Mobo-mounted SSD. Soligen has announced an SSD that mounts on motherboards. The drive mounts firmly, requires no special cooling and takes little board space.
Tiny USB drive. Verbatim has announced a tiny USB thumb drive that is a fraction the size of most current thumb drives. Call it a thumbnail drive. Perfect for keychains.
Super Talent is showing a 2 TB PCI-e SSD and claiming strong performance. At $6k gamers won’t buy it, but enterprises might.
Raidon is showing a nice collection of 2.5″ drive enclosures, including 8 drive arrays. Not much larger than a 5.25″ drive. Can’t find them all on the web yet, though.
A 32 GB Class 6 Micro SD is close to announcement. Micro.
Supermicro showed a 48 drive JBOD/36 drive server chassis. The server is almost as dense of Sun’s Thumper – and drives are front and rear accessible.
Eye-fi’s Wi-Fi enabled SD cards don’t handle AVCHD video files, but they’re working on it. With all the SD card using consumer, prosumer and even pro camcorders using SD, this will be a popular market for them.
How about a double-ended flash drive: one end for personal; the other for work? Developed with the help of the social community at Quirky.com. They pay developers and influencers a percentage of the revenues. Cool!
PoketyPoke is a con-call management service that reminds you of your concalls and optionally records them and provides transcripts for $9/hr. I like.
In other news
I moderated a too-short panel on Cloud storage at Storage Visions. Several technologies are out there that will change the current economics and application profiles of online storage. The field is young.
Got an update on USB 3.0 from Symwave, the fabless IC firm that makes USB 3.0 chips. Bottom line: unlike USB 2.0, whose marketing made promises the protocol could not keep, the new version can achieve over 400 MB/sec.
Here’s the 30 seconds over USB 3.0 video:
The StorageMojo take
No blockbuster, sector-defining new products. But many stepwise enhancements that move us forward.
USB 3.0 is going to push consumer storage as we can move gigabytes in seconds rather than minutes. But it looks like Apple is poised to miss this one – which could cost them a big chunk of their pro market.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. Fixed the pooched hyperlinks and a couple of other minor edits.
2009 has been an eventful year: the Great Recession has driven big changes in enterprise behavior, opening up the field to many new players. Isilon, for one, is reporting healthy growth and they were on the ropes 2 years ago.
Those changes are reflected in my take on the biggest stories of the year:
(8) Tiny server clusters
Instead of putting many virtual eggs in one power-hungry basket, why not build low-power/low-cost servers that don’t need VM software at all?
Microslice servers achieve availability through cheap redundancy. Of course, no enterprise salesman will sell them, so if their advantages prove out the efficiency gap between cloud and enterprise shops will only grow.
(7) Nightmare on DIMM street
Bianca Schroeder’s, et. al. finding that DRAM is hundreds to thousands of times more error-prone than chip vendors said means that every device that claims to be “enterprise” better have at least SECDED – single error correction/double error detection – ECC.
(6) Apple drops ZFS
A golden opportunity to bring a 21st century file system to millions of people sank without a trace. But if the Sun/Oracle deal gets closed it might be revived.
(5) Data Domain bidding war
An EMC blogger was trashing DD 2 weeks before the bid – and singing their praises after it. So what else is new?
EMC legitimized dedup – and the bastards say welcome.
(4) Cluster-based scale-out storage
HP bought IBRIX and Isilon is growing fast – storage clusters have arrived. EMC will continue to pooh-pooh it until they get Atmos functional – or maybe they’ll bite the bullet and buy someone who already has it working.
(3) Flash
STEC’s 10x stock leap – and crash – to everyone announcing flash drives and cards and appliances: this is not a flash in the pan. Fusion-io’s big OEM deals and announcements by newcomers say the party is just getting started.
(2) Cisco’s bong-sized cloud
Cisco’s UCS may not be a success, but they have forced everyone to rethink their businesses. Is a new round of verticalization about to begin as big companies seek to drive growth by taking away their former “partner’s” markets?
