StorageMojo

Despite being written off for dead . . .
Isilon’s been putting their IPO money to good use: engineering the next gen of their platform that they’ve named the X-series. In the meantime they’ve been adding customers - over 600 so far - and they have 60 customers running the new kit.

Moving from an aging single-core Xeon to a dual-core Xeon - the second core isn’t turned on yet - with faster busses and more cache speeds things up. They claim up to 60% faster performance, 20% less power and heat and 10 GigE readiness. Once they get their software dual-core aware they’ll have another nice boost to offer.

The StorageMojo take
Turning over the platform more rapidly than traditional array vendors do is a good strategy. It keeps the competition off-balance and gives you something new to tell customers. What good is commodity hardware if you don’t follow Moore’s law?

That said, Isilon’s scale out architecture is the real differentiator vs NetApp and other traditional filers. More bang for the buck just underscores the differences.

Comments welcome.

A particularly odd bit of goofiness has hit the infosphere: cloud/utility computing mania. Nick Carr has written a book - a sign of the Apocalypse . IBM has announced, for the umpteenth time, a variation on utility computing, now cloud computing. Somebody at Sun is claiming they’ll get rid of all their data centers by 2015.

R-i-i-i-ght.

You know the flying car in your garage?
The syllogism is

1. Google-style web-scale computing is really cheap
2. Networks are cheap and getting cheaper fast
3. Therefore we’re going to use really cheap computing over really cheap networks Real Soon Now

Can you spot the fallacies?

Fallacy #1: Google is Magick
The world’s largest Internet advertising agency does have the cheapest compute cycles and storage (see my StorageMojo article Killing With Kindness: Death By Big Iron for a comparison of Yahoo and Google’s computing costs). But they do nothing that the average enterprise data center couldn’t do if active cluster storage were productized.

Google built their infrastructure because they couldn’t buy it. They couldn’t buy it because no one had built it. But all Google did was package up ideas that academics had been working on, sometimes for decades. Google even hired many of the researchers to build the production systems. Happy multi-millionaire academics today!

Blame vendor marketing myopia for missing that opportunity. But their eyes are wide open now. If your enterprise wants cluster computes or storage you can buy it.

Fallacy #2: Networks are cheap
Or they will be Real Soon Now.

10 Mbit Ethernet from Intel, DEC and Xerox came out in 1983. A mere 25 years later we have 1000x Ethernet - 10 GigE - starting down the cost curve.

About the same time a first generation 5 MB Seagate disk cost $800. Today a 200,000x disk - 1 TB - costs 300 vastly cheaper dollars.

Also in 1983 the “hot box” - the VAX 11-780 - with a 5 MHz 32-bit processor and a honking 13.3 MByte/sec internal bus cost - for you, a special price - $150,000. Today a 64-bit, 3 GHz quad-core server - with specs too fabulous to compare - is $1300. Call it 1,000,000x.

Networks are the laggards. Which is why Cisco commands such a premium over the folks who do their jobs so much better: networks are the bottleneck. Optimizing the bottleneck has an incredible payback.

Hey, Cisco! Get the lead out!

What’s really going on?
There are - currently - economies of scale, which Google is exploiting and MSN and Yahoo! aren’t. So the latter two are going out of business.

But when you look at the cost of going across the network compared to the rest of infrastructure you realize that local - what we used to call distributed - computing is the only way to go.

Ergo, cloud computing will remain in the clouds and real computing will remain local.

Comments welcome, as always.

What’s the difference?
I came across a thoughtful essay on the “Top Ten Differences between Disk-based Archive & Disk-based Storage” in the MatrixStore blog. MatrixStore is a Mac cluster-based disk archive for Apple’s to-be-announced-RSN Final Cut Server.

MatrixStore is focused on one market segment - video content archiving - but their comments seem to be generally applicable. With 2008’s likely focus on the disk-based backup and archive market, it is worth starting the conversation now.

