solid state storage in the datacenter - past, present & future
DESCRIPTION
Delivering the lay of the land of the solid state storage industry circa mid-2012 while at Whiptail in Chicago before the Cisco acquisition. With the exception of the addition of two new vendors, and deduplication, everything else remains true today (and some of the future predictions came true as well!).TRANSCRIPT
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARYCONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARYCONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY 1
Solid-state Storage in the Datacenter: Past, Present, and Future
WhipTail 2012. All Rights Reserved.
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY 2
Who am I?
Regional Manager at WhipTail Benefit from joining very early Citrix & Symantec (VERITAS)
background Humbly attempt to be student
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What this Presentation is NOT
Sales-oriented Consumer market related Official
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What this Presentation IS
History of solid-state Types of solid-state Early adoption Current offerings How it’s panning out What the future holds
For the enterprise…
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Why Are We Here Today?
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Types of Solid-State Storage:DRAM
History Invented 1978 at IBM $8.8mm/GB! Mainly memory Enterprise shared-
storage appliances hit the market in the 90’s
Pros/Cons Pros
Absolute fastest Cons
Most expensive/GB Volatile Mainly offered via direct
attached storage (DAS) architectures
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Types of Solid-State Storage:Flash
History Launched 1987 by
Toshiba Thumb drives circa
2000 Apple iPhone 2007 Now out-ships DRAM
8X
Pros/Cons Pros
Cheaper Fast Non-volatile Capacity
Cons All flash wears out Not bit-addressable =
writes slow Larger capacities =
worse endurance
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Two Types of Flash
SLC (Single Level Cell) Pros
Natively faster Natively more durable
Cons 10X more expensive Lower capacities Lower supply Wears out
MLC (Multi-Level Cell) Pros
Larger capacities Cheaper Still fast Mass produced
Cons 1/10th the durability Natively slower
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Why Consider SSD At All?
CPU & memory no longer the bottleneck
HDD as fast as it’s going to get Moore’s Law Virtualization On-demand world Storage performance in spotlight
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Performance Evolution from Traditional Vendors
Hard Disk Drive (HDD) tricks Cache Trays of SLC SSD SLC flash as cache Auto-tiering Evolutionary path mainly driven by
physical limitations of flash Ultimately all became “Hybrid Arrays”
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Performance Evolution from Start-Ups Leveraging SSD
Server-side DAS “In-the-Middle” caching appliances Hybrid Arrays “Mix-of-the-above” solutions 100% solid-state storage arrays This is your current landscape
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Server Side DAS
Players SSD
Hitachi, STEC, Toshiba, Intel, Samsung, SanDisk, OCZ, Apple, etc.
PCIe Fusion IO EMC (Project Lightning) Others
Pros/Cons Pros
Performance closest to workload
Cons Expensive Management nightmare Single point of failure Consumes server
resources Performance island Wasted capacity
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“In-the-Middle” Caching Appliances
Players Dataram Gridiron Avere
Pros/Cons Most incumbent arrays
now do this Putting small company
solution in front of multi-million dollar investment
Helps reads only Expensive In-band
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Hybrid Storage Arrays
Players Every major storage
player now a hybrid Nimble Xiotech
Pros/Cons Pros
Leverage existing investment
Manage one array One source of support
Cons Performance limited Expensive Not a “top speed”
solution – doesn’t close performance gap
One demanding workload ruins it for everyone
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“Mix-of-the-Above” Contraptions
Players Tintri Atlantis
Pros/Cons Pros
? Helps with IO problem
some? Cons
Too much technology Blame storming Management nightmare Impacts everything More room on this
slide?
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100% SSS Arrays
Players DRAM/SLC Hybrid
Violin Kaminario Texas Memory Systems
All Flash WhipTail Nimbus
Pros/Cons Pros
Top speed performance (15X-30X Hybrid Arrays)
Focus on closing gap Pioneering
Cons Individually managed Fabric attached? HA/BC/DR? Write speed? Wear?
80% of the IO resides on 10% of the capacity…
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
The New Standard for Flash Arrays:Modular High Performance Storage
10WhipTail 2012. All Rights Reserved.
INVICTA
Silicon Storage Router
Silicon Storage Nodes
Min/Max Capacity 6TB - 72TB
Base Models ISSA-6, ISSA-12, ISSA-24 6TB 12TB 24TB
Silicon Storage NAND Flash - MLC
Height 6RU-14RU
Silicon Storage Router
Multi-Path Architecture 250,000 - 650,000 IOPS
4GB/s - 7GB/s R/W Bandwidth200 Microseconds Latency
Power: 440W
Interfaces4/8 Gb Fibre Channel
1/10 Gb Ethernet40 Gb Infiniband
Protocols Fibre Channel, iSCSI, QDR
Silicon Storage Nodes
Protected Write Cache300GB or 600GB Power: 180W each
FeaturesCapacity Pooling
RAID Protection and Hot SparingLUN Mirroring and LUN Striping
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Future of SSD
SLC will go away (VHS & Beta) Server side SSD will continue DAS, SAN, NAS, and now…SSA Two tiers, no auto-tiering All “in-the-middle” and “mix-of-the-
above” solutions will dissipate and go away
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Caveat Emptor: “1 Billion IOPS!” Don’t believe everything you read 2012 #1 SPC-1 storage benchmark = 520k
IOPS, $3.8mm, 2k+ HDD Require an evaluation or third party
performance lab validation report Ask about block size, Ask about read/write Ask about Internal, DAS fabric connectivity With parity? Match your requirements
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Future of Use Cases
Past/Present VDI operating Systems Limited Oracle, SAP,
SQL, Exchange OLTP Federal/DoD
supercomputer-type stuff
Future Mainstream multi-
tenant platform use Virt. of Tier 1 apps ALL Tier 1 apps BI/OLAP HPC metadata, check-
pointing, out-of-core Portions of Big Data Batch Code development
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The “Star Trek” Future
Phase-change memory - Samsung Memristors - HP Atomic storage – IBM Years (decades?) away from large
scale manufacturing Flash closes the datacenter
performance gap for now
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Questions?
21WhipTail 2012. All Rights Reserved.
Ryan [email protected]@ryguysnelllinkedin.com/in/ryansnell