Introduction
In the relatively short and fast-paced history of data storage, the buzz around NAND Flash has never been louder, the product innovation from manufacturers and solution providers never more electric. Thanks to mega-computing trends, including analytics, big data, cloud and mobile computing, along with software-defined storage and the consumerization of IT, the demand for faster, cheaper, more reliable, manageable, higher capacity, and more compact flash has never been greater. But how long will the party last?
In this modern era of computing, the art of dispensing predictions, uncovering trends and revealing futures is de rigueur. To quote that well-known trendsetter and fashionista, Cher, “In this business, it takes time to be really good – and by that time, you’re obsolete.” While meant for another industry, Cher’s ruminations seem just as appropriate for the data storage space.
At a time when industry pundits and Flash solution insiders are predicting the end of mass data storage as we have known it for more than 50 years, namely the mechanical hard disk drive (HDD), storage futurists, engineers and computer scientists are paving the way for the next generation of storage beyond NAND Flash – even before Flash has had a chance to become a mature, trusted, reliable, highly available and ubiquitous enterprise class solution. Perhaps we should take a breath before we trumpet the end of the HDD era or proclaim NAND Flash as the data storage savior of the moment.
The Flash Memory Summit (FMS), held over three-plus days in August at the Santa Clara Convention Center, brought together nearly 200 exhibitors and speakers who regaled roughly 4,000 attendees with visions of Flash – present and future. FMS has grown significantly over the past 8 years, very recently attracting more than its traditional engineering and computer geek crowd. The Summit now embraces CIOs and other business executives cleaving to the Flash bandwagon, including Wall Street types looking to super-charge trading algorithms, web-based application owners seeking lower latencies for online transactions and a growing number of government and healthcare related entities who need to sift through mountains of data more quickly.
Short History of Flash
Flash has been commercially available since its invention and introduction by Toshiba in the late 1980s. NAND Flash is known for being at least an order of magnitude faster than HDDs and has no moving parts (it uses non-volatile memory, or NVM) and therefore requires far less power. NAND Flash is found in billions of personal devices, from mobile phones, tablets, laptops, cameras and even thumb drives (USBs) and, over the last decade, NAND Flash has become more powerful, compact and reliable as prices have also dropped, making enterprise-class Flash deployments much more attractive.
At the same time, IOPS-hungry applications such as database queries, OLTP (online transaction processing) and analytics have pushed traditional HDDs to the limit of the technology. To maintain performance measured in IOPS or read/write speeds, enterprise IT shops have employed a number of HDD workarounds such as short stroking, thin provisioning and tiering. While HDDs can still meet the performance requirements of most enterprise-class applications, organizations pay a huge penalty in additional power consumption, data center real estate (it takes 10 or more high-performance HDDs to match the same performance of the slowest enterprise-class Flash or solid-state storage drive (SSD)) and additional administrator, storage and associated equipment costs.
Flash is becoming pervasive throughout the compute cycle. It is now found on DIMM (dual inline memory module) memory cards to help solve the in-memory data persistence problem and improve latency. There are Flash cache appliances that sit between the server and a traditional storage pool to help boost access times to data residing on HDDs as well as server-side Flash or SSDs, and all-Flash arrays that fit into the SAN (storage area network) storage fabric or can even replace smaller, sub-petabyte, HDD-based SANs altogether.
There are at least three different grades of Flash drives, starting with the top-performing, longest-lasting – and most expensive – SLC (single level cell) Flash, followed by MLC, which doubles the amount of data or electrical charges per cell, and even TLC for triple. As Flash manufacturers continue to push the envelope on Flash drive capacity, the individual cells have gotten smaller; now they are below 20 nm (one nanometer is a billionth of a meter) in width, or tinier than a human virus at roughly 30-50 nm.
Each cell can only hold a finite amount of charges or writes and erasures (measured in TBW, or total bytes written) before its performance starts to degrade. This program/erase, or P/E, cycle for SSDs and Flash causes the drives to wear out because the oxide layer that stores its binary data degrades with every electrical charge. However, Flash management software that utilizes striping across drives, garbage collection and wear-leveling to distribute data evenly across the drive increases longevity.
