Lasers by dmuth (cc) (from Flickr)

Read an article today on AAAS Science Now online magazine (See Hot Idea for a Faster Hard Drive) on using lasers alone to toggle magnetic moments in specially designed ferro-magnetic materials.

The disk industry has been experimenting with bit patterned media/shingled writes (see our post on Sequential Only Disk)  and thermally or heat assisted magnetic recording (TAR or HAMR) heads for some time now.  The TAR/HAMR heads use both magnetization and heat to quickly change magnetic moments in ferro-magnetic material (see our post on When will disks become extinct).

Laser’s can magnetize!!

The new study seems to be able to do away with the magnetic recording mechanism and is able to change the magnetic value with a short focused laser burst alone.   But what does this mean for the future of disk drives.

Well one thing the article highlights is that with the new technology disks can transfer data much faster than today.   Apparently magnetic recording takes a certain interval of time (1 nanosecond) per bit and getting below that threshold was previously unattainable.

That is until this new laser magnetization came along.  According to the article they can reliably change a bits magnetic value in 1/1000th of a nanosecond with heat alone.  This may enable disk data transfers a 100X faster than available today.

Seagate’s 600GB-15Krpm 15.7 Cheetah disk has an sustained data transfer rate of from 122 to 204 MB/sec (see their 15K.7 Cheetah drive data sheet).  A 100 times that we will need a much faster interface than 16Gb/s FC which probably only transfers data at ~1600 MB/sec burst which means these drives will need like 128Gb/s FC.  In addition to the data transfer speed up, with the laser pulse alone it is much more energy efficient than the HAMR heads which need both magnetics and laser.

How soon such advances will make their way into disk drives is another question.

Is today’s 15Krpm disk speed limit due to writing speeds?

I have been struck for some time now why 3.5″ disk drives never went faster than 15Krpm.  I had always surmised it was something to do with the material mechanics at the outer diameter that limited the rotational speed.

Then when drives were shrunk to 2.5″ I thought we would see some faster rotational speed, but it never happened.  Perhaps magnetic write speeds are the problem.   At the 204MB/sec we are reading bits in under a nanosecond but write sustained data transfer is another question.  Maybe there will be a 22Krpm disk in my future?

Fixed head disks déjà vu

Ok now that that’s settled we need to work on speeding up seek times.  I  could see some sort of a rotating diffraction grating or diffraction comb taking the laser and splitting it up into multiple beams to cover each track at almost the same time, sort of like a fixed head disk of old (see IBM 2305).  This would allow disks to write seek to any track in microseconds rather than milliseconds and write data in picoseconds rather than nanoseconds.

How to do something like this for reading data off a track is yet another question.  It’s too bad we couldn’t use the laser alone to read the magnetic information as well as write it.

If you could do that and use a similar diffraction grating/comb for reading data, one could conceivably create a cost effective, competitive solution to the performance of SSD technology.  And that would be very interesting device indeed!

Comments?

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Post tags: Disk data transfer speeds, Disk RPM, disk technology, Drive write head, fixed head disks, Laser magnetization, Seagate, Ultrafast magnetization

rayo 3 by El Garza (cc) (from Flickr)

Although technically Project Lightening and Thunder represent some interesting offshoots of EMC software, hardware and system prowess,  I wonder why they would decide to go after this particular market space.

There are plenty of alternative offerings in the PCIe NAND memory card space.  Moreover, the PCIe card caching functionality, while interesting is not that hard to replicate and such software capability is not a serious barrier of entry for HP, IBM, NetApp and many, many others.  And the margins cannot be that great.

So why get into this low margin business?

I can see a couple of reasons why EMC might want to do this.

