapack of tape cartridges between one library row to the another.   All Spectra Logic libraries are built around a tape cartridge package they call the TeraPack which contains 10 LTO cartridges or (I think) 9-TS1140 tape cartridges (they are bigger than LTO tapes).  The TeraPack is used to import or export tapes from the library and all the tape slots in the library.

The software used to control all this is called BlueScale and is used in their T50e, a small, 50 slot library all the way up to the 122K T-Finity tape complex.  There are some changes for configuration, robotics and other personalization for each library type but the UI looks exactly the same across any of their libraries. Moreover, BlueScale offers the same enterprise level of functionality (e.g., drive and media life management) services for all Spectra Logic tape libraries.

Day 1 for SpectraPRDay closed with the lab tour and dinner.  Day 2 will start discussing futures and will be under NDA so there won’t be much to talk about right away. But from what I can see, Spectra Logic seems to be breaking down the barriers inhibiting tape use and providing tape library systems, that people almost revere.

I haven’t seen that sort of reaction about a tape library since the STK 4400 first came out last century.

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Post tags: High Performance Storage System, HPSS, Media and Entertainment tape library use, Spectra Logic, Spectra Logic T-950 tape library, Spectra Logic T-Finity tape library, Zettabyte

Functional Fusion? by Cain Novocaine (cc) (from Flickr)

One can only be perplexed by the seemingly overwelming adoption of server virtualization and contrast that with the ho-hum, almost underwelming adoption of storage virtualization.  Why is there this significant a difference?

I think the problem is partly due to the lack of an common understanding of storage performance utilization.

Why server virtualization succeeded

One significant driver of server virtualization is the precipitous drop in server utilization that occurred over the last decade when running single applications on a physical server.  It was nothing to see real processor utilization of less than 10% and consequently it was easy to envision that executing 5-10 applications on the single server. And what’s more each new generation of server kept getting more powerful, handling double the MIPs every 18 months or so driven by Moore’s law.

The other factor was that application workloads weren’t increasing that much. Yes new applications would come online but they seldom consumed an inordinate amount of MIPs and were often similar to what was already present. So application processing growth while not flatlining, was expanding at a relatively slow speed.

Why storage virtualization has failed

Data on the other hand continues its never ending exponential growth. Doubling every 3-5 years or less. And the fact that you have more data, almost always requires more storage hardware to support the IOPs being required to support it.

In the past the storage IOP rates was intrinsically tied to the number of disk heads available to service the load.  Although disk performance grew it wasn’t doubling every 18 months, and real per disk performance was actually going down over time, measured as the amount of IOPS per GB.

This drove proliferation of disk spindles and as such, storage subsystems in the data center. Storage virtualization couldn’t reduce the number of spindles required to support the workload.

Thus, if you look at storage performance from the perspective of % IOPS one could support per disk, most  sophisticated systems were running anywhere from 75% to 150% (based on DRAM caching).

Paradigm shift ahead

But SSDs can change this dynamic considerably.  A typical SSD can sustain 10-100K IOPs and there is some liklihood that this will increase with each generation that comes out but the application requirements will not increase as fast.  Hence, , there is a high liklihood that normal data center utilisation of SSD storage perfomance will start to drop below 50% or more, when that happens. -torage virtualization may start to make a lot more sense.

Maybe when (SSD) data storage starts moving more in line with Moore’s law, storage virtualization will become a more dominant paradigm for data center storage use.

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Any bets on who the VMware of storage virtualization will be?

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Post tags: performance utilization, processor utilization, storage virtualization adoption rate

Model of graphene structure by CORE-Materials (cc) (from Flickr)

I have been thinking about writing a post on “Is Flash Dead?” for a while now.  Well at least since talking with IBM research a couple of weeks ago on their new memory technologies that they have been working on.

But then this new Technology Review article came out  discussing recent research on Graphene Flash Memory.

Problems with NAND Flash

As we have discussed before, NAND flash memory has some serious limitations as it’s shrunk below 11nm or so. For instance, write endurance plummets, memory retention times are reduced and cell-to-cell interactions increase significantly.

These issues are not that much of a problem with today’s flash at 20nm or so. But to continue to follow Moore’s law and drop the price of NAND flash on a $/Gb basis, it will need to shrink below 16nm.  At that point or soon thereafter, current NAND flash technology will no longer be viable.

