New Report Posts Results of IT Manager IOPS Survey
Tom Coughlin and I have just released a new report that helps shed a lot of light on a pretty challenging subject: We asked nearly 200 IT managers to tell us how much storage performance their systems require. They provided candid replies about their IOPS, latency, and capacity needs for a number of leading applications.
The results of this survey are compiled in a 80-page report titled How Many IOPS do you Really Need? This one-of-a-kind report provides responses for all of Continue reading
Making Data Destruction ABSOLUTE!
A very unusual press release crossed my desk last week. London-based SecureDrives has introduced a 2.5″ self-encrypting SSD that takes security one very large step further by physically destroying the flash chips within the SSD by remote command.
The flash chips are actually fractured, as is shown in the accompanying photo, which SecureDrives sent me to illustrate. Click the thumbnail to enlarge.
SecureDrives calls its product the SDSRDD which is short for Secure Drive SSD, Remote Data Destruction.
My first concern was that the product used some sort of explosive. The company put me at ease by explaining that the fracture process uses a rapidly propagating shock wave via a patented technology. They said that the fracturing process creates no safety issues at all.
The destruction command is initiated through a GSM receiver internal to the SSD. When destruction is required (i.e. the drive is lost or stolen) the SSD’s rightful owner sends a user-defined message or phrase to the drive from any phone in the world. The drive flips the encryption key and then fractures the NAND flash and security processor. The drive then returns a confirmation message to the phone. The destruction process is executed in milliseconds.
Readers may recall a post that I published two years ago about an external SSD from Runcore that over-writes the data in the SSD via a GSM command. The Runcore product uses over-writing, which can take minutes to perform, rather than a self-encrypted drive which is effectively erased in a few milliseconds. The Runcore product also differes because it does not physically damage the flash, and, as an external drive, it cannot be incorporated into a notebook PC’s housing as can the SecureDrives product.
It seems that secure SSDs are getting increasingly sophisticated over time. I eagerly await hearing about the next imaginative step designers will take to make their SSDs more secure.
New Study Forecasts Huge Enterprise SSD Growth
Objective Analysis has published a new study, Enterprise SSDs: Technologies & Markets.
This study breaks the market into 23 application types, and provides an explanation of each along with forecasts by major application category.
Virtualized systems will drive the greatest 5-year average unit shipment growth, at 85%, although the data center will retain its leadership in enterprise SSD consumption. Overall enterprise SSD unit shipments will grow at an annual average of 32% through 2018.
Since SSD prices are cost-based, with roughly 80% of the cost coming from flash chips, NAND flash price swings will cause Continue reading
White Paper: Matching Flash to the Processor
I have just added a new white paper onto the Objective Analysis website: Matching Flash to the Processor – Why Multithreading Needs Parallelized Flash.
This document examines the evolution of today’s CPUs, whose clock frequencies have stopped increasing, but now exploit parallelism to scale performance. Multiple DRAM channels have also been added to performance computing to add parallelism to the memory channel.
Storage hasn’t kept pace with this move to parallelism and that is limiting today’s systems.
New NAND flash DIMMs recently introduced by Diablo, SanDisk, and IBM, provide a reasonable approach to adding parallel flash to a system on the its fastest bus – the memory channel. This white paper shows that storage can be scaled to match the processor’s growing performance by adding flash DIMMs to each of the many DRAM buses in a performance server.
The white paper is downloadable for free from the Objective Analysis home page. Have a look.
IBM Launches Flash DIMMs
On Thursday IBM announced its X6 product family, the sixth generation of the company’s successful EXA server architecture. A smaller byline of the introduction was the company’s new eXFlash memory-channel storage or eXFlash DIMM which is offered as one of many flash options available to X6 users.
Close followers of The SSD Guy already know that I am a serious advocate of putting flash onto the memory bus. Why slow the technology down by Continue reading
OCZ: Bankruptcy Certain, Outcome in Question
On Wednesday OCZ announced that its bank accounts had been seized by one of its creditors and that the company would file for bankruptcy, but it did not commit on which of two courses of action it would take:
- To file for bankruptcy and sell itself as an ongoing business to Toshiba
- To file for bankruptcy and liquidate
If the company is sold to Toshiba the bankruptcy court will require an auction to be held to assure that the price that Toshiba pays is the best price that the company can get. This means that there is still the possibility of another company actually acquiring OCZ. Although Seagate was rumored to be interested there are certainly others who are also preparing bids.
OCZ has good technology and a loyal retail customer base, but one year ago Continue reading
LSI SandForce SSD Controllers Move the Knee in the Curve
LSI’s SandForce has just rolled out its SF3700 family of four SSD controllers aimed at the Entry Client, Mainstream Client, Value Enterprise, and Enterprise Storage marketplaces. Performance is impressive, with worst-case random PCIe IOPS at 150K read/81K write and 94K/46K for the SATA interface.
The SF3700 family builds on the division’s first two product families by adding a choice of PCIe or SATA interfaces, LDPC error correction, and a boosted set of flash management features. The SSD Guy will explore this last point after highlighting the other two.
By providing both PCIe and SATA interfaces LSI is directly addressing the future: PCs are aiming to move to the m.2 SSD specification rather than Continue reading
Kaminario Seizes SPC1 Title Again
For the second year in a row little Kaminario has beat the large established storage array vendors to produce the highest SPC1 benchmark rating at 1.24 million SPC-1 IOPS.
The results of the Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 report, show Kaminario surpassing last year’s record performance by 20k IOPS.
Interestingly enough Kaminario set the 2012 record using DRAM while this year the company was able to do it with its fourth-generation all-flash K2.
Why is the SPC1 test so highly respected in Continue reading
Violin & Microsoft Take a New Approach to Scaling
Violin Memory and Microsoft have jointly announced a novel way of harnessing the power of Windows Server software. Violin will be shipping its memory arrays with a special version of Windows Server 2012 R2 pre-installed on the embedded server that manages the internal operations of Violin’s all-flash array.
Violin explains that native support of specially-optimized versions of Windows Server and System Center that have been tuned for an all-memory array will provide improved performance and economics for large-scale enterprise cloud deployments.
The system can internally run Continue reading
Solving SSD Power Spike Issues
It would appear that you could build an all-SSD array by simply replacing all of the HDDs in a cabinet with SSDs. I tried that and ran into some surprising issues that were very confusing at first.
SSD spec sheets, might lead you to believe that power is just not an issue. For example, Samsung lists the power use for a 512GB 830 SSD at 0.127W (typical) for “Active Power Use”. This implies very low demands on the system power supply.
If you do some more research, you find that the peak power usage is a lot higher. AnandTech, in a review article reports sequential write power draw at 5.14W and random write power draw at 5.8W. In that 2.5” SSDs use the 5V power rail exclusively, this is more than Continue reading