Honey, I Shrunk the Flash!
As the cells get thinner, below 20 nm, more bit errors occur. New 3D architectures announced and discussed at FMS by a number of vendors hold the promise of replacing the traditional NAND Flash floating gate architecture. Samsung, for instance, announced the availability of its 3D V-NAND, which leverages a Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology that replaces the traditional floating gate architecture to help prevent interference between neighboring cells and improve performance, capacity and longevity.
Samsung claims the V-NAND offers an “increase of a minimum of 2X to a maximum 10X higher reliability, but also twice the write performance over conventional 10nm-class floating gate NAND flash memory.” If 3D Flash proves successful, it is possible that the cells can be shrunk to the sub-2nm size, which would be equivalent to the width of a double-helix DNA strand.
Enterprise Flash Futures and Beyond
Flash appears headed for use in every part of the server and storage fabric, from DIMM to server cache and storage cache and as a replacement for HDD across the board – perhaps even as an alternative to tape backup. The advantages of Flash are many, including higher performance, smaller data center footprint and reduced power, admin and storage management software costs.
As Flash prices continue to drop concomitant with capacity increases, reliability improvements and drive longevity – which today already exceeds the longevity of mechanical-based HDD drives for the vast number of applications – the argument for Flash, or tiers of Flash (SLC, MLC, TLC), replacing HDD is compelling. The big question for NAND Flash is not: When will all Tier 1 apps be running Flash at the server and storage layers?, but rather: When will Tier 2 and even archived data be stored on all-Flash solutions?
Much of the answer resides in the growing demands for speed and data accessibility as business use cases evolve to take advantage of higher compute performance capabilities. The old adage that 90%-plus of data that is more than two weeks old rarely, if ever, gets accessed no longer applies. In the healthcare ecosystem, for example, longitudinal or historical electronic patient records now go back decades, and pharmaceutical companies are required to keep clinical trial data for 50 years or more.
Pharmacological data scientists, clinical informatics specialists, hospital administrators, health insurance actuaries and a growing number of physicians regularly plumb the depths of healthcare-related Big Data that is both newly created and perhaps 30 years or more in the making. Other industries, including banking, energy, government, legal, manufacturing, retail and telecom are all deriving value from historical data mixed with other data sources, including real-time streaming data and sentiment data.
All data may not be useful or meaningful, but that hasn’t stopped business users from including all potentially valuable data in their searches and their queries. More data is apparently better, and faster is almost always preferred, especially for analytics, database and OLTP applications. Even backup windows shrink, and recovery times and other batch jobs often run much faster with Flash.
What Replaces DRAM and Flash?
Meanwhile, engineers and scientists are working hard on replacements for DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) and Flash, introducing MRAM (magnetoresistive), PRAM (phase-change), SRAM (static) and RRAM – among others – to the compute lexicon. RRAM or ReRAM (resistive random-access memory) could replace DRAM and Flash, which both use electrical charges to store data. RRAM uses “resistance” to store each bit of information. According to wiseGEEK, “The resistance is changed using voltage and, also being a non-volatile memory type, the data remain intact even when no energy is being applied. Each component involved in switching is located in between two electrodes and the features of the memory chip are sub-microscopic. Very small increments of power are needed to store data on RRAM.”
And according to Wikipedia, RRAM or ReRAM “has the potential to become the front runner among other non-volatile memories. Compared to PRAM, ReRAM operates at a faster timescale (switching time can be less than 10 ns), while compared to MRAM, it has a simpler, smaller cell structure (less than 8F² MIM stack). There is a type of vertical 1D1R (one diode, one resistive switching device) integration used for crossbar memory structure to reduce the unit cell size to 4F² (F is the feature dimension). Compared to flash memory and racetrack memory, a lower voltage is sufficient and hence it can be used in low power applications.”
Then there’s Atomic storage which ostensibly is a nanotechnology that IBM scientists and others are working on today. The approach is to see if it is possible to store a bit of data on a single atom. To put that in perspective, a single grain of sand contains billions of atoms. IBM is also working on Racetrack memory which is a type of non-volatile memory that holds the promise of being able to store 100 times the capacity of current SSDs.