Other non-NAND based non-volatile memories

That’s why IBM and others are working on different types of non-volatile storage such as PCM (phase change memory), MRAM (magnetic RAM) , FeRAM (Ferroelectric RAM) and others.  All these have the potential to improve general reliability characteristics beyond where NAND Flash is today and where it will be tomorrow as chip geometries shrink even more.

IBM seems to be betting on MRAM or racetrack memory technology because it has near DRAM performance, extremely low power and can store far more data in the same amount of space. It sort of reminds me of delay line memory where bits were stored on a wire line and read out as they passed across a read/write circuit. Only in the case of racetrack memory, the delay line is etched in a silicon circuit indentation with the read/write head implemented at the bottom of the cleft.

Graphene as the solution

Then along comes Graphene based Flash Memory.  Graphene can apparently be used as a substitute for the storage layer in a flash memory cell.  According to the report, the graphene stores data using less power and with better stability over time.  Both crucial problems with NAND flash memory as it’s shrunk below today’s geometries.  The research is being done at UCLA and is supported by Samsung, a significant manufacturer of NAND flash memory today.

Current demonstration chips are much larger than would be useful.  However, given graphene’s material characteristics, the researchers believe there should be no problem scaling it down below where NAND Flash would start exhibiting problems.  The next iteration of research will be to see if their scaling assumptions can hold when device geometry is shrunk.

The other problem is getting graphene, a new material, into current chip production.  Current materials used in chip manufacturing lines are very tightly controlled and  building hybrid graphene devices to the same level of manufacturing tolerances and control will take some effort.

So don’t look for Graphene Flash Memory to show up anytime soon. But given that 16nm chip geometries are only a couple of years out and 11nm, a couple of years beyond that, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Graphene based Flash Memory introduced in about 4 years or so.  Then again, I am no materials expert, so don’t hold me to this timeline.

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Post tags: cell-to-cell interaction, circuit size, feram, Ferro-electric RAM, Flash at 11nm, Graphene Flash Memory, IBM Almaden lab, IBM Research, Magnetic RAM, MRAM, NAND Flash problems, pcm, Phase Change Memory, racetrack memory, SSD, write endurance

EMC World keynote stage, storage, vblocks, and cloud...

EMC announced today a couple of new twists on the flash/SSD storage end of the product spectrum.  Specifically,

• They now support all flash/no-disk storage systems. Apparently they have been getting requests to eliminate disk storage altogether. Probably government IT but maybe some high-end enterprise customers with low-power, high performance requirements.
• They are going to roll out enterprise MLC flash.  It’s unclear when it will  be released but it’s coming soon, different price curve, different longevity (maybe), but brings down the cost of flash by ~2X.
• EMC is going to start selling server side Flash.  Using storage FAST like caching algorithms to knit the storage to the server side Flash.  Unclear what server Flash they will be using but it sounds a lot like a Fusion-IO type of product.  How well the server cache and the storage cache talks is another matter.  Chuck Hollis said EMC decided to redraw the boundary between storage and server and now there is a dotted line that spans the SAN/NAS boundary and carves out a piece of the server which is sort of on server caching.

Interesting to say the least.  How well it’s tied to the rest of the FAST suite is critical. What happens when one or the other loses power, as Flash is non-volatile no data would be lost but the currency of the data for shared storage may be another question.  Also having multiple servers in the environment may require cache coherence across the servers and storage participating in this data network!?

Some teaser announcements from Joe’s keynote:

• VPLEX asynchronous, active active supporting two datacenter access to the same data over 1700Km away Pittsburgh to Dallas.
• New Isilon record scalability and capacity the NL appliance. Can now support a 15PB file system, with trillions of files in it.  One gene sequencer says a typical assay generates 500M objects/files…
• Embracing Hadoop open source products so that EMC will support Hadoop distro in an appliance or software only solution

Pat G also showed EMC Greenplum appliance searching a 8B row database to find out how many products have been shipped to a specific zip code…

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Post tags: big data, EMCWorld, GreenPlum, Hadoop, Isilon, project lightening, SSD, VPLEX

Toshiba's 2.5" SSD (from SSD.Toshiba.com)

Had a talk the other week with an storage executive about SSD and NAND cost trends.  It seemed that everyone thought that $/GB for SSD was going to overtake (be less costly) than enterprise class disk sometime in 2013.  But it appeared that NAND costs weren’t coming down as fast as anticipated and now this was going to take longer than expected.

