Interesting companies at this year’s Flash Memory Summit, but the winner of the StorageMojo BuzzGen award is Skyera. That there’s little detail on their system may have helped: attendees get to fantasize about the putative magic under the covers.
Founded by PhD SandForce alumni with no VC funding – but with investments by a large storage vendor and a large flash vendor – this team has an impressive track record and hundreds of patents. But the lack of detail is troubling: how much is real and how much is planned?
44TB in 1U
The claims are impressive:
- Up to 44TB in a 1U half-depth, 750 watt box
- Up to 1 million IOPS or 3.6GB/sec
- Built-in network switch: 40 x 1GbE & 3 x 10 GbE
- Software including in-line Compression/De-dup, AES Encryptio to protect data at rest, Snapshots, Writeable clones, Configurable QoS levels, Consistency groups, Thin provisioning, Dynamic re-sizing & more.
- Flash Controller: “Proprietary algorithms dynamically tune the partitions during the lifetime of the flash minimizing damage to the flash oxide layer typically experienced during write cycles”
- $3/GB raw; 99¢/GB with dedup & compression turned on
This all translates to the economic bottom-line:
. . . an all-Flash enterprise solid-state storage system that delivers next-generation performance and density through solid-state technology at a price point equivalent to spinning disk. For the first time, enterprise customers will be able to utilize solid-state technology as a direct replacement for traditional hard disk drives. . . .
[bolding added]
Where have we heard that before?
The StorageMojo take
At a private briefing off the show floor, Skyera’s CEO and CTO wouldn’t go into any detail about the how, focusing on the what. They wouldn’t even open up the pizza box labeled “44TB” for inspection, pleading foreign patent filing issues.
Really?
From the comments they did make, it appears the secret sauce includes a variable-block size flash translation layer and a wear-aware ECC function that increases ECC power as flash ages. And much more, no doubt.
Skyera’s rapid emergence is one more sign of the vibrancy of the storage market. The paucity of supporting information about their box underlines the difficulty customers have in evaluating competing claims.
But the larger trend is clear: enterprise flash array vendors are targeting the cost advantage of disk arrays. And one of these days they will catch up. Then the sea change from disk to flash arrays will start in earnest.
Courteous comments welcome, of course.
That looks crazy, scaring and beautiful at the same time, I would like to know more about it’s reliability, since it is using “cheap” flash; a good explanaition of how RAID-SE works would be usefull too.
If it does all it says it can, I think they are forcing a “fast forward” to the storage industry.
Claiming they can’t open the box because of foreign patent filing issues is nonsense. If they showed the box and said what it does then it is “publication”, opening up the box isn’t going to change anything, assuming that there was actually anything inside the box of course.
Most impressive to me was their claim that through system wide ( not only on flash chips) proper data placement, they can improve overall flash life time by 100x. If this is true, the significance is obvious: lots of cheap consumer grade MLCs can be packed to achieve enterprise SLC’s quality. Wait and see,
What bothers me about this comparison is that they are using compression on flash while assuming that you can’t use compression on disk. Built-in compression is nice, but other vendors do offer that, and if they don’t you can still compress your data (as appropriate).
Even at $4/GB they should be able to make a good pitch to customers who want better performance, lower power consumption and substantial space reductions. That they have to resort to this to appear to be price-competative doesn’t bode well in my mind.
This has a tiny bit more info. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWrIG1SmjU8
As a consumer/buyer of tech, I wouldn’t be too alarmed about anything yet. You can’t even buy their product yet. They look to be in hype mode right now and have all the right buzz words. They haven’t really said anything crazy yet (the integrated switch is a bit new/odd). I am interested to see how they are packaging flash to get their advertised density and delivery the other goods (redundancy etc).
What would concern me about Skyera down the road is it seems from their roster of top level folks is they are playing this end with an acquisition. Aside from being an early adopter and having those growing pains, to then have them be acquired could go either way as being good or bad. That unknown generally sucks.
I’m not a storage guru, like you and your readers, but this is the first time I have seen a company focus on the bandwidth running between the servers and the flash. Is this as unusual as I think it is? If so, shouldn’t Skyera be hawking this more than they are pushing the $/GB?
Hmm Ethernet only though? Really?? If this ever hits and folks can achieve any reasonable performance out if it, it would have been nice to see at least SAS if not something beefier. (FDR IB as an SRP target) 10Gb/E is rather poky for storage now on the enterprise playing field.