StorageMojo

What, if any, is the value of multi-year storage uptime?

Xiotech and Atrato promise 5 and 3 year uninterrupted service on their new arrays. Now it is time to ask, as some commenters have, so what?

After all, enterprise data centers are already well-equipped to deal with disk failures. RAID keeps the data available. 7×24 service replaces the failed drive with a new hot spare. Experienced storage admins paper over the cracks.

It isn’t like you’re going to fire all your storage admins just because arrays stop breaking.

Opex vs capex
The direct cost saving - no maintenance contract for x years - may or may not be reflected in the purchase price. From a buyer’s perspective there are 2 costs: the capital expense - capex - and the operating expense - opex. Opex is fully tax deductible in the year incurred, so it is easier to get.

Atrato and Xiotech need to think creatively about maintenance pricing.

Breaking into the glass house
Breaking into data centers with the promise of cost savings isn’t easy. The provable cost savings have to be 50% or better to get conservative data centers to change vendors. And it helps if there is a recession or the business is tanking. Motivation.

A case can be made that after adding up a standard array’s maintenance costs, random disruption costs and additional management it will be cheaper to go with the new product. The CFO will demand it.

But if you want to change the market, you have to change the way the market thinks.

Re-thinking the issue
Straight cost-displacement arguments aren’t going to have the legs both companies would like. They need a different model.

Enterprise IT is manufacturing plant - not an engineering testbed. It confuses the engineers because it seems like a techie haven - but it isn’t.

It is all about shipping product, each and every day. Like a real factory.

SPC
Everyone accepts that statistical process control has changes the face of manufacturing. A core idea behind SPC, reducing variability improves quality, is directly applicable to IT factories.

What Atrato and Xiotech do, ideally, is reduce IT ops variability. There is always a known level of performance. Availability is 100%.

Thus most of the usual dependencies are no longer dependencies. I/O slowdowns and timeouts should disappear. Drive rebuilds won’t impact performance. Admins won’t pull the wrong drive - which happens about 2% of the time - and bring down the array. And so on.

The StorageMojo take
Enterprises over-configure because they never know what is going to hit them - but they do know it will be at the worst possible time. Ideally they want to be ready to handle the biggest shopping day of the year - even after an array failure.

Workload variability isn’t going away. But wouldn’t it be nice if equipment performance and availability variability did?

That’s what Atrato and Xiotech are selling. I wish them luck communicating a value prop that strikes at the heart of what every other array vendor is selling.

Comments welcome, of course.

NAB frame by frame
SNW and NAB did not overlap this year, so I spent 3 days each at both. The 2 events are very different: storage is the topic at one and merely central to what everyone is doing at the other. I enjoy both.

Rather than tackle NAB in one piece I’m writing a series of short takes on a number of companies.

SNW is the past. NAB is the future.
Storage is in the midst of a massive transition from an IOPS focus to a bandwidth focus. Like computing’s shift from batch to interactive in the ’60s and ’70s this transition is about bringing the technology closer to how people live. Not consumerizing, humanizing.

Life is a sequential access workload. Our eyes, ears and our pattern-hungry brains crave bandwidth. New display technologies push patterns at us at rates that used to require roller-coasters.

Batch isn’t going away - Google probably runs more batch jobs than most F100 firms - and neither is transaction processing. But the investment goes to the growth areas and bandwidth intensive storage is a growth area.

HD 3D: the Next Big Thing?
3D is getting good and will be the next step in home theater. Whether it is good enough to break through in theaters is another issue. But the net is that high quality 3D doubles data rates.

NAB gets this. They also get that to be useful, storage has to be integrated with the application, whether that app is production, editing, distribution or presentation. A new wide world is opening up to people who know storage and can learn an application. Much easier than the reverse, to be sure.

And, of course, they have a very reliable market to pay for all the innovation: entertainment. Cool.

Comments welcome, of course. First up: Isilon.

After 8 years of hard slogging the folks at InPhase are ready to ship the world’s first holographic storage system.

As StorageMojo noted 2 years ago:

InPhase is claiming they will ship drives with removable holographic disks with 300GB capacity and 20Mbps transfer rate later this year.