• Believing in the commoditization of storage performance.  I have had this debate with a number of analysts over the years but there remain many out there that firmly believe that storage performance will become a commodity sooner, rather than later.  By entering the PCIe NAND card IO buffer space, EMC can create a beachhead in this movement that helps them build market awareness, higher manufacturing volumes, and support expertise.  As such, when the inevitable happens and high margins for enterprise storage start to deteriorate, EMC will be able to capitalize on this hard won, operational effectiveness.
• Moving up the IO stack.  From an applications IO request to the disk device that actually services it is a long journey with multiple places to make money.  Currently, EMC has a significant share of everything that happens after the fabric switch whether it is FC,  iSCSI, NFS or CIFS.  What they don’t have is a significant share in the switch infrastructure or anywhere on the other (host side) of that interface stack.  Yes they have Avamar, Networker, Documentum, and other software that help manage, secure and protect IO activity together with other significant investments in RSA and VMware.   But these represent adjacent market spaces rather than primary IO stack endeavors.  Lightening represents a hybrid software/hardware solution that moves EMC up the IO stack to inside the server.  As such, it represents yet another opportunity to profit from all the IO going on in the data center.
• Making big data more effective.  The fact that Hadoop doesn’t really need or use high end storage has not been lost to most storage vendors.  With Lightening, EMC has a storage enhancement offering that can readily improve  Hadoop cluster processing.  Something like Lightening’s caching software could easily be tailored to enhance HDFS file access mode and thus, speed up cluster processing.  If Hadoop and big data are to be the next big consumer of storage, then speeding cluster processing will certainly help and profiting by doing this only makes sense.
• Believing that SSDs will transform storage. To many of us the age of disks is waning.  SSDs, in some form or another, will be the underlying technology for the next age of storage.  The densities, performance and energy efficiency of current NAND based SSD technology are commendable but they will only get better over time.  The capabilities brought about by such technology will certainly transform the storage industry as we know it, if they haven’t already.  But where SSD technology actually emerges is still being played out in the market place.  Many believe that when industry transitions like this happen it’s best to be engaged everywhere change is likely to happen, hoping that at least some of them will succeed. Perhaps PCIe SSD cards may not take over all server IO activity but if it does, not being there or being late will certainly hurt a company’s chances to profit from it.

There may be more reasons I missed here but these seem to be the main ones.  Of the above, I think the last one, SSD rules the next transition is most important to EMC.

They have been successful in the past during other industry transitions.  If anything they have shown similar indications with their acquisitions by buying into transitions if they don’t own them, witness Data Domain, RSA, and VMware.  So I suspect the view in EMC is that doubling down on SSDs will enable them to ride out the next storm and be in a profitable place for the next change, whatever that might be.

And following lightening, Project Thunder

Similarly, Project Thunder seems to represent EMC doubling their bet yet again on the SSDs.  Just about every month I talk to another storage startup coming out in the market providing another new take on storage using every form of SSD imaginable.

However, Project Thunder as envisioned today is not storage, but rather some form of external shared memory.  I have heard this before, in the IBM mainframe space about 15-20 years ago.  At that time shared external memory was going to handle all mainframe IO processing and the only storage left was going to be bulk archive or migration storage – a big threat to the non-IBM mainframe storage vendors at the time.

One problem then was that the shared DRAM memory of the time was way more expensive than sophisticated disk storage and the price wasn’t coming down fast enough to counteract increased demand.  The other problem was making shared memory work with all the existing mainframe applications was not easy.  IBM at least had control over the OS, HW and most of the larger applications at the time.  Yet they still struggled to make it usable and effective, probably some lesson here for EMC.

Fast forward 20 years and NAND based SSDs are the right hardware technology to make  inexpensive shared memory happen.  In addition, the road map for NAND and other SSD technologies looks poised to continue the capacity increase and price reductions necessary to compete effectively with disk in the long run.

However, the challenges then and now seem as much to do with software that makes shared external memory universally effective as with the hardware technology to implement it.  Providing a new storage tier in Linux, Windows and/or VMware is easier said than done. Most recent successes have usually been offshoots of SCSI (iSCSI, FCoE, etc).  Nevertheless, if it was good for mainframes then, it certainly good for Linux, Windows and VMware today.

And that seems to be where Thunder is heading, I think.

Comments?

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Post tags: commoditization of storage performance, Commodity hardware, EMC, EMC Project Lightening, EMC Project Thunder, external shared memory, Linux, NAND, SSD, VMware, Windows

(SCISFS111221-001) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

[We are still catching up on our charts for the past quarter but this one brings us up to date through last month]

There’s just something about a million SPECsfs2008(r) NFS throughput operations per second that kind of excites me (weird, I know).  Yes it takes over 44-nodes of Avere FXT 3500 with over 6TB of DRAM cache, 140-nodes of EMC Isilon S200 with almost 7TB of DRAM cache and 25TB of SSDs or at least 16-nodes of NetApp FAS6240 in Data ONTAP 8.1 cluster mode with 8TB of FlashCache to get to that level.

