What is SNIA’s Persistent Memory Programming Model?
In this post The SSD Guy will discuss the SNIA Nonvolatile Memory (NVM) Programming Model, a framework to allow standard applications to take advantage of nonvolatile, or persistent, memory in any system that includes persistent memory,
This model is enormously important to the future of computing, yet few people even know that it exists. It’s a fundamental change to the way that application programs access storage that will have significant ramifications to computer architecture and performance over the long term.
Here’s why: The industry is moving towards larger-scale systems that mix persistent memory with standard DRAM into a single memory address space. Persistent memory has an advantage over volatile DRAM, since it maintains data after power is removed or lost. Because of this certain application programs will want to know which memory is volatile and which is persistent and to take advantage of whatever persistent memory the system might provide. I say “Larger-Scale” systems because small systems often combine Continue reading
Are SSDs Approaching Price Parity with HDDs?
A recent Storage Newsletter article argues that SSD prices are approaching HDD prices, and that the gap has narrowed to only a 2.7 times difference.
Upon closer inspection, though, the reader will note that this is only true at lower capacities. The narrowing price gap at lower capacities has always existed in this market. The SSD Guy was making that argument back in 2007!
This post’s graphic shows a chart from the first report ever published by Objective Analysis over a decade ago: The Solid State Disk Market – A Rigorous Look.
The point of this chart was to illustrate that, at low capacities, SSDs are cheaper, while at higher capacities HDDs provide lower-priced storage.
The concept is simple: It’s uneconomical for an Continue reading
A New Spin on Memcache
Data centers that use centralized storage, SANs or NAS, sometimes use servers to cache stored data and thus accelerate the average speed of storage. These caching servers sit on the network between the compute servers and storage, using a program called memcached to replicate a portion of the data stored in the data center’s centralized storage. Under this form of management more-frequently-used data presents itself faster since it has been copied into a very large DRAM in the memcached server.
Such systems have been offset over the past five or more years thanks to the growing availability of high-speed enterprise SSDs at an affordable price. Often direct-attached storage (DAS) in the form of an SSD within each server can be used to accelerate throughput. This can provide a considerable cost/performance benefit over the memcached approach since DRAM costs about 20 times as much as the flash in an SSD. Even though the DRAM chips within the memcached server run about three orders of magnitude faster than a flash SSD most of that speed is lost because the DRAM communicates over a slow LAN, so the DAS SSD’s performance is comparable to that of the memcached appliance.
There’ a catch to this approach, since the DAS SSD must be Continue reading
SSDs Need Controllers with More, NO! Less Power
The Storage Developer Conference in September gave a rare glimpse into two very different directions that SSD architectures are pursuing. While some of the conference’s presentations touted SSDs with increasing processing power (Eideticom, NGD, Samsung, and ScaleFlux) other presentations advocated moving processing power out of the SSD and into the host server (Alibaba, CNEX, and Western Digital).
Why would either of these make sense?
A standard SSD has a very high internal bandwidth that encounters a bottleneck as data is forced through a narrower interface. It’s easy to see that an SSD with 20+ NAND chips, each with an 8-bit interface, could access all 160 bits simultaneously. Since there’s already a processor inside the SSD, why not open it to external programming so that it can perform certain tasks within the SSD itself and harness all of that bandwidth?
Example tasks would include Continue reading
Storage Visions Conference Coming Oct 22
Once again The SSD Guy will be playing a part in the annual Storage Visions conference which has been moved this year to the Santa Clara Hyatt Hotel adjacent to the Santa Clara Convention Center. It’s now a 2-day conference (October 22-23) and has an agenda packed with interesting subjects, speakers, and panelists.
Storage Visions’ mission is to bring together the vendors, end users, researchers and visionaries that will meet growing demand for digital storage for the “coming data tsunami.”
I will moderate a panel on an exciting new technology that is currently known by a few different names, including “In-Situ Processing,” “Computational Storage,” and “Intelligent SSDs” (iSSD). It’s a kind of SSD that uses internal processing to reduce the amount of data traffic between the server and storage. This helps get past an issue that plagues many applications which spend more time and energy moving data back and forth than they do actually processing that data.