I love holographic technology and wish InPhase the best, but I don’t believe they have a viable business with their technology - yet. The problem: 3.5″ disk drives will reach 750GB by the end of this year with much faster transfer rates. InPhase’s 20 Mbps is only 2.5 million bytes per second or only 9GB per hour. It will take over 30 hours just to fill one disk! I predict that hard drives will still be more convenient and fairly cost-competitive than this promising new technology.

But keep at it guys. Lightning will strike if your investors are patient enough.

So what’s different now? They’re saying they will ship next month instead of “later.” The transfer rate is 20 MB/sec. And the media archive life is 50 years - higher density and longer life than tape.

Limited availability until fall
I saw a unit - not sure it was functional - at NAB last week. Marketing VP Liz Murphy gave me the pitch, about 110 seconds of which you can watch here:

The yellow plastic on the drive is for display purposes. Note the nifty see-through media.

Target market
As befits a small company with an $18,000 holographic drive whose media is quantity 1 $180 a copy, InPhase has a sharp focus on people who need a 50 year archive life. Like film studios, whose film-based archives are bulky and subject to the vagaries of physical chemistry.

The media price is reasonable - compared to Blu-ray. NewEgg has TDK 25 GB blu-ray media for $17. 12x that - to get 300 GB - is $204. Plus the clutter. The burners are cheaper though.

Why did it take 8 years?
InPhase had to literally invent almost every piece of the system.

• The optical media.
• The manufacturing process for fabricating thick, optically-flat and high-dynamic range media.
• The mathematics and circuitry needed to use digital camera CMOS chips for high-speed and high-accuracy image reconstruction.
• A new method - polytopic multiplexing - for a 10x density increase.
• Holographic mastering techniques for commercial reproduction.

For example, in order to use commercial, l.e. affordable, CMOS optical sensors to read the holograms, InPhase engineers had to do a deep dive (pdf) into optical information theory:

For holographic data storage it is advantageous to limit the spatial bandwidth of the object beam to only slightly higher than the Nyquist frequency of the data pattern. Typically an aperture in a Fourier plane is used to band limit the data beam (thereby also minimizing the size of the holograms in a Fourier-transform geometry). The data pattern may contain at most 1 cycle/2 data image pixels, so that the Nyquist frequency of the optical field of the object beam is minimally 1 sample/pixel. However, since the spectrum of the irradiance pattern is the auto-correlation of the spectrum of the optical field, the Nyquist frequency of the detectable signal is actually 2 linear samples/pixel minimum. Thus any method relying on less than 4 detector elements/data image pixel is operating in a sub-Nyquist regime where the Nyquist rate is defined with respect to the actual irradiance pattern impinging on the detector.

As Liz noted, you can’t hire experienced holographic storage engineers. InPhase has trained every one of them.

The StorageMojo take
Kudos to InPhase for a magnificent achievement. This is comparable to IBM’s original RAMAC disk effort back in 1957. They all deserve to get rich.

15 years ago a 3x CD reader cost a few hundred dollars. Perhaps in 15 years holographic burners will be $50 and the media less than a $1.

Learn more about the technology at the InPhase Technologies web site.

Comments welcome, of course. See a more accessible version of this article on my ZDnet blog, Storage Bits.

NAB comes closer to the future of storage than any other show I’ve seen. Both in the storage demand generated by digitizing existing content and in the bulk storage supply needed to house it, NAB points to the future of massive digital storage.

If you or your company are there, send me an email with your booth number and I’ll try to stop by.

The StorageMojo take
Posting will be a little light again this week. Lots of great stuff lined up for next week though.

Comments welcome, of course.

6 weeks ago StorageMojo covered the leaving-stealth-mode non-announce of Atrato’s new storage box. I spoke to Dan McCormick, Atrato’s co-founder and CEO a few days ago for an update.

They’ll have more details at SNW. But here’s what I found interesting.

Density and capacity
The new Atrato box is 3U, not 5, and has about 200 2.5″ drives, for 50 TB raw. With the new 500 GB 2.5s coming out they’ll be able to do 100 TB.