Key points
SANs aren’t designed for archiving.

Reason 1.

If you are archiving your data, it’s probably because you don’t want to lose it.

Raison d’etre for a disk based archive? To keep data - safe. For a SAN? Speed of delivery, QoS… You wouldn’t put 256 bit delivery checksums into a SAN; SANs cut corners on flushing to disk; SANs don’t build in search or audit-trails, or security; SANs can down completely because of single-points-of-failure in the hardware; a bad software update in a SAN and…. Don’t do it. With nursing care and attention they can run fine for years, but they are inherently tightly coupled, software version sensitive, high maintenance, error prone and hardware technology dependent… even if they are brilliant at fast storage and delivery of information…

A disk-based archive must be: loosely coupled and free from dependencies between hardware components on independent nodes (surely the greatest example of a loosely coupled solution is the world-wide-web; you have no fear on the www that a server going down, say, hosting an IBM site, is going to bring down another in Cupertino!); free from requiring constant latest updates to software/firmware; able to guarantee safe delivery and storage of data; and basically, able to safely, securely store and protect data for year upon year, without complications, manual intervention, spanners…

Archives must be engineered for easy adoption of new technology
In storage everything is cheaper next quarter. So why buy now?

Reason 2.

There’ll be bigger, better, cheaper, more efficient disks in 2009, and in 2010, and in 2011…

Will there be bigger, better, cheaper, more energy efficient storage devices coming out this year, and every year that follows? Yes, of course there will be.

In your SAN do you have to mirror between like-sized devices? What happens when one of those devices goes down in 2 years time? Do you end up throwing away the good device? In your SAN can you bolt on new technologies as they arrive; holographic disks that store 10TB a shot, or new fibre connectors?

In ZFS can you decommission a part of a storage pool, replacing it with new storage devices without significant bleeding edge techniques and without disrupting the rest? Ideally, it be great to bolt new technology into an archive, as and when they arrive, rolling out old technologies if they reach the point of diminishing returns; to be able to do that whilst always seeing a single archive storage cluster; and without a maintenance or data migration headache; or should I say; without risk. A disk based archive can achieve that, if selected carefully.

Vendor handcuffs
Long-term storage and proprietary products don’t mix. Along with upgradeability-in-place, this should be high on customer checklists.

Reason 3.

Vendor tie-in is more like Vendor hand-cuffs.

OK - this isn’t strictly about SAN vs Disk based archiving; but fact of the matter is that most SAN/any other disk-based storage solutions tie you in to a particular vendor, which is great when they are supplying the ‘best-in-class’ solution of the moment at time of purchase, but not quite so clever when you come to upgrade that solution a year down the line and they aren’t offering the best in class anymore.

The archive should be vendor independent otherwise, for many reasons, you’re just creating tomorrow’s headache with a solution from yesteryear.

Stability and security

Reason 5.

Viruses. Hackers.

Choice one:

“out of the box” configured with encryption, firewalled, data locked down, all access to data routed through PPK, all maintenance functionality requiring 256 bit passwords.

Choice two:

bolt on each of the above to your favourite SAN/filesystem. Wait five years as your conglomerate of software solutions evolve (along with the workforce) and cross fingers. A disk-based archive must be secure out-of-the-box.

There’s more, of course, and if you are interested please read the whole essay and respond here with your thoughts so every one can see and respond.

The StorageMojo take
EMC’s upcoming backup and archive cluster, code-named Hulk/Maui (HW/SW), will drive a lot of customers to think about this topic. Of course, EMC’s famously disciplined sales force will scrupulously limit Hulk/Maui sales to B&A applications for the first several months weeks days hours after its release. Once the customer utters the magic word “Isilon” Hulk/Maui will suddenly be ready for enterprise use.

[I hope someone has mentioned this to the Maui engineers: forget about summer vacation.]