A couple of other things are going on in the enterprise disk market that are also having an effect on the relative advantage of SSDs over disks.  Probably, most concerning to SSD market is enterprise storage’s new penchant for sub-LUN tiering.

Automated sub-LUN storage tiering

The major storage vendors all currently support some form of automated storage tiering for SSD storage (NetApp’s Flash Cache does this differently but the impact on NAND storage requirements is arguably similar).  Presumably, such tiering should take better advantage of any amount of SSD/NAND storage available to a storage system.

Prior to automated sub-LUN storage tiering, one had to move a whole LUN to SSDs to take advantage of its speed. However, I/O requests or access are not necessarily at the same intensity for all blocks of a LUN.  So one would typically end up with an SSD LUN with a relatively few blocks being heavily accessed while the vast majority of its blocks would not be being hit that much.  We paid the high price of SSD LUNs gladly to get the high performance for those few blocks that really needed it.

However, with sub-LUN tiering or NAND caching, one no longer has to move all the blocks of a LUN into NAND storage to gain its benefits.  One can now just have the system identify those select blocks which need high performance and move those blocks and those blocks only to NAND storage.  The net impact of sub-LUN tiering or NAND caching is that one should require less overall NAND storage to obtain the same performance as one had previously with SSDs alone.

On the other hand, some would say that making the performance advantages of NAND be available at a lower overall cost might actually increase the overall amount of NAND shipments. Also with automated sub-LUN tiering in place, this removes all the complexity needed previously to identify which LUNs needed higher performance.  Reducing such complexity should increase SSD or NAND market penetration.

Nonetheless, I feel that given todays price differential of SSDs over enterprise disk, the people buying SSDs today have a very defined need for speed and would have paid the price anyways for SSD storage.  Anything we do to make satisfying that need with less SSD or NAND storage should reduce the amount of SSDs shipped today.

But getting back to that price crossover point, as the relative price of NAND on $/GB comes down, having an easy way to take advantage of  its better performance should increase its market adoption, even faster than price would do alone.

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Post tags: SSD disk crossover, SSD market dynamics

A head assembly on a Seagate disk drive by Robert Scoble (cc) (from flickr)

Yesterday, it was announced that Hitachi General Storage Technologies (HGST) is being sold to Western Digital for $4.3B and after that there was much discussion in the tweeterverse about the end of enterprise disk as we know it.  Also, last week I was at a dinner at an analyst meeting with Hitachi, where the conversation turned to when disks will no longer be available. This discussion was between Mr. Takashi Oeda of Hitachi RSD, Mr. John Webster of Evaluator group and myself.

Why SSDs will replace disks

John was of the opinion that disks would stop being economically viable in about 5 years time and will no longer be shipping in volume, mainly due to energy costs.  Oeda-san said that Hitachi had predicted that NAND pricing on a $/GB basis would cross over (become less expensive than) 15Krpm disk pricing sometime around 2013.  Later he said that NAND pricing had not come down as fast as projected and that it was going to take longer than anticipated.  Note that Oeda-san mentioned density price cross over for only 15Krpm disk not 7200rpm disk.  In all honesty, he said SATA disk would take longer, but he did not predict when

I think both arguments are flawed:

• Energy costs for disk drives drop on a Watts/GB basis every time disk density increases. So the energy it takes to run a 600GB drive today will likely be able to run a 1.2TB drive tomorrow.  I don’t think energy costs are going to be the main factor to drives disks out of the enterprise.
• Density costs for NAND storage are certainly declining but cost/GB is not the only factor in technology adoption. Disk storage has cost more than tape capacity since the ’50s, yet they continue to coexist in the enterprise. I contend that disks will remain viable for at least the next 15-20 years over SSDs, primarily because disks have unique functional advantages which are vital to enterprise storage.

Most analysts would say I am wrong, but I disagree. I believe disks will continue to play an important role in the storage hierarchy of future enterprise data centers.

NAND/SSD flaws from an enterprise storage perspective

All costs aside, NAND based SSDs have serious disadvantages when it comes to:

• Data retention – the problem with NAND data cells is that they can only be written so many times before they fail.  And as NAND cells become smaller, this rate seems to be going the wrong way, i.e,  today’s NAND technology can support 100K writes before failure but tomorrow’s NAND technology may only support 15K writes before failure.  This is not a beneficial trend if one is going to depend on NAND technology for the storage of tomorrow.
• Sequential access - although NAND SSDs perform much better than disk when it comes to random reads and less so, random writes, the performance advantage of sequential access is not that dramatic.  NAND sequential access can be sped up by deploying multiple parallel channels but it starts looking like internal forms of wide striping across multiple disk drives.
• Unbalanced performance – with NAND technology, reads operate quicker than writes. Sometimes 10X faster.  Such unbalanced performance can make dealing with this technology more difficult and less advantageous than disk drives of today with much more balanced performance.