Flash Lives Everywhere! … for Now
Just as paper and computer tape drives continue to remain relevant and useful, HDD will remain in favor for certain applications, such as sequential processing workloads or when massive, multi-petabyte data capacity is required. And lest we forget, HDD manufacturers continue to improve the speed, density and cost equation for mechanical drives. Also, 90% of data storage manufactured today is still HDD, so it will take a while for Flash to outsell HDD and even for Flash management software to reach the level of sophistication found in traditional storage management solutions.
That said, there are Flash proponents that can’t wait for the changeover to happen and don’t want or need Flash to reach parity with HDD on features and functionality. One of the most talked about presentations at FMS was given by Facebook’s Jason Taylor, Ph.D., Director of Infrastructure and Capacity Engineering and Analysis. Facebook and Dr. Taylor’s point of view is: “We need WORM or Cold Flash. Make the worst Flash possible – just make it dense and cheap, long writes, low endurance and lower IOPS per TB are all ok.”
Other presenters, including the CEO of Violin Memory, Don Basile, and CEO Scott Dietzen of Pure Storage, made relatively bold predictions about when Flash would take over the compute world. Basile showed a 2020 Predictions slide in his deck that stated: “All active data will be in memory.” Basile anticipates “everything” (all data) will be in memory within 7 years (except for archive data on disk). Meanwhile, Dietzen is an articulate advocate for all-Flash storage solutions because “hybrids (arrays with Flash and HDD) don’t disrupt performance. They run at about half the speed of all-Flash arrays on I/O-bound workloads.” Dietzen also suggests that with compression and data deduplication capabilities, Flash has reached or dramatically improved on cost parity with spinning disk.
Bottom Line
NAND Flash has definitively demonstrated its value for mainstream enterprise performance-centric application workloads. When, how and if Flash replaces HDD as the dominant media in the data storage stack remains to be seen. Perhaps some new technology will leapfrog over Flash and signal its demise before it has time to really mature.
For now, HDD is not going anywhere, as it represents over $30 billion of new sales in the $50-billion-plus total storage market – not to mention the enormous investment that enterprises have in spinning storage media that will not be replaced overnight. But Flash is gaining, and users and their IOPS-intensive apps want faster, cheaper, more scalable and manageable alternatives to HDD.
Disruptive Flash Technology Vendors and Solution Providers
What follows are short profiles of 20 vendors and solution providers who are delivering innovative Flash-related solutions to the enterprise marketplace. While not an exhaustive list – there are more than 30 vendors delivering all-Flash storage arrays – the profiled companies represent a cross-section of Flash solution providers, from SSD drive and controller manufacturers to system integrators and software companies.
Some companies, such as IBM and Intel, defy classification as they are a manufacturer or fabricator, system integrator, storage software provider, nanotechnology developer and more. While the following categories are broad, they are indicative of the breadth and strength of the enterprise Flash solutions provider landscape as it stands today, represented by established, global technology firms as well as by startups looking to disrupt the enterprise data storage market.
All-Flash Solution Providers
This group consists of smaller, mostly private equity or investor-backed companies that are primarily in the business of supplying all-Flash storage appliances to enterprises of all sizes. The success of these all-Flash providers hinges on their ability to exploit the advantages of inexpensive MLC NAND Flash, whether through proprietary hardware improvements or the development and delivery of a rich software feature set that improves Flash longevity, manageability and, of course, speed. Some version of MLC NAND Flash manufactured by a handful of providers, including Intel, Micron, Samsung, SanDisk, SK hynix and Toshiba is included in all of these flash-based storage solutions.
In smaller enterprises, Flash arrays have become affordable and functional enough to replace an organization’s entire HDD storage stack. In larger companies, all-Flash solutions co-exist with the legacy SAN fabric (and increasingly NAS as well) or sit closer to the application on a PCIe card within the server, providing the performance needed for mission-critical Tier 1 applications. Now that all-Flash vendors have succeeded in scaling their solutions up and/or out economically, it has become feasible for organizations to consider migrating away entirely from multi-tiered HDD storage strategies in favor of a single, performance-centric Flash storage tier.