That blows away the density of EMC’s soon-to-be-announced Hulk box. And with the declining delta between 3.5″ and 2.5″ drive capacities, the Atrato box should increase their capacity per rack unit lead.

Performance
In a refreshing change from normal industry practice Atrato quotes IOPS to disk, not cache. Thus their quoted 10,000 IOPS is a real-life number. Dan said that one user got up to 20,000 IOPS after tuning their app.

Apps with big files and large I/Os need disk I/Os, not cache I/Os. Most controllers turn off cache when they see large I/Os anyway. Quoting cache IOPS to their market would be a mistake.

Power
Atrato claims an 80% reduction in power per I/O. 80% of that is due to the power efficiency of 2.5″ drives. The remaining third though is their own special sauce.

Virtual drive hospital
When a drive starts acting up - and with 200 drives that doesn’t take very long - their software “pulls” the drive and tests it. If the drive is failing they leave it alone, but Atrato has found that over half the problem drives can be put back into service.

The StorageMojo take
Still cool. An interesting metric will be uptake into space and power constrained enterprise data centers. If power really is an issue - and while I’m sure it is at some level, the priority is the question - I’d expect to see all the big NYC data centers testing these things within 90 days.

Comments welcome, of course. Dan also commented that StorageMojo’s original Atrato post was the best researched and most insightful of all the reportage they saw. Flattery works.

Mobile computing. Cloud computing. Client-server computing. Green computing.

A new mainframe. A 9U supercomputer. Scale-out clusters. High-bandwidth RAID controllers. Multi-core processors. Massive memory servers.

Facebook. YouTube. Twitter. Blogging. MySpace. Google apps.

The Next Big Thing: there is no Next Big Thing
Punctuated equilibrium is an evolutionary theory that posits that long periods of “normal” evolution - stepwise enhancements that fine-tune environmental adaptation - are interrupted by big events - asteroid strikes, climate change - that engender explosions of mutation and variety. These variations then get whittled down by the pressures of the new normal.

The current hype around “cloud computing” is a case in point. Much over-heated prognostication about how this changes everything. But does it?

Cloud computing will host a certain class of applications that

• Have low bandwidth requirements
• Only require ~99% uptime
• Are latency insensitive

Both “low bandwidth” and “latency insensitive” are relative measures. They will change over time. We’ve always had those applications and always will.

In the 1980’s those requirements fit PCs and Novell LANs. In the 1990s they fit browsers and 56k modems. Today they fit smart phones, sociall media, some web-hosted productivity apps and cool data storage

But there will always be important apps that don’t meet these restrictions and never will. Plus there will be new products that provide “cloud” advantages of cost and scale without the disadvantages of security, latency and bandwidth costs. Is a local “cloud” still a cloud?

The StorageMojo take.
Our human pattern-recognition hardware craves simple patterns and big stories - even if they aren’t there.

What is actually happening is that we are seeing an explosion of new computing forms to take advantage of many new market niches. Old forms will either bend - as the mainframe has - or break - as the minicomputer companies did.

Implicit requirements are becoming explicit. Market demand is great enough to support a larger number of niches. Application users are gradually understanding what they need - as opposed to what they’ve always wanted.

Out of this stew will come the new normal. For a few years anyway.

Comments welcome, of course.

The P4P working group demo’d their work Friday at the Distributed Computing Industry Association show in New York. Not only did they show 2-3x faster downloads, but they also cut the average number of inter-metro hops - the expensive kind - from over 5 to less than 1. Cool.

The P4PWG idea is that if P2P is both cheaper for ISPs and faster for users we will all have a happier Internet. Folks from the Yale CompSci department - Haiyong Xie, Y. Richard Yang and Avi Silberschatz - along with Verizon and Pando Networks, cooperated on the demo.

The P4PWG includes AT&T, Verizon, Pando, BitTorrent, Cisco and LimeWire among others. The cable companies are there as observers. The P4P work is an open standard with the hope that all ISPs and P2P networks will endorse it.