None of these problems will halt SSD use in the enterprise. They can all be dealt with through more complexity in the SSD or in the storage controller managing the SSDs, e.g., wear leveling to try to prolong data retention, multi-data channels for sequential access, etc. But all this additional complexity increases SSD cost, and time to market.

SSD vendors would respond with yes it’s more complex, but such complexity is a one time charge, mostly a one time delay, and once done, incremental costs are minimal. And when you come down to it, today’s disk drives are not that simple either with defect skipping, fault handling, etc.

So why won’t disk drives go away soon.  I think other major concern in NAND/SSD ascendancy is the fact that the bulk NAND market is moving away from SLC (single level cell or bit/cell) NAND to MLC (multi-level cell) NAND due to it’s cost advantage.  When SLC NAND is no longer the main technology being manufactured, it’s price will not drop as fast and it’s availability will become more limited.

Some vendors also counter this trend by incorporating MLC technology into enterprise SSDs. However, all the problems discussed earlier become an order of magnitude more severe with MLC NAND. For example, rather than 100K write operations to failure with SLC NAND today, it’s more like 10K write operations to failure on current MLC NAND.  The fact that you get 2 to 3 times more storage per cell with MLC doesn’t help that much when one gets 10X less writes per cell. And the next generation of MLC is 10X worse, maybe getting on the order of 1000 writes/cell prior to failure.  Similar issues occur for write performance, MLC writes are much slower than SLC writes.

So yes, raw NAND may become cheaper than 15Krpm Disks on a $/GB basis someday but the complexity to deal with such technology is also going up at an alarming rate.

Why disks will persist

Now something similar can be said for disk density, what with the transition to thermally assisted recording heads/media and the rise of bit-patterned media.  All of which are making disk drives more complex with each generation that comes out.  So what allows disks to persist long after $/GB is cheaper for NAND than disk:

• Current infrastructure supports disk technology well in enterprise storage. Disks have been around so long, that storage controllers and server applications have all been designed around them.  This legacy provides an advantage that will be difficult and time consuming to overcome. All this will delay NAND/SSD adoption in the enterprise for some time, at least until this infrastructural bias towards disk is neutralized.
• Disk technology is not standing still.  It’s essentially a race to see who will win the next generations storage.  There is enough of an eco-system around disk that will keep pushing media, heads and mechanisms ever forward into higher densities, better throughput, and more economical storage.

However, any infrastructural advantage can be overcome in time.  What will make this go away even quicker is the existance of a significant advantage over current disk technology in one or more dimensions. Cheaper and faster storage can make this a reality.

Moreover, as for the ecosystem discussion, arguably the NAND ecosystem is even larger than disk.  I don’t have the figures but if one includes SSD drive producers as well as NAND semiconductor manufacturers the amount of capital investment in R&D is at least the size of disk technology if not orders of magnitude larger.

Disks will go extinct someday

So will disks become extinct, yes someday undoubtedly, but when is harder to nail down. Earlier in my career there was talk of super-paramagnetic effect that would limit how much data could be stored on a disk. Advances in heads and media moved that limit out of the way. However, there will come a time where it becomes impossible (or more likely too expensive) to increase magnetic recording density.

I was at a meeting a few years back where a magnetic head researcher predicted that such an end point to disk density increase would come in 25 years time for disk and 30 years for tape.  When this occurs disk density increase will stand still and then it’s a certainty that some other technology will take over.  Because as we all know data storage requirements will never stop increasing.

I think the other major unknown is other, non-NAND semiconductor storage technologies still under research.  They have the potential for  unlimited data retention, balanced performance and sequential performance orders of magnitude faster than disk and can become a much more functional equivalent of disk storage.  Such technologies are not commercially available today in sufficient densities and cost to even threaten NAND let alone disk devices.

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So when do disks go extinct.  I would say in 15 to 20 years time we may see the last disks in enterprise storage.  That would give disks an almost an 80 year dominance over storage technology.

But in any event I don’t see disks going away anytime soon in enterprise storage.