Astute Networks
Astute Networks has been in business for more than 13 years, making the switch a few years ago to what they refer to as Networked Flash™ rather than direct attached storage (DAS). Leveraging its TCP or “Tranquil” Offload Engine (TOE) Ethernet-like chip technology, Astute’s ViSX storage appliance uses Samsung-supplied MLC NAND Flash and in-house developed iSCSI storage protocol “accelerators” to solve the network latency problem. ViSX, powered by its patented DataPump Engine™ processor, “speeds up application performance and delivers up to five times the performance and price/performance advantage over the competitive iSCSI-based storage arrays for I/O intensive database and VDI applications.” Astute focuses primarily on mid-market enterprises in the healthcare, higher education and manufacturing industries.
Kaminario
Kaminario’s top executives are veterans of the storage industry, having previously worked at EMC, IBM and other storage firms. Founded in 2008 and funded by several VC firms, including Sequoia Capital, Kaminario provides “enterprise-class resiliency” to customers. Its scale-out technology is key to providing what Kaminario refers to as “3D consistent performance”: low latency, high IOPS and high throughput. Kaminario K2 is built to support mixed workloads to meet actual customer needs by “marrying a variable block size algorithm, optimized for any I/O size, with a true scale-out architecture. K2 system bandwidth can scale from a few GB/sec to more than 20GB/sec while running real mixed customer loads.” K2 snapshots also match the I/O size from the application. Application consolidation is also made easier. Financial services is a key vertical.
Pure Storage
Pure Storage has a simple five-point recipe for Flash disrupting enterprise storage: Disruptive performance, cost parity to disk or better, resiliency, usability and supportability. Pure believes data reduction software is essential for affordable Flash with 5x to 10x data reduction achievable. According to Pure, the “musts” of data reduction are: “Inline and always on (to avoid writes), global (across entire array), no performance penalty, deduplication and compression (DB & VM/VDI), small chunk size (effectiveness + alignment) and no trusting hashes (collision = corruption).” Pure states dedupe is a concern for HDD, which is very I/O intensive and its ZeroSnap™ feature allows users to “instantly snapshot any volume with no performance overhead.” Pure Storage is installed throughout many industries, vastly improving I/O-intensive workloads such as VDI and DB queries.
Skyera
Skyera created some buzz at SMF with the announcement of their half-petabyte Flash array that establishes price parity with traditional HDD arrays. Its “SeOS”™ is composed of three layers that provide a complete suite of functionality, including easy administration, data protection, security and optimization, and real-time monitoring of Skyera arrays.” The skyEagle array will deliver 5 million read-optimized IOPS and fits into a single long 1U enclosure. Skyera states their pricing for Flash storage, after applying data reduction technologies, will reach 45¢ per GB compared with $19 per GB for some high-end Flash solutions. Utilizing 16-nm MLC MAN (Most Advanced NAND) Flash supplied by SK hynix and Toshiba changes the parameters for Flash longevity. Customers using Skyera’s existing Flash arrays include telecom, service providers, finance and government.
SolidFire
SolidFire’s SF9010 is an All-Flash scale-out array for large public and private cloud infrastructures scaling from 5 to 100 nodes engineered to deliver guaranteed performance to thousands of applications within a shared infrastructure. Billed as the “World’s fastest, largest all-SSD storage platform”, the SF9010 incorporates the QoS (quality of service) features of SolidFire’s existing product line that has made it appealing for deploying large scale cloud infrastructures. One customer states, “Traditional HDD arrays are not capable of delivering QoS consistency. Running many bursty, unpredictable and IO-intensive workloads within the same shared storage infrastructure makes delivering predictable application performance almost impossible.” With SolidFire’s QoS functionality, companies can now allocate, manage and guarantee storage performance, making services like PaaS, SaaS and IaaS more predictable.