Disk-based backup and archive is a fast growing application with very different requirements from SANs, arrays and fast NAS boxes. Data migrations will be increasingly infeasible. Management has to be stoner-on-the-night-shift-proof. And the data can’t be held hostage by proprietary standards.

Companies do discontinue products or go bankrupt, after all.

Comments welcome, of course. Anything else?

What could be more appropriate?
HP’s lackluster showing in The Info Pro’s survey - see yesterday’s post - reminded me that I’d written about HP shortly after after I’d started blogging (see HP’s Storage Grid-lock: panic-stricken execs promise fix in four years).

Here’s a quote from the September 2004 post:

HP’s storage shortfall this past quarter has Carly pulling out the stops to save one of HP’s few high-margin non-printer businesses. Firing executives, check. Inspirational speech to resellers, check. Roll out ambitious product roadmap for delivery in 2008, check.

2008!?! Why not just put out a press release titled ” HP execs panic over storage shortfall, have no clue how to fix business in less than four years”? Then, at least, they could start facing up to their real problems.

Issuing long-range roadmaps is always a move of pure desperation, so the HP storage business must be considerably weaker than they have let on.

So what were they going to deliver this year?
Get this wacky idea: a storage grid. As an HP whitepaper described it:

The HP StorageWorks Grid will be built from intelligent building blocks called smart cells. These elements will incorporate commodity hardware. In addition to the expected control and storage hardware, smart cells will incorporate a flexible operating environment that allows storage functions to be downloaded as needed—and allows smart cells to be repurposed if necessary.

While the 4 year timeline was laughable the actual proposal was smart and forward-looking. The technology was there. But the paper didn’t address the business dynamics that would enable HP to bring the project to fruition. In other words, the marketing problem.

Clearly no one else did either.

The StorageMojo take
Today clustered storage is the obvious successor to big-iron arrays. When HP wrote the paper it wasn’t. If they’d followed through they’d be the thought leaders in the industry and well-positioned to take commercial leadership as well.

As I noted then,

But HP’s roots as a device company have always made the systems approach [. . .] difficult to execute. Even though HP bought a strong storage business with Compaq (which won it when they bought DEC) and the StorageWorks line, the feckless storage mavens in Palo Alto (best idea ever: “Let’s introduce EMC into all our top corporate accounts! It’s cheap, easy and with no engineering its all profit!”) have managed to run it into the ground.

HP should take a leaf from Sun’s storage strategy: move storage software from tin-wrapped boxes into the OS group where commodity servers and networks can provide cost-effective infrastructure.

HP had a great idea 4 years ago. Now it’s time to deliver.

Comments welcome, of course.

A recent study by The Info Pro research firm suggests that some seismic shifts are underway. Is EMC losing top-of-mind recognition in the data center? Are mid-size enterprises more likely to embrace new technology?

In an article in Data Storage Connection, TIP talks about some of its findings from a series of interviews with a couple of hundred data center denizens. TIP runs the series about every 6 months. About 150 were F1000 types and another 85 were mid-size enterprise.

Naturally, the article and the accompanying slide presentation are designed to sell the report, but it is worth watching for marketing mavens. They focus on what people consider “exciting” technologies.

Random comments
In no particular order:

• EMC’s unaided top-of-mind seems to be on a steady downward slide. One might have thought the hype around VMware would have changed that. Of course the stock market seems to forgotten that too.
• Newbies 3Par, Data Domain, F5, Compellent, and Isilon are trending up.
• Biggest surprise: HP is in the weeds behind behind Data Domain, Sun and F5.

The StorageMojo take
EMC may be paying the price for all of its not-terribly-storage-related acquisitions like RSA and VMware. Or maybe its aging architectures are taking their toll. Whatever it is, the upcoming Hulk/Maui launch is a chance to burnish the corporate image. But not too brightly since the v1 software will be weak.