The panel, at 8:15 Monday morning, October 22, is Continue reading
Podcast: Flash Memory Summit
Those of you who enjoy listening to podcasts may want to hear Ray Lucchesi (Silverton Consulting) and Howard Marks (Deep Storage) interview The SSD Guy for their series “Greybeards on Storage.”
This interview is their 70th episode covering the world of storage. These guys do a fantastic job of probing this industry with great enthusiasm and insight.
This episode is a 42-minute compendium of the sights and goings-on at last August’s Flash Memory Summit along with a number of side trips into the world of SSDs and memory chips. It’s not strictly structured, and not strictly serious, but just three industry insiders having a lot of fun sharing their observations.
Some of the broad range of subjects that we Continue reading
The Micron QLC SSD – No Surprises Here
Last Monday, May 21, Micron introduced the industry’s first QLC SSD for enterprise applications. Micron’s press release is HERE.
Although this is a laudatory feat, the industry has been headed in this direction for a number of years. In fact, this was the subject of a presentation that I made to the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) during its Winter Symposium in January 2014.
The slide in which I discussed this appears as this post’s graphic. (Click on it to see a larger rendition.) This table attempted to illustrate that all SSDs were headed towards TLC (and implicitly QLC) over the long term despite the fact that naysayers persistently argued that this could never happen. It looks at attitudes over history and considers the fact that things that the industry said could “Never” happen ended up eventually becoming the mainstream technology.
Since I live, eat, and breathe Continue reading
New Approach to Portable Storage
According to confidential information disclosed to The SSD Guy, the US military has made several advancements in a novel approach to provide soldiers, sailors, and aviators with portable storage that cannot be lost or stolen.
Consider the difficulty faced by the armed forces: Confidential information is now a part of every enlisted person’s mission, yet that data, if stored on an external HDD, USB flash drive, or flash card, could fall into the hands of an adversary. How can the military prevent this from happening?
The solution is ingeniously simple. Iron in any form can be magnetized, and magnetization is the most common of all ways to store data bits: It’s used in tape and hard drives, which, combined, account for more than 90% of all data storage today.
The human body has plenty of iron, traveling though its veins in the blood stream.
The military’s approach is to magnetize the Continue reading
Kaminario Adopts Software-Only Business Model
Kaminario recently decided to adopt a “software-centric” business model, rather than sell all-flash arrays as the company has done since its inception. The company says that this will allow it “to streamline operations, while focusing its resources on continued software innovation,” acknowledging that the change: “represents a strategic business model shift for Kaminario.”
Hardware support for existing and future Kaminario customers will be provided by Tech Data, which Kaminario’s release tells us is the world-leading end-to-end distributor of technology products, services, and solutions.
Jay Kramer of Network Storage Advisors, a friend of The SSD Guy recently provided me with some valuable insights on Kaminario’s restructuring and has allowed me to share them here. Jay is a recognized technology consultant specializing in the network storage industry.
Here’s what Jay has to say Continue reading
NVDIMM Report Now Available
I am proud to share the release of a new Objective Analysis report detailing the nonvolatile dual inline memory module (NVDIMM) market. Titled: “Profiting from the NVDIMM Market,” this report explains the What, How, Why, & When of NVDIMMs, and forecasts the market through 2021.
Readers are aware that I have been watching this market for some time, and never really know whether I should post about NVDIMMs in The SSD Guy or in The Memory Guy, since the boundary between memory and storage is bridged by these products. My solution: publish posts about this report in both blogs!
According to the Objective Analysis NVDIMM market model the NVDIMM market can be expected to reach nearly 12 million units by 2021, representing a 105% average annual growth rate. The forecast methodology used for this model has provided some of the semiconductor business’ most consistently-accurate forecasts. The report, which includes this forecast, was the result of thorough research into the technology and the circumstances that led to the introduction of NVDIMMs, NVDIMM vendor and user interviews, and briefings from those standards bodies that are diligently working to provide timely support for this new technology.
This in-depth 80-page analysis explores the Continue reading
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