Tegile
Tegile offers an all-Flash array with a twist, combining the power of Flash with HDD capacity. Its Zebi array combines a unified SAN and NAS platform, along with a proprietary Metadata Accelerated Storage System (MASS) to deliver high performance, high capacity and high reliability at low cost. Zebi utilizes a large pool of DRAM and Flash as cache to mask the latency of spinning disks and extracts metadata to dramatically improve performance from a pool of inexpensive 7.2k RPM HDD drives. Tegile users can experience up to 3.5x data reduction with 200k IOPS in a 10U package, in effect providing a half-PB of useable storage when starting with 144TBs of original HDD capacity. Redundant VMDK (virtual machine disk format) data is reduced to a single instance, while caching algorithms promote active data real time. Primary market is SMB, with 10% using all-Flash.
Virident
Virident effectively delivers networked all-Flash storage to the server – as close to the application as possible. Also referred to as server-based SAN, Virident’s FlashMAX II is a “Storage Class Memory (SCM) solution that offers enterprises unconditional performance combined with the industry’s highest storage capacity in the smallest footprint. FlashMAX PCIe SSDs range in capacity from 550GB to 2.2 TB, in both MLC and SLC types of flash media.” In addition to offering memory-class performance of more than 1.5 million IOPS and HDD-like capacity up to 2.2 TBs in a single compact form factor, Virident is directing a software-led transformation to provide storage admins, CIOs and application owners what they expect from enterprise-class storage solutions, including high availability and data mirroring. Virident sells direct or through OEMs, including EMC and Seagate. (Acquired by Western Digital September, 2013)
WHIPTAIL
WHIPTAIL all-Flash arrays help customers “get applications moving at the speed of Flash.” The ACCELA and INVICTA arrays are capable of moving customers up the performance stack as they handle writes as quickly – or more quickly – than reads, according to independent lab tests. WHIPTAIL’s RACERUNNER operating system allows for consolidation of write-dependent applications including VDI, OLTP and databases that rely on lock, group and join functions. RACERUNNER minimizes write amplification which can shorten the useful life of Flash as well as consume bandwidth while reducing critical write performance. WHIPTAIL also works with its customers to help them understand how to optimize applications to better utilize their Flash arrays, including strategies for consolidation, cache management and meeting tighter recovery time and point objectives. (Acquired by Cisco September, 2013)
Flash and Component Manufactures
Companies in this category supply manufactured and/or fabricated components from Flash on DIMM and in PCIe cards used inside servers (PCIe cards are also being modified for use in Flash appliances that sit between the server and a SAN) to multiple grades of Flash (SLC, MLC, and TLC) used for enterprise-class storage arrays. Four of the manufacturers are also major suppliers of HDDs, and two are among the leading designers of semiconductors and software (controllers) that accelerate storage functionality in the data center.
Diablo Technologies
Diablo Technologies has been supplying memory and DRAM enhancements products for more than a decade. With its recently announced Memory Channel Storage™ (MCS™), ostensibly high-performance, persistent Flash on an “ULLtraDIMM” card, Diablo “combines the speed and scalability of the memory subsystem with the unique capability of NAND Flash and future non-volatile memory technologies enabling new levels of application performance supported by next generation enterprise server and storage system designs.” Designed for ultra-low latency applications, such as high-frequency trading, Diablo claims orders-of-magnitude faster processing speeds than Flash-based PCIe cards (3 to 5 microseconds vs. 25 milliseconds). Its technology advisory board includes engineers and computer scientists from EMC, IBM, Pure Storage and Samsung.
Intel
Intel dominates the server processor space and has made significant strides in developing and delivering their next generation of SSD-based storage solutions, including the recently announced DC S3500 (optimized for reads) and the DC S3700 (optimized for writes). Via its recent acquisition of NEVEX, Intel now offers server-based Cache Acceleration Software (CAS) that employs a “most popular” cache algorithm and “heuristics on how often data is used combined with an aging curve that keeps most popular data longer.” Intel states, “CAS is the only solution to target specific application workloads, including database/OLTP, virtualization, cloud and Hadoop Big Data, adding policy-based intelligence to server-side caching.” Available today for Windows and Linux servers, CAS “selective optimization” boosts HDD performance to a near SSD experience level.