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Post tags: disk density, disk economics, HGST, Hitachi, MLC NAND, NAND pricing, SLC NAND, SSD market, Western Digital

FCoE Frame Format (from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ff.jpg)

I don’t know much about O/S drivers but I do know lots about storage interfaces. One thing that’s apparent from yesterday’s announcement from Intel is that Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) has taken another big leap forward.

Chad Sakac’s chart of FC vs. Ethernet target unit shipments (meaning, storage interface types, I think) clearly indicate a transition to ethernet is taking place in the storage industry today. Of course Ethernet targets can be used for NFS, CIFS, Object storage, iSCSI and FCoE so this doesn’t necessarily mean that FCoE is winning the game, just yet.

WikiBon did a great post on FCoE market dynamics as well.

The advantage of FC, and iSCSI for that matter, is that every server, every OS, and just about every storage vendor in the world supports them. Also there are plethera of economical, fabric switches available from multiple vendors that can support multi-port switching with high bandwidth. And there many support matrixes, identifying server-HBAs, O/S drivers for those HBA’s and compatible storage products to insure compatibility. So there is no real problem (other than wading thru the support matrixes) to implementing either one of these storage protocols.

Enter Open-FCoE, the upstart

What’s missing from 10GBE FCoE is perhaps a really cheap solution, one that was universally available, using commodity parts and could be had for next to nothing. The new Open-FCoE drivers together with the Intels x520 10GBE NIC has the potential to answer that need.

But what is it? Essentially Intel’s Open-FCoE is an O/S driver for Windows and Linux and a 10GBE NIC hardware from Intel. It’s unclear whether Intel’s Open-FCoE driver is a derivative of the Open-FCoe.org’s Linux driver or not but either driver works to perform some of the FCoE specialized functions in software rather than hardware as done by CNA cards available from other vendors. Using server processing MIPS rather than ASIC processing capabilities should make FCoE adoption in the long run, even cheaper.

What about performance?

The proof of this will be in benchmark results but it’s quite possible to be a non-issue. Especially, if there is not a lot of extra processing involved in a FCoE transaction. For example, if Open-FCoE only takes let’s say 2-5% of server MIPS and bandwidth to perform the added FCoE frame processing then this might be in the noise for most standalone servers and would showup only minimally in storage benchmarks (which always use big, standalone servers).

Yes, but what about virtualization?

However real world, virtualized servers is another matter. I believe that virtualized servers generally demand more intensive I/O activity anyway and as one creates 5-10 VMs, ESX server, it’s almost guaranteed to have 5-10X the I/O happening. If each standalone VM requires 2-5% of a standalone processor to perform Open-FCoE processing, then it could easily represent 5-7 X 2-5% on a 10VM ESX server (assumes some optimization for virtualization, if virtualization degrades driver processing, it could be much worse), which would represent a serious burden.

Now these numbers are just guesses on my part but there is some price to pay for using host server MIPs for every FCoE frame and it does multiply for use with virtualized servers, that much I can guarantee you.

But the (storage) world is better now

Nonetheless, I must applaud Intel’s Open-FCoE thrust as it can open up a whole new potential market space that today’s CNAs maybe couldn’t touch. If it does that, it introduces low-end systems to the advantages of FCoE then as they grow moving their environments to real CNAs should be a relatively painless transition. And this is where the real advantage lies, getting smaller data centers on the right path early in life will make any subsequent adoption of hardware accelerated capabilities much easier.

But is it really open?

One problem I am having with the Intel announcement is the lack of other NIC vendors jumping in. In my mind, it can’t really be “open” until any 10GBE NIC can support it.

Which brings us back to Open-FCoE.org. I checked their website and could see no listing for a Windows driver and there was no NIC compatibility list. So, I am guessing their work has nothing to do with Intel’s driver, at least as presently defined – too bad

However, when Open-FCoE is really supported by any 10GB NIC, then the economies of scale can take off and it could really represent a low-end cost point for storage infrastructure.

Unclear to me what Intel has special in their x520 NIC to support Open-FCoE (maybe some TOE H/W with other special sauce) but anything special needs to be defined and standardized to allow broader adoption by other Vendors. Then and only then will Open-FCoE reach it’s full potential.

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So great for Intel, but it could be even better if a standardized definition of an “Open-FCoE NIC” were available, so other NIC manufacturers could readily adopt it.

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Post tags: 10GBE, ESX server, FCoE, Intel, Linux, NIC, open source, Open-FCoE, Windows