Nevertheless, a million NFS throughput operations is something worth celebrating.  It’s not often one achieves a 2X improvement in performance over a previous record.  Something significant has changed here.

The age of scale-out

We have reached a point where scaling systems out can provide linear performance improvements, at least up to a point.  For example, the EMC Isilon and NetApp FAS6240 had a close to linear speed up in performance as they added nodes indicating (to me at least) there may be more there if they just throw more storage nodes at the problem.  Although maybe they saw some drop off and didn’t wish to show the world or potentially the costs became prohibitive and they had to stop someplace.   On the other hand, Avere only benchmarked their 44-node system with their current hardware (FXT 3500), they must have figured winning the crown was enough.

However, I would like to point out that throwing just any hardware at these systems doesn’t necessary increase performance.  Previously (see my CIFS vs NFS corrected post), we had shown the linear regression for NFS throughput against spindle count and although the regression coefficient was good (~R**2 of 0.82), it wasn’t perfect. And of course we eliminated any SSDs from that prior analysis. (Probably should consider eliminating any system with more than a TB of DRAM as well – but this was before the 44-node Avere result was out).

Speaking of disk drives, the FAS6240 system nodes had 72-450GB 15Krpm disks, the Isilon nodes had 24-300GB 10Krpm disks and each Avere node had 15-600GB 7.2Krpm SAS disks.  However the Avere system also had a 4-Solaris ZFS file storage systems behind it each of which had another 22-3TB (7.2Krpm, I think) disks.  Given all that, the 16-node NetApp system, 140-node Isilon and the 44-node Avere systems had a total of 1152, 3360 and 748 disk drives respectively.   Of course, this doesn’t count the system disks for the Isilon and Avere systems nor any of the SSDs or FlashCache in the various configurations.

I would say with this round of SPECsfs2008 benchmarks scale-out NAS systems have come out.  It’s too bad that both NetApp and Avere didn’t release comparable CIFS benchmark results which would have helped in my perennial discussion on CIFS vs. NFS.