LSI
LSI is a leading provider of flash controllers. At FMS, LSI demonstrated new SandForce flash controller technologies critical to improving flash reliability, endurance and cost. A unique SandForce feature is its DuraWrite™ Virtual Capacity (DVC) that extends the available storage capacity beyond the physical capacity of the underlying flash memory. By increasing storage capacity for the same physical flash memory, DVC helps to reduce the cost per gigabyte of delivered capacity to the user. LSI also announced support for Toshiba’s second generation advanced 19-nm NAND Flash memory (A19nm), enabling SSD manufacturers to produce and deliver more affordable SSD products. LSI also demoed SHIELD technology, an advanced error correction method designed to deliver enterprise-class SSD endurance and data integrity even while using less expensive flash memory.
Marvell
Marvell is a leader in providing storage controller technologies powering PCs, servers and enterprise-class storage systems. Marvell offers “quality, reliability, price sensitivity and relationships,” even providing custom ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) for enterprise customers, e.g., network switching solutions. Marvell’s SSD controller technology, largely driven by an understanding of user demand and market dynamics, is keeping pace with rapid changes, “offering many advantages to enterprise markets, with innovative and scalable embedded processors that deliver high performance with low cost and power efficiency.” Its SSD Central Processing Unit (CPU) technology is compliant with the ARM instruction set, providing improved performance and lower power consumption in a smaller footprint, anticipating a shift to converged HDD/SSD, scale-out storage servers.
Samsung
Samsung, the “world leader in advanced memory technology,” made a splash at FMS, announcing it had begun mass production of its 3D V-NAND (vertical) Flash drive. Nearly 10 years in the making, Samsung states V-NAND “breaks through the current scaling limit for existing NAND Flash technology, achieving gains in performance and area ratio.” The implications for enterprise SSD storage solutions include improved performance, higher density, fewer bit errors and lower power consumption. Samsung also anticipates the V-NAND will provide the enterprise marketplace with a more durable, longer lasting SSD, dramatically improving price performance, enabling rapid adoption as well as twice the write performance over conventional 10 nm-class floating gate NAND flash memory. To date, Samsung has more than 300 patent-pending 3D memory technologies worldwide.
SanDisk/Smart Storage
SanDisk has definitively demonstrated its desire to be a dominant player in the enterprise Flash market, making a number of strategic moves, including an investment in all-Flash array vendor WHIPTAIL and the acquisition of Smart Storage Solutions, which was finalized this month. With Smart comes a partnership with Diablo Technologies on the development of ULLtraDIMM – Flash on the DIMM – significantly reducing write latency and immediately saving data in “power safe” storage within the controller, and return of status is not gated by writing to Flash. “By drastically reducing the IO path delays, Flash DIMM can achieve write latency of less than 10 microseconds. Today, Flash capacity DIMM is 1.2 TBs but is anticipated to increase in the near future. SanDisk FlashSoft™ is caching technology that also improves SSD performance.
Toshiba
Toshiba has a horse in just about every data storage race. Flash, invented by an engineer working at Toshiba in the 1980s in Japan, is key to Toshiba’s enterprise storage strategy, and so is HDD. “Enterprise computing systems – servers, workstations, SAN and NAS systems, RAID, and storage subsystems – demand a delicate balance of performance, efficiency, availability, and capacity. With these factors in mind, Toshiba delivers a full range of enterprise storage HDDs and SSDs which enable customers to architect optimized solutions across all tiers of the enterprise.” Toshiba believes the cloud will increasingly do the “heavy lifting” for data storage and will continue to rely on HDDs to store the vast majority of content. Meanwhile, if Flash overtakes HDD, even for online data and content archiving applications, Toshiba is confident its SSD solutions will meet the demand when it materializes.
Software, Flash and HDD Systems Integrators
Companies in this broad category range from investment-backed startups to some of the world’s largest and most admired technology companies. What they all have in common is a passion for integrating their own proprietary software with largely commodity storage hardware components, whether they be HDD, NAND Flash or PCIe-based solutions – or a combination of all the above.
The “secret sauce” is in how these storage solution providers interweave their own software into an enterprise’s new and existing storage fabric, whether providing additional performance for mission critical applications or enhancing backup and recovery capabilities. Software-defined, application and policy-driven storage are key messages for this group, placing the emphasis on available storage software services and capabilities such as compression, deduplication, replication, snapshotting, policy-based data management and security rather than prioritizing the hardware.