HP is clearly in trouble. I’m biased - I shipped the very first StorageWorks product back around ‘91 - but for an organization that used to have bright and creative developers and good marketing, their top-of-mind stinks. Time to shake up HP storage marketing: there’s an art to marketing to and through a large direct sales force. Megatons of brochures don’t sell products - people do.

The newbies seem to be doing well in mid-size enterprises where they can more easily migrate to a new vendor. But while the glass house grinds slowly, entrenched vendors can be displaced. Time to rethink the value proposition.

Comments welcome, of course.

No, this isn’t about pork bellies
In just the last few weeks EMC and IBM have announced their intentions to offer commodity server-based storage. EMC with Hulk/Maui and IBM with XIV.

Sun already offers its Thumper product, a high-density server and storage chassis with 48 disk drives, at prices competitive with commodity servers from a GB perspective. You can put OpenSolaris on anything you choose.

A few more shoes will be dropping
So EMC, IBM and Sun have commodity-hardware based storage. HDS, HP LSI and NetApp don’t. How long will they choose to hold out?

HP is part way there. Polyserve runs on HPs popular blade servers. But if density isn’t your goal and scalability is important, you may lean to another solution.

Pressure on the margin
It is a simple question, really. How will expensive hardware compete with cheap hardware? After the FUD and hand waving are said and done, customers of enterprise storage will have a new choice with a lower cost structure.

If HDS and NetApp aren’t in the new game, where exactly will they be?

The StorageMojo take
HDS is not nimble, so I’d be pleasantly surprised if they did anything in 08. NetApp also has some breathing room as none of the big boys are offering commodity cluster NAS. But that could change in a week.

NetApp appears to be the most vulnerable. Their largest customers are ripe for conversion to a more scalable architecture and lower costs. No matter how much NetApp discounts, their costs are higher than commodity hardware. They can fight for a while, but not forever. They have to be competitive and their big customers have to believe they will be competitive.

Expect to see NetApp make a cluster storage software acquisition in 2008.

Comments welcome. Is Polyserve going to meet HP’s needs going forward, or are they too going to have to buy or create a new cluster storage product?

About time
I’m in Silicon Valley for a few days. So I’ll keep this brief.

EMC is pulling out the stops. First Hulk/Maui clusters and now putting flash SSDs in the Symm. They are positioning it as technology leadership, which it isn’t, but it is marketing leadership. I’m impressed.

SSDs have been around for decades. Symms have been around for over 15 years, so why now?

I suspect the rising chorus of customers complaining about 30% capacity utilization rates coupled with Wall Street’s economic woes - I wouldn’t want to be EMC’s Citibank account manager - helped them make the decision. Plus the rise of cluster block storage - XIV the latest case in point - means that if you want to own the high-performance array crown it is time to stake out the territory.

Plus the margins are great!
I haven’t seen any pricing yet, but knowing EMCs general strategy I suspect they are charging their usual 6x markup over cost for the SSDs. Despite that it should be an easy business case for a CFO to approve.

But if you are going to spend big bucks on an SSD, is putting it inside a single storage array the right way to go? The wide-awake folks at Texas Memory Systems think not. They provided me with this table comparing their SSD to the STEC ZeusIOPS drive EMC is using.

Make an entire SAN go faster instead of a single array? Sounds good to me.

The StorageMojo take
Will SSDs finally get some data center love? EMC’s endorsement of SSDs should provide an opening for the long-suffering SSD companies to get more attention from the enterprise. If it’s good enough for EMC . . . .

Comments welcome, as always. Moderation may be slightly more intermittent than usual, but moderate I shall. When I’m not enjoying the convertible I rented.

Enough of Google’s bathtub brew
IBM’s purchase of XIV makes it official: cluster storage is on a roll.

XIV’s website could have been ripped from the webpages of StorageMojo:

. . . enterprise-class storage systems typically comprise proprietary, special-purpose hardware, such as backplanes, shared memory architecture, and disk shelves. Huge amounts of resources are spent on developing and testing these products — with the associated costs passed on to the user. Moreover, special-purpose hardware quickly becomes obsolete, with a long wait time until new-generation processors, switches, and other components are integrated.