How does it work?
The tech papers aren’t available yet on the web, but this is what I’ve pieced together from an afternoon’s websurfing. Update: Wide-awake reader Paul found this P4P Overview on Ars Technica. Thanks Paul! End update.

P2P is network oblivious. When you start downloading streams they might be from anywhere, regardless of network cost. The problem is that big routers are costly and smaller routers are much cheaper, not to mention undersea fiber.

What P4P is inject some knowledge into the P2P network so peering decisions are made more intelligently. It looks like a network version of locality of reference.

Implementation
There are at least 2 ways to deliver network awareness to peers. Here’s one of them.

A peer-tracker (pTracker) and an Internet tracker (iTracker) are added to the P2P network. A peer requests peering information of the pTracker, which has knowledge of local (metro area) and recent non-local resources. The pTracker sends back an edited server list and the peer goes its merry way.

If the resources aren’t local and the pTracker doesn’t know the network topology, it pings the iTracker, which returns high-level peering suggestions. If locality of reference works as well in cyberspace as it does with other data the pTracker won’t be querying the iTracker very often.

It is expected that the pTracker will be maintained by the P2P network, while the iTracker could be maintained by the ISP, network or a trusted 3rd party. This should preserve help P2P user privacy, although the *Tracker names certainly won’t reduce user paranoia.

Guys, how about something less Big Brotherish? PeerServer and RoutServer? Just a thought.

The StorageMojo take
As file sizes continue their secular trend upward the need for P2P will continue to grow. By aligning ISP, telco and user needs for faster and more efficient P2P the P4PWG has pulled off a win/win/win situation.

A less obvious benefit of this work is on VoIP networks, which are also P2P. It doesn’t take much to degrade VoIP quality. To the extent that it enables improvement in P2P network node selection, the P4P project will benefit the rapidly growing population of VoIP users as well.

Kudos to the P4PWG and especially the Yale team.

Comments welcome, of course. Images courtesy of the P4PWG.

How flash is really going to affect the storage industry is becoming clear. The short take: not as big a deal as flash vendors hoped. The longer take: There won’t be much of a mid-range flash market; instead we’ll see either costly fast flash or cheap slow flash.

There are lots of theories about how flash will alter the mass storage landscape. This is mine.

The flash write problem
The fundamental flash problem is the slow writes. There are 3 elements to the slow write problem.

• Flash has to be erased before it can be written. Every write operation is really 2 write operations.
• The writes are large. Typical block sizes are 128KB to 256KB. Writing a single page requires writing - after erasing it first - the entire block.
• The write bandwidth to a single block is less than a slow disk. High bandwidth writes requires parallel paths to multiple blocks.

These problems can all be engineered around.

• Garbage collection-like algorithms can be extended to enable a supply of erased blocks
• RAM backed by a small battery or capacitor can buffer writes for later re-writing to flash
• Controller chips can be built in high volume with multiple data paths

But at what cost? The first two require well-engineered software and some sort of CPU to run it. Since it is software it will have bugs. Can it be any more reliable than current drive firmware?

The dilemma
For enterprise use, flash-based SSDs need to be rock-solid, which implies a lot of careful and costly engineering. For consumer use, they need to be very high volume, which means low-cost.

It is a similar problem to RAID controllers: very low-end RAID controllers aren’t reliable enough for enterprise use. They also aren’t cheap enough - or easy enough - for consumers to buy in volume. RAID controllers have engineering problems similar to flash translation layers.

Making flash drives look like disks makes them easy to integrate, but if you really need performance it also makes them costly - like the $10k for the flash drive EMC is using in the Sym.

Flash in the disk controller?
As I’m writing this a NetApp exec says that flash will be disruptive because by placing flash in a disk controller they will reduce the need for the costly and highly profitable fibre channel disks. That could be correct. It sounds smarter than sticking flash on a disk.

The StorageMojo take
Despite the miracles of cost-reduction and integration the industry regularly performs, some things, like power provisioning, don’t get cheaper. High-quality software engineering doesn’t either. That is what high-performance flash drives require.

The high-performance consumer flash drive seems to be a mirage. I’d like to be proven wrong, but today’s notebook SSDs don’t offer superior application performance and cost 10x as much. Hardly a recipe for success.