But there’s always next time.

~~~~

The full SPECsfs2008 performance report went out to our newsletter subscriber’s last December.  A copy of the full report will be up on the dispatches page of our site sometime later this month (if all goes well). However, you can see our full SPECsfs2008 performance analysis now and subscribe to our free monthly newsletter to receive future reports directly by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.

For a more extensive discussion of file and NAS storage performance covering top 30 SPECsfs2008 results and NAS storage system features and functionality, please consider purchasing our NAS Buying Guide available from SCI’s website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions on how to improve our analysis of SPECsfs2008 results or any of our other storage system performance discussions.

Comments?

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Post tags: Avere FXT 3500, Chart of the month, Data ONTAP 8.1, EMC, EMC Isilon, EMC Isilon S200, NetApp, NetApp C-mode, NetApp FAS6240, NFS ops/sec, Scale out NAS, Scale-out storage performance, SPECsfs2008, SSD

Isilon Packaging by ChrisDag (cc) (from Flickr)”]

[InfiniBand interconnected

From many analyst’s perspective, IB is one of the only technologies out there that can efficiently interconnect a cluster of commodity servers into a supercomputing system.

What’s InfiniBand?

Recall that IB is one of three reigning data center fabric technologies available today which include 10GbE, and 16 Gb/s FC.  IB is currently available in DDR, QDR and FDR modes of operation, that is 5Gb/s, 10Gb/s or 14Gb/s, respectively per single lane, according to the IB update (see IB trade association (IBTA) technology update).  Systems can aggregate multiple IB lanes in units of 4 or 12 paths (see wikipedia IB article), such that an IB QDRx4 supports 40Gb/s and a IB FDRx4 currently supports 56Gb/s.

The IBTA pitch cited above showed that IB is the most widely used interface for the top supercomputing systems and supports the most power efficient interconnect available (although how that’s calculated is not described).

Where else does IB make sense?

One thing IB has going for it is low latency through the use of RDMA or remote direct memory access.  That same report says that an SSD directly connected through a FC takes about ~45 μsec to do a read whereas the same SSD directly connected through IB using RDMA would only take ~26 μsec.

However, RDMA technology is now also coming out on 10GbE through RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE, pronounced “rocky”).  But ITBA claims that IB RDMA has a 0.6 μsec latency and the RoCE has a 1.3 μsec.  Although at these speed, 0.7 μsec doesn’t seem to be a big thing, it doubles the latency.

Nonetheless, Intel’s purchase is an interesting play.  I know that Intel is focusing on supporting an ExaFLOP HPC computing environment by 2018 (see their release).  But IB is already a pretty active technology in the HPC community already and doesn’t seem to need their support.

In addition, IB has been gradually making inroads into enterprise data centers via storage products like the Oracle Exadata Storage Server using the 40 Gb/s IB QDRx4 interconnects.  There are a number of other storage products out that use IB as well from EMC Isilon, SGI, Voltaire, and others.

Of course where IB can mostly be found today is in computer to computer interconnects and just about every server vendor out today, including Dell, HP, IBM, and Oracle support IB interconnects on at least some of their products.

Whose left standing?

With Qlogic out I guess this leaves Cisco (de-emphasized lately), Flextronix, Mellanox, and Intel as the only companies that supply IB switches. Mellanox, Intel (from Qlogic) and Voltaire supply the HCA (host channel adapter) cards which provide the server interface to the switched IB network.

Probably a logical choice for Intel to go after some of this technology just to keep it moving forward and if they want to be seriously involved in the network business.

IB use in Big Data?

On the other hand, it’s possible that Hadoop and other big data applications could conceivably make use of IB speeds and as these are mainly vast clusters of commodity systems it would be a logical choice.

There is some interesting research on the advantages of IB in HDFS (Hadoop) system environments (see Can high performance interconnects boost Hadoop distributed file system performance) out of Ohio State University.  This research essentially says that Hadoop HDFS can perform much better when you combine IB with IPoIB (IP over IB, see OpenFabrics Alliance article) and SSDs.  But SSDs alone do not provide as much benefit.   (Although my reading of the performance charts seems to indicate it’s not that much better than 10GbE with TOE?).

It’s possible other Big data analytics engines are considering using IB as well.  It would seem to be a logical choice if you had even more control over the software stack.

~~~~

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Post tags: 10GBE, BIGData, EMC Isilon, ExaFLOP computing, Flextronics, Hadoop, HDFS, HPC, IB EDR, IB QDR, IBTA, Intel, IPoIB, Melanox, OpenFabrics Alliance, Qlogic, supercomputing clusters, Voltaire

(SCISPC111122-004) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

[As promised, I am trying to get up-to-date on my performance charts from our monthly newsletters. This one brings us current up through November.]

The above chart plots Storage Performance Council SPC-1 IOPS against spindle count.  On this chart, we have eliminated any SSD systems, systems with drives smaller than 140 GB and any systems with multiple drive sizes.

Alas, the regression coefficient (R**2) of 0.96 tells us that SPC-1 IOPS performance is mainly driven by drive count.  But what’s more interesting here is that as drive counts get higher than say 1000, the variance surrounding the linear regression line widens – implying that system sophistication starts to matter more.

Processing power matters

For instance, if you look at the three systems centered around 2000 drives, they are (from lowest to highest IOPS) 4-node IBM SVC 5.1, 6-node IBM SVC 5.1 and an 8-node HP 3PAR V800 storage system.  This tells us that the more processing (nodes) you throw at an IOPS workload given similar spindle counts, the more efficient it can be.

System sophistication can matter too

The other interesting facet on this chart comes from examining the three systems centered around 250K IOPS that span from ~1150 to ~1500 drives.

• The 1156 drive system is the latest HDS VSP 8-VSD (virtual storage directors, or processing nodes) running with dynamically (thinly) provisioned volumes – which is the first and only SPC-1 submission using thin provisioning.
• The 1280 drive system is a (now HP) 3PAR T800 8-node system.
• The 1536 drive system is an IBM SVC 4.3 8-node storage system.

