Seagate’s Big Intro: Four New SSD Families in One Day
Seagate this week updated its SSD portfolio with four new product families and now claims to have the broadest portfolio of storage products in the industry. This announcement squarely places the company in all the key SSD markets: SATA, SAS, and PCIe.
Here’s Seagate’s new lineup:
- Seagate 600 6Gb/s SATA, a drive that Seagate calls: “The ultimate laptop upgrade”. The company claims that this is the first Continue reading
Webinar: How Many IOPS Do You Really Need?
Earlier today Tom Coughlin and I presented a BrightTalk webinar in league with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to discuss our joint report: How Many IOPS is Enough?
The report is based upon a survey that asked IT managers about their enterprise IOPS requirements. The webinar gives a taste of the report’s contents, and explains the survey methodology. During the course of the webinar and at the end Tom and I answered a number of listener questions relating to the content.
The presentation also includes a little plug for SNIA’s client IOPS survey which is being run by downloading a program called the Workload I/O Capture Program, or “WIOCP.”
A replay of this webinar is available on the BrightTalk website.
The presentation was well received by our audience. Have a listen.
CEO Change at Fusion-io
On May 9 Objective Analysis sent an Alert to our clients discussing the prior day’s CEO change at Fusion-io.
In a nutshell, co-founders David Flynn (CEO) and Rick White (Chief Marketing Officer) have left the firm, with Flynn being replaced by board member Shane Robison, HP’s former Chief Strategy Officer, who helped put together HP’s acquisition of Autonomy.
Here are some of the Continue reading
WDC’s HGST Intros 12G SAS MLC SSDs
In case you didn’t have enough abbreviations in your life, The SSD Guy brings you the headline above, with the promise that the news below is really interesting: HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technology, but now a division of WDC – Western Digital Corp.) has brought out a new line of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs based on MLC flash. These are a part of the UltraStar line.
Whereas HGST’s first-generation UltraStar SAS SSDs used SLC flash, the new SSDs are based on 25nm MLC flash but offer the same warranties as HGST’s prior generation. Even so, performance for the new SSDs is significantly faster than that of their SLC-based predecessors, with no reduction in wear or lifetime specifications.
These SSDs are the first to support Continue reading
One-Hop vs. Two-Hop PCIe SSDs
Lately a number of PCIe offerings have hit the SSD market. The SSD Guy breaks them into two camps: One-Hop SSDs, in which the commands are translated directly from PCIe to the NAND flash without going through an intermediary protocol, and Two-Hop SSDs, which use off-the-shelf HBAs and SATA SSD controllers to move commands first from PCIe to SATA then from SATA to NAND. There are aslo versions that go through SAS: PCIe to SAS, then SAS to NAND.
The SSD Guy figured that Easter would be a good time to talk about these since everyone already has the Easter Bunny hopping through their minds!
It’s not hard to understand why Continue reading
Understanding Storage Delays
Jim Pappas of Intel, a fellow member of SNIA (the Storage Networking Industry Association) shared a really intuitive way to understand storage delays at the last Storage Developer Conference (SDC). It’s very simple. First consider these two facts:
- The difference between the speed of system memory and that of a hard disk drive (HDD) is roughly 6 orders of magnitude, or 1 million times
- SSDs split the gap. An SSD is about 1,000 times faster than an HDD, and is about 1,000 times slower than system memory. Memory access times are measured in nanoseconds (ns), SSDs in microseconds (µs) and HDDs in milliseconds (ms)
The problem with understanding this (ns, µs, ms) is that Continue reading
Nimbus Upgrades both Software and Hardware
Nimbus Data made a dual announcement on Monday, introducing an upgrade to the company’s zero-license-fee Halo storage management software and announcing volume shipments of the new Gemini storage array.
The Halo storage software, which already boasts a rich feature set, has added a new API, a mobile access to performance information, and powerful analytics tools that track and report over 200 metrics in real time with unlimited scroll-back.
The Nimbus Gemini system has already been shipping for a couple of months and is finding acceptance in Continue reading
LSI’s Take on Data Center Flash
LSI Corp. has launched a new blog that covers (among other things) flash storage. It’s only natural – the company’s SandForce subsidiary is riding high on the SSD wave and LSI’s HBAs are finding widespread use, both internally and externally, in the production of two-hop PCIe SSDs.
A recent post called “What are the Driving Forces Behind Going Diskless” by LSI Fellow Rob Ober outlines the leading Continue reading
Violin Bets on Both Sides
Violin Memory today made some important announcements. The company has introduced a new line of one-hop PCIe SSDs, and Toshiba will be carrying these as its own products. This creates a tighter link between the two companies: Toshiba is already an investor in Violin, and Toshiba Japan already sells Violin’s memory arrays in Japan.
The new PCIe SSDs are based on Violin’s high-performance NAND management technology, and Violin claims that they offer a higher performance/price point that is available from any other PCIe SSD vendor. This is a key point because PCIe SSD performance varies across a very broad range.
But why does The SSD Guy say that Violin’s betting on both sides? Ever since discrete SSDs started to find their way into the data center there has been a heated debate: Do SSDs belong on the server side of the network or as shared storage? In a virtualized configuration all storage is shared to allow a task to easily move from one server to the next. In an HDD-based system this makes a lot of sense, since an HDD’s latency is significantly larger than that of the network. With SSDs that equation changes – the SSD’s latency is significantly lower than that of the network. The network dramatically reduces the performance of the SSD, so it makes more sense to move that part of the storage into the server, but this breaks the “Shared Storage” model.
This post’s graphic comes from a slide that I have shown repeatedly explaining that it’s wrong to take sides in this argument. Eventually solid state storage will find its way into both sides of the network. In the server it serves as an alternative to large DRAMs, and if it is managed as memory and not as storage, then there will never be any data consistency problems. Of course, most caching solutions also help in this regard, allowing server-side flash to be managed as persistent storage. On the other side of the network flash as shared storage also makes a lot of sense since it accelerates access to shared storage, which is the basis for all virtualized systems.
Violin has taken this argument to heart, betting on flash adoption on both sides of the network, and is the first flash storage array start-up to do so. It will now only be a matter of time before others fall in line.
Objective Analysis covers the enterprise SSD market very closely, issuing reports like our well-regarded annual update covering the enterprise SSD market: The Enterprise SSD: Technologies & Markets. We also perform custom consulting in this area. Clients who wish to engage with us are welcome to drop The SSD Guy a line.
SSDs and TCO
One of the best arguments to use an SSD is also one of the most difficult ways to sell anything. This is the Total Cost of Ownership, commonly abbreviated to “TCO.”
TCO has been used as an argument for buying anything from compact fluorescent bulbs to Jaguar automobiles.
The argument usually revolves around an item whose initial price is higher, but which has lower ongoing (or operating) costs, and when these costs are combined, the higher-priced item proves to cost less to own over the long run. In the case of a compact fluorescent (CF) bulb, the bulb may cost $7, versus $1 for an incandescent bulb, but it consumes 18 Watts compared to the 75 Watts consumed by the incandescent bulb it replaces. In addition the CF bulb lasts ten times as long (10,000 hours vs. 1,000 hours.) This works out to a savings of 470 kWh – or about $50 – plus $3 in bulb costs. Continue reading