Update: Intel is planning to offer “high-performance” flash drives with partner Micron. I saw an impressive demo - is there any other kind? - at the Storage Visions conference. But with the early marketing missteps of Samsung, it looks like the consumer flash drive may fall off the hype cycle into a deep ditch. Flash drive marketers: now is the time for precision marketing if you ever hope to establish a mass market. Consumers remember unkept promises. Until you are cheaper. End update.

Comments welcome, as always. Also check out BPLRU: A Buffer Management Scheme for Improving Random Writes in Flash Storage by two Samsung researchers, Hyojun Kim and Seongjun Ahn for a nice intro to flash issues.

EMC looks to be single-handedly reinventing the industry. And creating a new one as well.

They just topped Fortune’s list of most admired computer peripherals companies, beating out NetApp.

They bought Pi Corporation, snagging Paul Maritz, longtime Microsoftie, and put him in charge of a new division focused on cloud computing.

And the soon-to-be-announced Hulk/Maui project will further roil the waters of a complacent industry. Unlike their usual secrecy about futures, EMC can’t shut up about Maui. That reflects a confidence that they’ve got something that can’t easily be replicated.

Note to erstwhile competitors: be afraid - be very afraid. The last time EMC was this fired up they rolled IBM out of their decades-old enterprise storage domination. And now they are a $12 billion company. There will be a lot of collateral damage.

Eat lunch or be lunch
18 months ago I was writing CEO Joe Tucci off, but I was wrong. He’s brought in a lot of new blood with a mandate to create change. EMC is hungry.

The StorageMojo take
EMC’s famously fractious product groups don’t like the emerging order. EMC isn’t going to be an array-centric company much longer. That is hard for the Sym and Clariion groups. Especially when their margin dollars are going to support new ventures that won’t all be successful.

EMC will continue selling arrays, though they won’t be core to the company’s message. They’ll be a stepping stone to more compelling services and products geared to global enterprises. Software that ties EMC arrays, virtual machines and the new cloud infrastructure products together will freeze out point products.

Those planning to continue with “faster, better, cheaper” competitive strategies will have to adjust. Starting now would be wise.

Comments welcome, as always.

I had a con call with Chris Gladwin and Russ Kennedy of Cleversafe a couple of weeks ago. They’ve come to market with a product line that seeks to deliver:

• Massive scalability to meet growing digital content requirements
• Unprecedented Security and Privacy for critical digital assets
• Survivability against disasters, dishonesty and time
• Extremely cost-effective infrastructure compared to traditional methods

That’s a quote from their pitch.

Cleversafe’s product line
Cleversafe, IIRC, started as a software company, but their announced products come in nice rack-mountable boxes. There are 3 of them:

• CS Slicestor - Dispersed Storage server - $11.3k
• CS Accesser - Dispersed Storage router - $12.3k
• CS Manager - Dispersed Storage network manager - $12.3k

The Slicestor is a 1U storage server containing 4 disks. The Accessor slices up the data and distributes it - think slice router. The Manager works out of band to monitor and manage the storage network components.

I assume the pricing includes some room for volume discounts. There is an open-source version (c. 2006) of the software. The company intends to offer a software-only version as well.

Why hardware?
The Conventional Wisdom in VC circles is that tin-wrapped software ramps revenues faster - hey, you’re selling tin + bits - at the cost of lower margins and loss of focus.

Qualifying hardware is non-trivial; so you tend to stay on one platform longer than you should. At liquidity event time, software companies fetch higher multiples, so it may be a net loss. VCs live by the Golden Rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

What it does
Cleversafe has an iSCSI or block storage interface. It takes the data, slices it into small pieces using Information Dispersal Algorithms and then ships the slices off to storage either locally or around the world.

In the latest version you can specify how many slices the system makes and how many slices are required to rebuild the data. If you have 11 data centers around the world, you can specify that, say, 6 are required to recreate the data.

You could lose access to 5 data centers and still recover. If the local controlling authority busts into 3 or 4 data centers, they get nothing. Pretty cool if you worry about corrupt government officials getting hold of your company secrets.