One would think that thin provisioning would degrade storage performance and maybe it did but without a non-dynamically provisioned HDS VSP benchmark to compare against, it’s hard to tell.  However, the fact that the HDS-VSP performed as well as the other systems did with much lower drive counts seems to tell us that thin provisioning potentially uses hard drives more efficiently than fat provisioning, the 8-VSD HDS VSP is more effective than an 8-node IBM SVC 4.3 and an 8-node (HP) 3PAR T800 systems, or perhaps some combination of these.

~~~~

The full SPC performance report went out to our newsletter subscriber’s last November.  [The one change to this chart from the full report is the date in the chart's title was wrong and is fixed here].  A copy of the full report will be up on the dispatches page of our website sometime this month (if all goes well). However, you can get performance information now and subscribe to future newsletters to receive these reports even earlier by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.

For a more extensive discussion of block or SAN storage performance covering SPC-1&-2 (top 30) and ESRP (top 20) results please consider purchasing our recently updated SAN Storage Buying Guide available on our website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions on how to improve our analysis of SPC results or any of our other storage system performance discussions.

Comments?

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Post tags: 3PAR, Chart of the month, HDS, HDS VSP, HP, HP 3PAR V800, IBM, IBM SVC, IBM SVC 4.3, IBM SVC 5.1, IOPS, IOPs/Drive, SPC-1, Storage Performance Council

(SCIESRP111029-003) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

The above chart is from our last Exchange [2010] Solution Review Program (ESRP) performance dispatch released in our October newsletter (sign-up upper right).  The 1K mailbox and under category for ESRP represents Exchange storage solutions for SMB data centers.

As one can see from the above the NetApp FAS2040 has done well but an almost matching result came in from the HP P2000 G3 MSA system.  What’s not obvious here is that the FAS2040 had 8 disks and the P2000 had 78 so there was quite a difference in the spindle counts. The #3&4 runs from EMC VNXe3100 also posted respectable results (within 1sec of top performer) and only had 5 and 7 disks respectively, so they were much more inline with the FAS2040 run.  The median number of drives for this category is 8 drives which probably makes sense for SMB storage solutions.

Why log playback

I have come to prefer a few metrics in the Exchange 2010 arena that seem to me to capture a larger part of the information available from an ESRP report.  The Log Playback metric is one of them that seems to me to fit the bill nicely.  Specifically:

• It doesn’t depend on the Jetstress IO/rate parameter that impacts the database transfers per second rate.  The log playback is just the average time it takes to playback a 1MB log file against a database.
• It is probably a clear indicator of how well a storage system (configured matching the ESRP) can support DAG log processing.

In addition, I believe Log Playback is a great stand-in for any randomized database transaction processing. Now I know that Exchange is not necessarily a pure relational database but it does have a significant component of indexes, tables, and sequentiality to it.

My problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any other real database performance benchmark out there for storage.  I know that TPC has a number of benchmarks tailored to database transaction activity but these seem to be more a measure of the database server than the storage.  SPC-2 has some database oriented queries but it’s generally focused on through put and doesn’t really represent randomized database activity and for other reasons it’s not as highly used as SPC-1 or ESRP so there is not as much data to report on.

That leaves ESRP.  For whatever reason (probably the popularity of Exchange), almost everyone submits for ESRP. Which makes it ripe for product comparisons.

Also, there are a number of other good metrics in ESRP results that I feel have general applicability outside Exchange as well.  I will be reporting on them in future posts.

~~~~

Comments?

Sorry, I haven’t been keeping up with our chart-of-the-month posts, but I promise to do better in the future.  I plan to be back in synch with our newsletter dispatches before month end.

The full ESRP performance report for the 1K and under mailbox category went out to our newsletter subscriber’s last October.  A copy of the full report will be up on the dispatches page of our website sometime this month (if all goes well). However, you can get performance information now and subscribe to future newsletters to receive these reports even earlier by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.

For a more extensive discussion of block storage performance in ESRP (top 20) and SPC-1&-2 (top 30) results please consider purchasing our recently updated SAN Storage Buying Guide available on our website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions on how to improve our analysis of ESRP results or any of our other storage system performance discussions.