It also appears that the Nextra product has done away with RAID 5:

The Nextra system uses innovative RAID-X design, in which each disk is split into small pieces, and each piece is mirrored on a different disk. As a result, when a disk does fail, all disks in the system participate in the rebuild.

They don’t like ILM:

The ILM concept is rendered redundant, saving on ILM-related software license costs, administration efforts, and management attention, and sparing users migration-related downtime and other service issues related to ILM

Payback time?
Moshe Yanai, the executive chairman of XIV, was the chief engineer for the original Symmetrix that EMC used - along with raging incompetence at IBM - to destroy IBM’s lock on enterprise storage. Not only was he the engineer, he also got a percentage of the sales price of each Symm sold, making him a wealthy man.

But when EMC bought Data General to acquire the Clariion storage division, Moshe didn’t like it. After a long fight, CEO Joe Tucci pushed Moshe out of EMC and continued the successful Clariion product line. Moshe went back to Israel and eventually developed the Nextra product for XIV.

Gee, do you think his tie-up with IBM might be aimed at his former employer? A little?

The StorageMojo take
EMC’s Hulk/Maui and IBM’s XIV products are aimed at different parts of the market. IBM doesn’t have a large high-end array business to protect so the Nextra’s positioning as

A winning new storage paradigm for the enterprise
XIV Ltd., creator of Nextra™, has undertaken to design and produce the next generation of enterprise-class SAN (Storage Area Networks) systems. Nextra was created based on the principle of providing a simple solution for meeting the herculean IT challenges of today and tomorrow.

isn’t the problem for IBM that it is for EMC, desperate to protect the margins and revenue of the Symm line.

But both products are built on (quality) commodity hardware, so if one or the other needs to make mid-course corrections they can do it in software. Positioning Nextra as enterprise storage puts the heat on EMC and the Symm.

It will be interesting to see who gets to a boil first.

Comments welcome, of course.

Darn! It looks like I screwed up. I’m sorry. While Microsoft did disable a number of early Word and other file formats, it wasn’t as long a list as I thought.

Textual analysis
I take a text-heavy approach to the content on StorageMojo. I prefer to go to original source material, unpack the meaning and the context, and then give my take on it.

That usually works pretty well. But in this case it didn’t.

What happened?
I read a lot of technical documents. Most never get written about. But the Microsoft knowledge base article was an exception. Since Microsoft was the topic it also got a lot of attention from me and others

There is a lot of emotion around Microsoft. They are a big, powerful, immensely profitable and sometimes clueless corporation whose desktop monopoly is a fact of life for computer users and IT professionals.

I try to stay with the facts as best I can determine them. In this case I got confused by the KB article. That other people made the same mistake is small comfort and no excuse (see a Microsoft take here).

Lessons learned
Other than resolving to analyze content from Microsoft more carefully, I’m not sure what else I would do differently. I didn’t question their motives for the change, only the way it was handled.

However, I do have some suggestions for Microsoft.

• Reducing functionality on an already purchased product is a problem. You should notify users that you are limiting product functionality and give them the opportunity to decline the update. Even if it is for their own good.
• Suggesting that editing the registry or using esoteric admin tools to solve the problem is OK for the tech savvy. But what about my 85 year old neighbor Dorothy, whose computer is a lifeline to her great-grandchildren? Her late husband was an engineer, so she has files that go back quite a few years. Microsoft, you are both an enterprise and a consumer company. Own it.
• Communication is worth spending money on. Tech writers tell me that Microsoft doesn’t pay very well and, as a result, it doesn’t get very good tech writing. Maybe MCSEs are used to the style, but it sure didn’t work for this reasonably tech-savvy consumer.