The company is planning on adding FTP, CIFS and NFS in the fullness of time.

How well it works
Cleversafe claims that given sufficient low-latency bandwidth the dispersed storage is as fast as a local disk. That’s a tall order, but for now I’ll take their word for it.

Who should buy it?
The company is aiming the Dispersed Storage Network at ISPs to offer as a service and multinationals with round the clock operations and critical data.

How it works
Cleversafe uses Cauchy Reed Solomon erasure codes to slice and dice the data. These codes have several advantages:

• More capacity efficient and failure tolerant than parity codes
• Doesn’t require a license
• Code and decode are faster than other stack operations

If you’d like to play with Cauchy Reed Solomon, check out Dr. Jim Plank’s software page which includes

. . . Reed-Solomon coding, Cauchy Reed-Solomon coding, general bit-matrix coding, Reed-Solomon coding optimized for RAID-6, and Liberation coding. The documentation provides some tutorial material on matrix and bit-matrix based erasure coding.

I met the good doctor at FAST, where he was delighted to find that Clevesafe - also a FAST presenter - was using techniques he’d worked on a decade ago.

The StorageMojo take
I’m impressed with what Cleversafe has done. They will look even smarter after EMC’s Hulk/Maui announcement this spring. I suspect they’ll be bought by year’s end.

Kudos to the Cleversafe team.

Comments welcome, of course.

The magnetic spots in disk storage are already smaller than semiconductor feature sizes, and patterned media and heat-assisted recording will give us 10 TB 2.5″ disks in the next decade. But then what? Optical protein-based quantum dots could be the answer.

Scientists at a Osaka University lab say in a recent paper:

. . . we have established a novel, rapid method for the fabrication of a “protein recording material”, which enables us to spatiotemporally regulate the recording, reading, and erasing of a fluorescent protein array as information by a photochemical technique. A photolinker that we synthesized here was used to control the protein array spatiotemporally.

The patterned surface was manufactured using two similar processes. One used quantum dot 605-streptavidin conjugates. Under a medium wave UVB laser, the conjugate fluoresces, distinguishing a 1 from a zero. They used a similar substance to build a positive version as well.

The team
Professors Koji Nakayama, Takashi Tachikawa, and Tetsuro Majima, who authored the paper have published an incredible amount of work on nanotechnology, biochemistry and chemistry. It feels like they woke up one day and realized, “hey, we have fluorescent markers, proteins and substrates, let’s build a storage prototype!”

Here’s a picture I borrowed from their paper:

Mainstream technology
What I like about this technology - and this is simply a lab demo, nowhere near commercial introduction, and could be derailed by many problems - is that it could use much of today’s disk infrastructure. Servo, signal processing, steppers, glass disks - and some of the planned future technology - patterned media and HAMR lasers - is directly applicable.

The underlying technology is widely used, as the team notes:

Protein patterning on solid surfaces is a topic of significant importance in the fields of biosensors, diagnostic assays, cell adhesion technologies, and biochip microarrays.

The importance of utilizing existing technology, representing thousands of man-years of refinement and billions of dollars of investment, is key. Thousands of engineers know how to work with current technology, speeding adaptation of new techniques.

The Storage Bits take
Few appreciate how much the exponential increase in storage areal density has fostered computing advances. As Moore’s law has driven processing power, the advance of storage technology has - just barely - enabled massive data stores and rates to feed insatiable processors.

Optical protein storage should be much more stable than magnetic storage as well. Magnetic bits are subject to many kinds of degradation, while proteins can be very persistent, as the prions causing Mad Cow disease show.

Much work remains before protein storage sees the light of a commercial introduction. Its importance is that it gives us another tool to advance our ability to preserve and access the information that makes our culture and civilization possible. Professor Tetsuro Majima and his team deserve our gratitude for this breakthrough.

Comments welcome, as always. This is a highly technical chemistry paper so I just skimmed the surface. Get the pdf here.