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Post tags: 1K-and-under mbx, Chart of the month, database performance, EMC VNXe3100, ESRP, Exchange performance, Exchange Solution Reviewed Pro, HP P2000 G3 MSA, Log playback, Microsoft Exchange, NetApp FAS2040

Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive Decal: RAC Future Car Challenge by Dominic's pics (cc) (from Flickr)

I saw where Seagate announced the next generation of their Momentus XT Hybrid (SSD & Disk) drive this week.  We haven’t discussed Hybrid drives much on this blog but it has become a viable product family.

I am not planning on describing the new drive specs here as there was an excellent review by Greg Schulz at StorageIOblog.

However, the question some in the storage industry have had is can Hybrid drives supplant data center storage.  I believe the answer to that is no and I will tell you why.

Hybrid drive secrets

The secret to Seagate’s Hybrid drive lies in its FAST technology.  It provides a sort of automated disk caching that moves frequently accessed OS or boot data to NAND/SSD providing quicker access times.

Storage subsystem caching logic has been around in storage subsystems for decade’s now, ever since the IBM 3880 Mod 11&13 storage control systems came out last century.  However, these algorithms have gotten much more sophisticated over time and today can make a significant difference in storage system performance.  This can be easily witnessed by the wide variance in storage system performance on a per disk drive basis (e.g., see my post on Latest SPC-2 results – chart of the month).

Enterprise storage use of Hybrid drives?

The problem with using Hybrid drives in enterprise storage is that caching algorithms are based on some predictability of access/reference patterns.  When you have a Hybrid drive directly connected to a server or a PC it can view a significant portion of server IO (at least to the boot/OS volume) but more importantly, that boot/OS data is statically allocated, i.e., doesn’t move around all that much.   This means that one PC session looks pretty much like the next PC session and as such, the hybrid drive can learn an awful lot about the next IO session just by remembering the last one.

However, enterprise storage IO changes significantly from one storage session (day?) to another.  Not only are the end-user generated database transactions moving around the data, but the data itself is much more dynamically allocated, i.e., moves around a lot.

Backend data movement is especially true for automated storage tiering used in subsystems that contain both SSDs and disk drives. But it’s also true in systems that map data placement using log structured file systems.  NetApp Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) being a prominent user of this approach but other storage systems do this as well.

In addition, any fixed, permanent mapping of a user data block to a physical disk location is becoming less useful over time as advanced storage features make dynamic or virtualized mapping a necessity.  Just consider snapshots based on copy-on-write technology, all it takes is a write to have a snapshot block be moved to a different location.

Nonetheless, the main problem is that all the smarts about what is happening to data on backend storage primarily lies at the controller level not at the drive level.  This not only applies to data mapping but also end-user/application data access, as cache hits are never even seen by a drive.  As such, Hybrid drives alone don’t make much sense in enterprise storage.

Maybe, if they were intricately tied to the subsystem

I guess one way this could all work better is if the Hybrid drive caching logic were somehow controlled by the storage subsystem.  In this way, the controller could provide hints as to which disk blocks to move into NAND.  Perhaps this is a way to distribute storage tiering activity to the backend devices, without the subsystem having to do any of the heavy lifting, i.e., the hybrid drives would do all the data movement under the guidance of the controller.