It used to be a commonplace that he who owned the customer’s data owned the business, but the horizontal model of the last 25 years changed that. But if the Oracle/Sun deal completes, Cisco will find that Oracle’s grip is tighter, giving HP and Cisco common cause once again.
(1) Cloud infrastructure
Unlike some other hype-driven IT trends, cloud infrastructure is here to stay because Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft have proven it makes economic sense. Which is more than client-server had going for it for many years.
Smart IT people looking to demonstrate added-value will figure out how to leverage that for real competitive advantage over less-nimble foes. It isn’t a quick fix though and enterprises will need to think long term – a skill rusty from disuse.
The StorageMojo take
Like a termite-riddled barn after a heavy snow, the Great Recession is seeing old models collapse. We can’t afford to keep doing what we’ve been doing.
As the new models emerge, competition will grow in the hot areas, leading to even more innovation in the next 3 years than we’ve seen in the last 5. More on that in a future post.
But not that kind of science project. This is the real deal, already running near a petabyte, needing to upgrade and looking for answers. Sounds like they’ll be spending real money real soon.
I edited for brevity and asked the writer to monitor the comments to help answer any questions.
The neuroscience institute:
I work for a large neuroscience institute. We’re big data generators, now using Sun’s SAM-FS for data migration between FC-AL tier1, SATA tier2 and large LTO4 tape silo stores for tier3. We use LTO4 because the cost/benefit in STK’s T10K B drives just didn’t add up!
We’ve run this for the last couple of years, nearing a PB between disk and tape.
It’s been a bumpy road, as HSM can be, if implemented with “end user touching” in mind. It’s taken a couple of years, a lot of development between us and the SAM-Q engineers, and many sleepless nights to make it work near seamlessly for end users.
Our problem:
Our meta data slices (for various reasons) on 15k RPM FC-AL disk in the STK 6140 arrays are barely able to keep up with their workload.
We need to expand our disk infrastructure for both front end high performance disk and backing space commodity disk archive (SATA and lots of it!).
Tape is all good. Cool, calm and collected .
HDS tells me their AMS2500 is great: beautiful SAS backplane; amazing cache partitioning; and brilliant scalability. I worry that 3Gbit/sec SAS spindles will not have the same kind of concurrency that my traditional FC-AL 6140 chassis does (not that it’s helping much!).
Sun tells me their monster HPC array STK 6780 will blitz anything. And they’re willing to qualify SSD’s inside the FC-AL connected array shelf to fix metadata I/O constraints.
Further, Sun is suggesting their F5100 (SAS connected only, if I recall correctly), will be the answer to my meta data latency and IOPS woes. But it’s only SAS “direct connected” and doesn’t support the FC-AL loop for fail-over between hosts.
My take, so far:
Flash and SSD are being pushed hard. It *seems* sensible to win a small IOPS war (I need thousands of IOPS, not hundreds), and the latency war of mechanical disk – but I worry about Sun’s roadmaps, future and overall strategy. I’m currently in talks with Fusion-io.
With regard to the OpenStorage promise of “changing storage economics”, I am unconvinced the price is as sharp as it could be, considering I could white box it myself, with some large supermicro JBOD arrays + OpenSolaris!
Between HDS and Sun, it’s a tough choice. I’ve not seen HDS play in this space before, and am unfamiliar with their market strategy, their gearing towards more HPC/big data mover scenarios and “science” in general. Are they really geared for these kinds of workloads? I’ve only ever seen them employed in the generic enterprise “Let’s run MS Exchange and Oracle” space.
With Sun, I like the promise of the big 6780 chassis – everyone says it is the “monster” array that will handle anything, but with the premium price of FC-AL compared to SAS….
I’d love your thoughts!
The StorageMojo take
Seems like a job for scale-out cluster storage man – like IBRIX, Parascale or Scaleout. It may also be a fit for some of the new tiering-in-a-box vendors like Avere Systems or Storspeed.