The StorageMojo take
Tech is complicated and sometimes people - like I just did - get it wrong. Listening to criticism and learning from mistakes is how we all get better, even Microsoft. I hope you’ll keep coming back to StorageMojo and I’ll keep doing my level best to make it worth your time.

Comments welcome, as always.

“They trusted us with their data? Will the fools never learn?”
The Service Pack 3 update to Office 2003 blocks over a dozen old file formats, effectively rendering the data inaccessible. Unless you are adept at the registry editing Microsoft cautions you against.

And they don’t warn you that you won’t be able to access the old files. Whee!

Check out my ZDnet article for the gory details. It isn’t pretty.

Update: While the SP3 does block opening a number of old file formats, the formats in question are older: all Word pre-6.0; PowerPoint pre-97; Excel 4.0 charts; dBASE II .dbf; Lotus and Quattro files; Corel Draw .cdr. See my mea culpa. End update.

Clueless droids?
How does the world’s largest software company make this kind of wrong-on-so-many-levels decision? Is there ANY adult supervision in Redmond?

The decision bespeaks a corporate culture that is painfully clueless about its customers. Gee, why would anyone want to access 5 year old Word documents?

Medical products marketing
Redmond’s blindness echoes that of Detroit’s for the last 50 years. “Safety doesn’t sell.” “Bigger is better.” “Good enough quality is good enough.” “Americans will never buy Japanese cars.”

Microsoft clearly doesn’t get the fact that their products are an intimate part of consumer’s lives, much as medicines are. When 8 bottles of Tylenol capsules were poisoned with cyanide in 1982, Johnson & Johnson quickly recalled 31 million bottles and spent on the order of $100 million dollars to restore consumer confidence in the Tylenol brand.

Would Microsoft spend a nickel to protect and reassure consumers? I give it a qualified “maybe.”

The StorageMojo take
In case anyone thought that archiving documents in proprietary formats was acceptable, this is your wake-up call. ASCII text and probably PDFs are OK. Everything else, including RTF - which Microsoft controls - is suspect.

With the growing focus on e-discovery, there should be a market for a high-speed “any format to .txt or .pdf” appliance. Producing unreadable softcopies won’t cut much ice in Federal courts.

Comments welcome, as always.

I’m off to America’s Sin City for a weekend of good clean storage fun. I’m attending Tom Coughlin’s Storage Visions conference.

Then I’m sticking around on Monday to take in a few hours of CES, a show I’ve never attended. There are some storage-related firms whose booths I want to see.

If you are in LV this weekend, look me up. I’ll be at the Flamingo with the SV conference.

Can’t win ‘em all - darn it!
A year ago I offered predictions for 2007 (see 2007 in review) and it was with deep foreboding that I went back to look at them.

Cynic or optimist?
Here’s the list and my take on each prediction.

Cloud computing?

-CIOs realized they are at a significant cost disadvantage and started prototyping new apps on services such as Amazon’s EC and S3. They did see some cost savings, but the big win was faster implementation and scaling of the infrastructure. Very little industry buzz though, since storage vendors don’t do business with the service providers and the CIOs who know aren’t talking.

Cleverly worded to avoid measurement, I suspect that while some CIOs have piloted projects using online resources, the practice is not as common as I’d thought.

Medical records market

-Electronic medical records failed to get any storage industry attention even as this multi-billion dollar opportunity slipped away. American consumers, seeing widespread abuse by insurance companies, debt collectors, law enforcement and employers, began fighting their use in the courts and through “off the grid” health care options.

Nailed the industry’s reaction to EMR. Are American’s fighting their use? Hard to say. It appears they haven’t gotten enough traction to spur a reaction one way or the other.

1.5 TB disk drive?
I predicted they’d be shipping by year end, but none have even been announced. Is disk capacity growth slowing? We’ll know by mid-year.

Small-write optimized flash drives?