Coraid
Coraid is a leading provider of scale-out Ethernet storage solutions for enterprise and cloud customers. “Using Coraid’s flexible building block approach to storage, customers can consolidate file, block and object storage for all their application needs without creating silos. Coraid storage leverages commodity hardware and massively parallel layer-2 Ethernet connectivity to deliver superior price-performance compared to fibre-channel and iSCSI alternatives.” Coraid’s scale-out architecture helps eliminate controller bottlenecks that limit flash performance. Coraid allows customers to integrate flash pervasively for caching as well as in hybrid pools. Enterprise customers can use Coraid’s ‘versatile” building blocks in all-Flash configurations, achieving over 700,000 IOPS in a 2U array, or with a mix of flash and HDD for both block-based and file-centric workloads. Coraid’s scale-out architecture and policy-based automation is also suitable for CSPs.
Dell
Dell has been an early adopter of Flash technologies (first to install SSD in a desktop, circa 2007) and has accelerated its storage portfolio through the relatively recent acquisitions of EqualLogic and Compellent. Compellent Storage Center solutions compete at the high-end of the enterprise storage market, with advanced software features that allow customers to manage multiple tiers of Flash (SLC, MLC, TLC) from a “single pane of glass with a couple of clicks” and can also manage all tiers of HDD (15k, 10k, 7.2k). Compellent’s Storage Center 6.0 release includes several important enhancements such as 64-bit memory to help “detach” high-performance data from disk, tiering for larger amounts of hot/warm data and support for VMware vSphere™ Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) with full copy offload and hardware-assisted locking.
IBM
IBM, back in April, announced its Flash Ahead Initiative, signaling to the market it was “all in” with its commitment to Flash technology. Key sections of the announcement included a commitment of more than $1 billion in Flash research and development, the opening of 12 Flash Centers of Competency around the world and the introduction of the IBM FlashSystem™, which leverages eMLC and SLC flash controller and storage flash array technology acquired by IBM through its acquisition of Texas Memory Systems (TMS)), and is “designed with an all-hardware data path engineered to deliver the lowest possible latency.” IBM has Flash-optimized its entire storage portfolio, offering clients opportunities to create a Flash tier within their existing HDD environments as well as enhancing its San Volume Controller (SVC) software to deliver advanced Flash-handling capabilities.
NetApp
NetApp has taken HDD market share away from competitors and continues to OEM its NAS devices with success through IBM and others. Meanwhile, NetApp is shipping its EF 540 all-Flash array featuring low latency, configuration flexibility, custom performance tuning with complete control over data placement along with sub-millisecond response times requiring just 2U of rack space. To super-charge its clients’ existing HDD assets, NetApp introduced its Flash Accel intelligent caching software solution that adjusts dynamically according to workload. “Flash Accel paired with Flash Cache potentially reduces storage costs by 30% by offloading 80% of IOPS to the server. Intelligent data coherency provides block level invalidation rather than flushing the entire cache providing persistent cache across VM and server reboots.”
Permabit
Permabit developed its Albireo software suite to meet the deduplication and compression demands of enterprises straining to keep storage costs under control and deliver expected performance levels. Delivered as an OEM product for hardware, software, or cloud service providers, Albireo deduplication technology can be run at the controller level due to its small footprint and efficient resource utilization and integrates at the firmware, device driver, file system, appliance or application level to deliver: “Multiple GB/sec IO throughput, 5 – 35x reduction rates, minimal memory and CPU footprint, petabyte scalability within a single device, guaranteed data integrity and a flexible, simple integration.” Albireo also offers inline, block level compression and can reduce the amount of memory set aside for overprovisioning by reducing random write latency by 4x or more and increasing random write throughput by 4x or more.
Action Item: At least for the next five to seven years, Flash and its adherents can celebrate the many benefits of Flash over HDD. Users take note: For the vast majority of performance-centric workloads, Flash is much faster, lasts longer and costs less than traditional spinning disk storage. And Flash vendors already have their sights set on Tier 2 apps, such as email, and Tier 3 archival applications. Fast, reliable, longer lasting and lower cost is tough to beat.