But if we stick with the big boys – Sun and HDS -how should they sort this out? Is there anyone else they should look at? Update: Readers suggested Gluster, a very cool scale-out file system and Isilon, the easy-to-manage cluster storage system. Oh, and Bycast which is quite big – through OEM deals with IBM and HP – in the medical imaging space. End update.
Vendors are encouraged to respond. Please do us the favor of identifying yourself as such.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. I did work for IBRIX and Parascale at one time.
Spent 3 days at fall ‘09 SNW. Given the economy my expectations were low.
The good news: it was active. The better news: the pace of innovation across storage is accelerating, despite the economy and the drop in VC funding.
Make that perhaps because of the drop in VC funding. Veterans of prior startups have self-funding and the chops to prototype and market-test without VC “help.”
Fewer vendor staff – more customer interaction
Vendors brought fewer people – a good thing. Too often SNW booths are reunions of industry veterans leaving customers on the outside looking in.
They breakout sessions I saw were near full to SRO. Much content on SSD’s, cloud storage de-duplication, backup/archive and more.
The biggest disappointment was the Cisco UCS presentation. The Cisco NDAs must be dynamite because the public information isn’t.
New companies and products
Dataram was there with their new flash FC caching appliance, the XcelaSAN (pdf). They should’ve been included in the Hot data, smart cache post.
Avere Systems made its first public appearance with the results of their SPEC 2008 NFS benchmark. The six node configuration using 79 disks achieved a record-setting combination of more than 131,000 operations per second throughput with a latency of 1.38 ms overall response time. The other SPEC08 benchmark leaders use 10 times as many disks and sometimes multiple filesystems to achieve competitive results.
Zetta was talking about their new cloud-based NAS platform. The architecture impresses. Starting at $0.25/GB/Month with a highly-redundant platform and open NAS interfaces, they are well-positioned to compete with standard NAS boxes for general purpose file storage.
Simply Continuous is focused on the backup/disaster recovery market and offers a cloud backup to Data Domain dedupe boxes.
In addition, 3 stealth mode companies said hello. We should hear more from them by early next year. And they weren’t all cloud either.
The StorageMojo take
SNIA and ComputerWorld squeezed a lot of cost – the shirts, live music, bags and the like – out of SNW, but none of the value. SNW is still the place to go for the latest in commercial storage information and education.
The Great Recession is forcing many organizations to look beyond what has worked towards what could work. Thanks to the rise of new architectures intelligent storage decisions are rewarded with greater savings and more operational flexibility than at any time in the past.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. No disclosures to make, darn it, but it was nice to be able to drive to SNW this time.
Sun announced the, or removed from stealth mode, the F5100, their flash-based storage array that uses SO-DIMM form-factor flash modules (see last month’s post for the StorageMojo take on the unannounced product). With 20 flash modules and 480 GB of capacity it starts at $50k, which means for big customers it will be less than $40k.
The box supports 64 SAS connections, zones, up to 1.9 TB of capacity and up to 9.7 GB/s sequential write bandwidth. Here’s the official Sun web page. Joerg Moellenkamp has a good short writeup as well. (Thanks, David!)
Here’s a picture:
The StorageMojo take
A shareable flash resource at $100/GB list should be popular. It should also get more data center guys thinking about power per IOP instead of just performance.
Another shot across the bow of the big iron storage flotilla and a nifty advance. Good luck to them.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. Would a project name like “The Beast” have upped the sex appeal?
Flash memory is opening a second front in its war on entrenched storage technologies. So far disks have been taking the heat, but DRAM is the next target.
The unannounced Sun F5100 product uses 80 48 GB flash SO-DIMMs to create a 4 TB cache appliance. Cool.
But once the SO-DIMMs are on the market vendors will want to put them in notebooks. The question: will they displace more disks or DRAM?
Isn’t “enhance” nicer than “replace?”