I don’t think this likely because it would take industry standardization to define any new “hint” commands and they would be specific to Hybrid drives.  Barring standards, it’s an interface between one storage vendor and one drive vendor.  Probably ok if you made both storage subsystem and hybrid drives but there aren’t any vendor’s left that does both drives and the storage controllers.

~~~~

So, given the state of enterprise storage today and its continuing proclivity to move data around accross its backend storage,  I believe Hybrid drives won’t be used in enterprise storage anytime soon.

Comments?

© RayOnStorage.com. for RayOnStorage Blog, 2011. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: backend storage, Caching, enterprise storage, FAST technology, hybrid drives, log structured files, NAND, NetApp, Seagate, Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drive, SPC-2, SSD, WAFL

The NexGen n5 Storage System (c) 2011 NexGen Storage, All Rights Reserved

NexGen comes out of stealth

NexGen Storage a local storage company came out of stealth today and is also generally available.  Their storage system has been in beta since April 2011 and is in use by a number of customers today.

Their product uses DRAM caching, PCIe NAND flash, and nearline SAS drives to provide guaranteed QoS for LUN I/O.  The system can provision IOP rate, bandwidth and (possibly) latency over a set of configured LUNs.    Such provisioning can change using policy management on a time basis to support time-based tiering. Also, one can prioritize how important the QoS is for a LUN so that it could be guaranteed or could be sacrificed to support performance for other storage system LUNs.

The NexGen storage provides a multi-tiered hybrid storage system that supports 10GBE iSCSI, and uses MLC NAND PCIe card  to boost performance for SAS nearline drives.  NexGen also supports data deduplication which is done during off-peak times to reduce data footprint.

DRAM replacing Disk!?

In a report by ARS Technica, a research group out of Stanford is attempting to gang together server DRAM to create a networked storage system.  There have been a number of attempts to use DRAM as a storage system in the past but the Stanford group is going after it in a different way by aggregating together DRAM across a gaggle of servers.  They are using standard disks or SSDs for backup purposes because DRAM is, of course, a volatile storage device but the intent is to keep all in memory to speed up performance.

I was at SNW USA a couple of weeks ago talking to a Taiwanese company that was offering a DRAM storage accelerator device which also used DRAM as a storage service. Of course, Texas Memory Systems and others have had DRAM based storage for a while now. The cost for such devices was always pretty high but the performance was commensurate.

In contrast, the Stanford group is trying to use commodity hardware (servers) with copious amounts of DRAM, to create a storage system.  The article seems to imply that the system could take advantage of unused DRAM, sitting around your server farm. But, I find it hard to believe that.  Most virtualized server environments today are running lean on memory and there shouldn’t be a lot of excess DRAM capacity hanging around.

The other achilles heel of the Stanford DRAM storage is that it is highly dependent on low latency networking.  Although Infiniband probably qualifies as low latency, it’s not low latency enough to support this systems IO workloads. As such, they believe they need even lower latency networking than Infiniband to make it work well.

OCZ ups the IOP rate on their RevoDrive3 Max series PCIe NAND storage

Speaking of PCIe NAND flash, OCZ just announced speedier storage, upping the random read IO rates up to 245K from the 230K IOPS offered in their previous PCIe NAND storage.  Unclear what they did to boost this but, it’s entirely possible that they have optimized their NAND controller to support more random reads.

OCZ announces they will ship TLC SSD storage in 2012

OCZ’s been busy.  Now that the enterprise is moving to adopt MLC and eMLC SSD storage, it seems time to introduce TLC (3-bits/cell) SSDs.  With TLC, the price should come down a bit more (see chart in article), but the endurance should also suffer significantly.  I suppose with the capacities available with TLC and enough over provisioning OCZ can make a storage device that would be reliable enough for certain applications at a more reasonable cost.

I never thought I would see MLC in enterprise storage so, I suppose at some point even TLC makes sense, but I would be even more hesitant to jump on this bandwagon for awhile yet.

Solid Fire obtains more funding

Early last week Solid Fire, another local SSD startup obtained $25M in additional funding.  Solid Fire, an all SSD storage system company,  is still technically in beta but expect general availability near the end of the year.   We haven’t talked about them before in RayOnStorage but they are focusing on cloud service providers with an all SSD solution which includes deduplication.  I promise to talk about them some more when they reach GA.

LaCIE introduces a Little Big Disk, a Thunderbolt SSD

Finally, in the highend consumer space, LaCie just released a new SSD which attaches to servers/desktops using the new Apple-Intel Thunderbolt IO interface.  Given the expense (~$900) for 128GB SSD, it seems a bit much but if you absolutely have to have the performance this may be the only way to go.

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Well that’s about all I could find on SSD and DRAM storage announcements. However, I am sure I missed a couple so if you know one I should have mentioned please comment.

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Post tags: DRAM storage, LaCie storage, NexGen Storage, OCZ, Solid Fire Storage, SSD storage, Thunderbolt IO, TLC SSDs, TMS