Got an interesting press release this morning about a Denver-area company, Atrato, announcing its existence and $18 million in funding. Their mission:

Based in Westminster, Colorado, Atrato Inc.’s (www.atrato-Inc.com) mission is to help companies in entertainment, the Web, IPTV, HPC and VOD open up infinite new worlds of content for customers by offering them high-speed, high volume data access. Atrato’s high-density storage system with integrated data acceleration does nothing less than change the economics of high-speed/high-volume I/O processing.

So what do they have?
They say very little about their technology in the release:

. . . breakthrough technology, a high-performance storage platform that is designed to eliminate the barriers to high-speed / high-volume data access, unlocking revenue and opportunities for a range of applications and industries.

The web site makes some more specific claims which are excerpted below:

Speeds to support any load level. Easily handles traffic spikes with the power of hundreds of servers energizing your site.

Content is protected at both the stream and hardware levels (in flight and at rest) to ensure the security and integrity of your content while the sealed array eliminates most physical security vulnerabilities.

The industry’s only three year maintenance-free, fail-in-place operation available today and has been granted hundreds of patent claims with numerous others applied for.

. . . up to 10,000 I/Os per second or 3000 streams in 5RU . . . .

[bolding added]

How do they do it?
They say little about the secret sauce, but after looking their web site and some patent applications I’ll venture this much:

• The core team is heavy on hardware guys. With the numbers they’re quoting this is an ASIC-enabled box - think BlueArc for I/O. Lots of internal parallelism, wide stripes and mirroring.
• They’ve developed some innovative packaging technology for high-density disk - I’m guessing up to 400 2.5″ drives per enclosure. You can’t easily replace the drives, so they’ve made a virtue of necessity and “sealed” the enclosure.
• Beyond the high-density packaging they’ve thought long and hard about how to ensure a 3 year operational life. Offset counter-rotating drive pairs to damp rotational and actuator vibration, high-flow cooling and ample hot-spare provisioning are key.

The StorageMojo take
Way cool! Hardware is cheap, labor and downtime expensive so their architecture works from a TCO perspective. Sticking these boxes in cable system head-ends will simplify content distribution and support at the same time.

The prices are likely to look high, but when you factor in the 3 year maintenance contract it should be persuasive. With 80,000 IOPS from a single 42U rack it may even find favor in more I/O intensive environments.

This is the kind of innovative packaging I would have expected from Xyratex. Congrats to the Atrato team for a thorough re-thinking of storage infrastructure.

Comments welcome, as always. Atrato team members?

Join me in San Jose, CA, February 26–29, 2008, for the latest in File And Storage Technologies.

Top researchers from academe and industry - NetApp, IBM, Microsoft, Data Domain, HP, Panasas, Yahoo, Seagate and more - will present their latest research. [Doesn't EMC do any research?]

There will be thought-provoking presentations. I’ve already downloaded a number of papers and plan to report on some in the next couple of weeks.

If you’d like to meet, please drop me a line in the comments or send an email to robinATthisdomainname. Libation bearers are especially welcome.

The StorageMojo take
A lot of great research (see Everything you know about disks is wrong) has been presented at past FAST conferences and this year looks to be no exception. The work on data corruption looks very promising.

I’m also looking forward to shooting some video for the StorageMojo YouTube channel. Yes, it’s looking a little threadbare right now, as technical difficulties have slowed me down - FCS2’s underpinnings could be a lot more robust - so FAST should be a good place to get some new content.

Comments and invites welcome. Does anyone know if EMC has ever presented at FAST? Update: Several commenters quickly assured me that EMC

• Does lots of research
• Has presented at FAST
• Prefers to present at ACM

Thanks for the links!

Flash may be getting all the attention, but the boffins are working hard to ensure we have options to flash. We need those options because flash has some serious limitations, like random write performance and density, that we may not be able to overcome.

On the other hand it is easy to underestimate the power of sustained investment in R&D. Disk drives have successfully fended off numerous would-be usurpers thanks to their incredible areal density growth.

Now flash is facing a challenger
Intel and STMicroelectronics’ new phase-change memory threatens flash, but not any time soon. Unveiled at ISSCC, the thermal phase-change device can store 2 bits per cell, like MLC flash.