The flash DIMMs are accessed as disk drives through a thin driver, which makes them fast. As a disk look-alike they aren’t a direct replacement for RAM. But a 2 or 4 GB SO-DIMM DRAM is plenty for most folks.
If a flash DIMM is configured as the boot device users will get most of the advantages of a more expensive SSD in a smaller and cheaper package. For many users 48 GB of main capacity is plenty, making a disk optional.
Also, flash is a lot cheaper than DRAM. 4 GB notebook SO-DIMMs have just come to market priced at over $100 per gigabyte. How the flash SO-DIMMs will be priced is still a mystery, but since the memory chips typically are over 90% of the cost of a DIMM, a 48 GB SO-DIMM should be less than $200.
Expensive compared to a disk drive, cheap compared to DRAM. But not cheap enough for netbooks.
Peaceful coexistence?
In 2 years notebook vendors could be offering a scaled-down version of the traditional enterprise tiered storage architecture: high-speed DRAM; fast SO-DIMM for booting, application and scratch storage; and a large capacity hard drive for bulk storage. Faster performance, more capacity, lower power consumption and cooler notebooks. It could be good.
However, as the bootable SD card slot in the new MacBooks shows, there is more than one way to get flash into a system. Some of us would like to be able to easily swap out boot drives on as the cards, but most of us will prefer to have our boot drive inside the notebook where it won’t can’t get lost. SB cards will also continue to have a significant cost advantage over flash SO-DIMMs due to high volume.
The Storage Bits take
None of the players are standing still. In 12 to 18 months that 48 GB flash DIMM will be 96 GB or more. The current high price for the 4 GB SO-DIMM will drop to reasonable levels. And drive vendors will be offering 1.5 TB 2.5 inch drives.
Of course, we don’t know how well the new flash DIMMs will perform. Much depends on the quality of their embedded flash controllers, which often isn’t too good in first-generation designs.
Flash DIMMs will take a piece out of both the DRAM and disk markets, but how much of each remains to be seen. As usual, it is a dogfight in the storage business, and this on could get really nasty.
Here’s a thought: how about a 50GB notebook with 1 TB disk? Technically, 48 GB is flash, but since it is on an SO-DIMM and most consumers don’t know the difference between DRAM and disk, let alone flash, is it really that wrong? If it is defensible, expect storage marketers to do it.
If I were Fusion-io, I’d be looking into the flash DIMM business. Know them, they already have.
Comments welcome, of course. I worked in Sun’s storage group for 3 years in the mid-90s. I’ve done work for Fusion-io in the last couple of years.
The 4 TB Sun F5100 Flash Array product launch is imminent. Much talked up by Andy Bechtolsheim the 1U array promises 1 million IOPS, 10 GB/sec throughput, 64 SAS channels, redundant power & cooling and SES management.
Beyond the raw performance the F5110 is notable for 2 technical advances.
The Sun flash DIMM modules (FMods) which appears to support 64 GB – or is it only 48 GB? – of SLC flash on a notebook SO-DIMM card form factor.
A set of 4 super-capacitors that maintain power for the FMod’s on-board DRAM write buffers and I/O interfaces if mains power is lost – an innovative enterprise feature. The cool feature: a 10 minute charge time.
FMod
Here’s a picture of an FMod prototype from a presentation Andy gave several months ago.
The F5100 is spec’d with 80 FMods, which means 50 GB per. Are they really 64 GB and over-configured or is the spec very optimistic?
Also, what looks like an SO-DIMM is accessed as a disk. Would you give up one of your notebook DIMM slots to get 48 or 64 GB of very fast disk?
Issues
No v.1 product is perfect and the F5100 is no exception. There is no multipath access. Each FMod group attaches to one host through a single SAS link.
There is no cascading of F5100s. Each has to connect directly to a host SAS HBA.
Each FMod is a specific physical address. If one is replaced “Applications and utilities that depend on the old device path will need to be reconfigured to work with the new one.” Curious.
To maximize performance do not configure more than 20 FMods per HBA.