-The biggest device surprise - Small Write-Optimized Flash (SWOF) drives - in 32 and 64 GB capacities from Samsung, took off in as OLTP-oriented IDCs realized they could have higher reliability and performance at much lower costs over conventional disk drives. In a brilliant marketing move, Samsung got certified with Oracle, DB2, SQL Server and MySQL, dramatically raising the technical buzz around SWOF drives.

If we had more performance data Fusion-io drive might be a SWOF drive. And no Internet data centers picked them for broad implementation. Total miss.

Zmanda open source backup

-Zmanda open source backup really started taking off this year. It is cheap, reliable, and easily readable. At some point folks started waking up to the fact that they could lock themselves in to a single software product by using some sort-of cool features, or they could use Zmanda and know they’ll be able to recover the data on any Unix/Linux system.

Zmanda CEO Chander Kant assures me that Zmanda sales indeed started taking off this year. I’ll take his word for it.

He also noted that they can back up directly to Amazon’s S3. According to the AWS blog:

Zmanda Internet Backup is a plugin for the Amanda Enterprise backup software. Amanda Enterprise is a certified, tested, and supported version of the popular Amanda open source backup and recovery tool. Amanda can now use Amazon S3 to backup, archive and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Internet.

Pretty cool.

Apple’s Time Machine

-Apple’s spring trio of storage software products, based on ZFS, including Time Machine, Replicant and Total Recall - note their cool use of Sci-Fi movie references - left every other storage app looking like crank-start Model T’s next to a Ferrari F430.

No other cool storage tools. No cool names. Fact is, I’m not even using Time Machine yet because I’ve had so many problems with Leopard.

But I’m sure it will be insanely great when I do.

The final prediction:

2007 was a good year for storage. Despite the profitable inertia enjoyed by the big guys, some exciting technology and applications made waves . . . . All of these contributed to a growing rethinking of storage architectures in the high-volume, cool-data, internet age.

I stick by this last prediction: 2007 was a good year for storage. The momentum for cluster-based storage grew, particularly with EMC’s Hulk/Maui teaser announcement. 1 TB drives made it into mass production and their prices are dropping. WD’s greener drives appear to be a real advance.

The StorageMojo take
My predictions were generally optimistic so I guess I must be an optimist. But the big trend in new storage architectures is one I’ve been looking for - and advocating - for years. And that is definitely happening.

While I don’t buy the hype around cloud computing, it is clear that big customers and some VCs are waking up to the fact that the old storage business model is not going to be the new storage business model. We are on the verge of a surprisingly rapid shift in how new data systems are designed and built.

But that is a topic for another day.

Comments welcome, of course. What was the biggest surprise you saw in 2007?

Fast, high-capacity flash drive
Fusion-io’s impressive demo at DEMOfall07 piqued my interest (see Fusion io - great demo. Now comes the hard part.) and skepticism. They’ve announced some pricing and refined the specs.

The ioDrive

The ioDrive is a PCIe x4 card with 80, 160 or 320 GB of NAND flash. With a claimed performance of a sustained 87,500 8k IOPS - down from the DEMOfall claim of 150,000 IOPS - the ioDrive offers fast relief from disk latency.

While not as fast as RAM with a device latency of 25us - I’d guess driver latency would be more - the non-volatility, higher capacity and competitive price make it a reasonable substitute for more server RAM. Retail pricing starts at $2400, which is the $30/GB they promised. I’d assume the larger versions would have lower $/GB pricing.

The card is supported on Red Hat AS 4.0 and SUSE ES 10.

The StorageMojo take
Flash drive performance on single-user systems has not lived up to the hype. But servers are another story.

The ioDrive gives low-end servers high-end RAID I/O performance at a much lower cost and footprint. Price competitive with RAM the ioDrive offers power-limited data centers another way to increase I/O performance without adding power-hungry arrays.

Kudos to Fusion-io for figuring out how to harness the promise of NAND flash in the real world.

Comments welcome, of course.