I asked Jim Handy, of Objective Analysis, a semi-conductor market research firm, for his take on the Intel-STM announcement. He responded:

The big question is “When does Phase Change stand a chance?” I doubt that it could be competitive today because a wafer with a new material is bound to be much more costly than a pure silicon wafer until volumes get up, and the volume won’t get up until the price is competitive with flash. The number of chips per wafer is about the same for PCM as for NOR flash, so there’s no cost advantage from die size.

Once flash reaches its scaling limit brick wall (which was expected to be 2006 at 65nm, then at 25nm in 2012, now looking like 10nm around 2016) then PCM will zip right past it. Trouble is - that brick wall has legs and keeps zipping ahead of us.

Until then PCM should have trouble competing on cost, and cost is everything in the semiconductor memory markets.

One advantage PCM has is that it has a fast write, so in many cases a PCM chip can replace a flash and a RAM. This means that the cost target is something higher than simply matching a NOR price.

The significance of an MLC PCM is that it puts PCM on the same footing as MLC NOR. Had that not happened, then there would have been a longer delay before PCM replaced NOR, since a PCM die size would have been twice as large as an MLC NOR of the same density on the same process.

As for PCM replacing NAND, wellllll…… that’ll take longer since NAND’s about 1/3 the cost of NOR. The same brick wall impacts both technologies, though, so it will happen!

Thanks, Jim. I hadn’t realized that PCM could replace a NOR and a RAM chip.

The StorageMojo take
Jim’s take is better informed than mine. My take away is that the growth of PCM will depend on how broad a market niche it can build for itself over time. That won’t be easy.

Comments welcome, of course.

I wrote a first pass on the Microsoft/Yahoo for ZDnet yesterday morning. Short version: are they nuts?

The silliest comment
Ray Ozzie was quoted saying:

Our lives, our businesses, and even our society have been progressively transformed by the Web, and Yahoo! has played a pioneering role by building compelling, high-scale services and infrastructure,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft. “The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own.

I agree about the compelling services. Yahoo has a number of market-leading services, starting with mail.

High-scale infrastructure?
I don’t think so. Very conservatively Yahoo’s infrastructure costs are 3x Google’s. Probably 8-10x.

By all accounts Mr. Ozzie is a brilliant fellow. So why the silly comment? A few possibilities come to mind:

• PR flacks wrote the comment for him and he was too busy to review it.
• MS investor relations wrote the comment to try to paper over the fact that there is no technology synergy in the acquisition, figuring that Wall St. analysts wouldn’t know the difference.
• He actually believes it. They are so-o doomed!

Other than IBM, Microsoft Research probably has the most brilliant CompSci group in the industry - and that includes Google. They can’t solve problems?

What is the real problem?
BillG and Steve Ballmer were out of new ideas - or good ideas they could easily copy - after Windows 3.1 and Office. The illegal strangulation of Netscape has cost Msoft billions in penalties and still, 10 years after, IE is losing market share. Gee, maybe the browser wasn’t important after all!

It also looks like Microsoft avoids the kind of clean sheet design that gave Google its cost advantage. You must use Windows. You must use Dell. You must use CIFS. Who knows what self-sabotaging corporate injunctions are stifling Microsoft developers? Because they sure have the smarts. And the money.

The StorageMojo take
Microsoft has to stop chasing the latest Big New Thing - be it game consoles, music players, web portals or Internet advertising - and start focusing on new opportunities that they are uniquely positioned to exploit.

For example, how about migrating web-scale technology down to the enterprise? Storage companies are using Linux to create commercial storage clusters like Google’s. Why isn’t Microsoft building Boxwood-style cluster software to help enterprises lower their storage TCO? Take advantage of the Microsoft army of admins and resellers to move the concept and further entrench Windows.

And that’s far from the only opportunity.

Instead Ballmer et. al. seem obsessed with fighting wars they’ve already lost against Apple, Google and Linux (see Farewell, Bill. Yo, Ballmer, now it’s your turn! on ZDnet). Even the richest and most powerful nation software company on earth has limits and should pick its fights.

Comments welcome, of course.