Software support
The usual suspects: Solaris 10.5/08×64/SPARC or greater plus patches
Microsoft Windows Windows 2003 32-bit (R2 SP2) & 64-bit (SP2), Windows 2008 64-bit (SP1), Windows 2008 64-bit (SP2)
RHEL 4 U5 32/64-bit, RHEL 5 64-bit, RHEL 4 U6 32/64-bit, RHEL 5 U2 32/64-bit, RHEL 5 U1 32/64-bit
SUSE 10 32/64-bit SP1, SUSE 10 SP2 32/64-bit, SUSE 9 SP3 32/64-bit, SUSE 9 SP4 32/64-bit, SUSE 10 SP1 64-bit
There’s a required patch for Windows 2003.
Only 2 SAS HBAs, both from Sun, are supported on the F5100.
The StorageMojo take
No pricing or delivery as yet, so it isn’t officially announced AFAIK. Given the SLC capacity and current prices I’d guess that it will retail in the $80-$90k range.
The more interesting question is how Oracle will integrate this into their database server strategy. If we’re lucky Kevin Closson or someone just as knowledgeable will weigh in with a survey of the possibilities.
Kudos to the Sun engineers who have been driving flash forward faster than almost anyone else in the industry.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. How would you use this box?
Here’s a link to 17 MB of F5100 documentation. Update 9-04: Looks like Sun has pulled all the F5100 docs down. Maybe the announcement isn’t as imminent as I’d thought. End update.
If you’re late to the flash party, here’s an accessible YouTube video of Andy talking about flash and Sun’s strategy several months ago. There’s a lot more about flash here on StorageMojo.
Chris Mellor of The Register considers whether STEC’s lead in the high-performance SSD space is sustainable.
When competition does arrive in the enterprise SSD market, and as STEC starts competing in the more price-sensitive server flash market, then its early golden days – its first-mover advantages – will come to a close. Prices will drop and it will have to replace lost margins with higher volumes.
The company probably has until mid-2010 at the earliest before that happens.
The innovator’s dilemma
In the book by that title, Clayton Christensen reviews the disk industry’s form factor transitions – despite coining the term “disruptive technology” the only thing that changed was form factors – and found that with very few exceptions – Seagate & IBM – a 2 year lead in a new form factor was all it took to consign former players to oblivion.
How could a mere form factor change trigger mass corporate extinctions? Because in OEM storage a first mover may win the business, but it is relationships and service that keep the business.
It takes time and effort for qual engineers to develop confidence in vendor engineers. Once they do inertia rules. STEC has a big lead and as long their management team executes there is little competitors can do.
An example
Seagate’s first product, a 5 MB 5.25″ hard drive – I had one in a DEC Pro 350 – was pathetic: tiny, slow and noisy. Silly, compared to the fast 9″ drives that were taking the enterprise by storm.
But by the time 9″ vendors shipped 5.25″ drives, Seagate had shown the OEMs they were a quality supplier. So the OEMs only needed an alternate supplier. Dozens exited the disk business in a few years.
The StorageMojo take
There might be room for 3 enterprise SSD vendors, but 2 is more likely. The long-term threat to STEC is architectural: as often noted on StorageMojo, flash does best close to the CPU. Check out Fusion-io.
Of course the array and storage interconnect vendors should be working hard to reduce storage latencies, which works to STEC’s advantage, but this will take 5 years, not 2, to sort out. And the threat to Fusio-io is flash on the mobo, but since almost no one is working on it that is a distant threat indeed.
Long term the real fight is between NAS and DAS. How do the advantages of shared storage stack up against very fast local storage? There’s a place for both of course, but given bandwidth’s slower cost declines DAS – for the first time in years – may have a sustainable advantage.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. Disclosure: I’ve done work for Fusio-io and wish I owned stock. I haven’t done work for STEC, but do own their stock. Neo, what should bake your noodle is: do I own STEC stock because of my analysis; or is the analysis due to my owning their stock? Which came first?
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