Tag: "SSD"

Flood Affects Storage Industry


There was a great post a couple of weeks ago, with Tom Coughlin as a contributing editor, on Forbes’ news site about the floods that hit Thailand and how it will affect the disk drive market.  The great thing about the article is it truly highlights that necessity is the mother of invention.  What do I mean by that?  Over the past few “storage efficiency” has been a big topic with vendors.  Helping customers “do more with less”, especially in these stringent economic times, is key to the vitality of a number of businesses.  Technologies such as storage virtualization and thin provisioning have helped customers to slow their storage spend and get better utilization out of their existing storage.  Once customers have moved their utilization rates from 35% to 65% or 70%, time comes when new storage needs to be acquired to keep up with the growth of data.  The issue comes when there are no more disk drives to be acquired.  Due to the floods in Thailand, analysts predict that the storage industry could be 50 to 60 million units shy of the demand this quarter.  This does two things:

1)      Drives the price of disk higher, at a time when the expectation is to spend less for disk

2)      Has IT getting more creative on how they use and deploy their storage

It is the later that I want to focus on as paying more for disk is not necessarily the best option.  It is important to note that data grows for one reason, business does not stop, it needs to keep going and it is what is driving the demand on the data.

In the Forbes piece Tom talks about “a surge in new technologies because of this disk shortage” but he doesn’t cover some of the most innovative technologies that are available to help customers.  I would agree with Tom that we “could” see a surge in SSD but that would be short lived do to both supply and cost as well as a surge in tape, but these aren’t really “new technologies”.

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Dec 01, 2011 | 0 comments View Post

Storage Tiers – Take 3


I find myself in a true quandary.  First, I have true admiration for my good friend and fellow blogger 3Par Farley and never feel comfortable being on the other side of the coin from him.  Second, I find myself agreeing, to a degree, with Jon Toigo (who still uses crazy permalinks and considers Novell a serious storage player.  What is up with that?).

I’m sure by now most of you all have read the fury lately over Tom Georgens’ comments about the future of storage tiering.  A number of folks who have ‘tiering’ technology reacted with disdain (see a list on Storagerap).  Some wondered how a storage visionary like Tom could turn his back on technology that helps people save money in storage.  Some even suggested that this is just marketing to overcome deficiency in the NetApp product line.  However, one applauded Tom for understanding how the real world deploys storage.  All good points, but I have my own theory on storage teiring...

I want to come right out and say I think that storage tiering is an incredibly smart concept.  (Now that that is off the table…) I would also say that much like the prediction that tape is ‘dead’ (I guess Data Domain didn’t get that memo), storage tiering, while it can’t be dead, because in reality, it never actually was, nor do I think it will be for a very long time.  Let’s look at the facts:

First, HSM never really went anywhere.  There is not mass adoption of HSM technology.  Second, tiering is not a technology issue.  Humans are lazy.  What do I mean?  HSM / Tiering or whatever you want to call it depends on policy.  IT can’t get any two groups in a company to decide on anything other than storage is too expensive.  When I speak to well respected people in IT the ‘real world’ (my dad), they tell me it is too difficult to get organizations to agree on when data can be archived in order to save money (and that is what this is all about really).  Finally, IT processes get in the way of a good tiering strategy.  Getting data to go one way is easy – move data to cheaper and cheaper tiers of storage until it vanishes.  Try getting it back.  That takes a lot of management tools and integration and costs just as much as doing nothing.

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Mar 07, 2010 | 15 comments View Post

Extending the Life and Economics of SSD with Real-time Compression


Last week in was in a number of business development meetings when the question came up, "Can real-time compression work with SSD?"  I thought the question was a bit odd because I would have assumed it was obvious that real-time compression would work with any primary storage, including SSD but it turns out that the question was just a validation question on the road to a brilliant solution stack for SSD.  The two big issues with SSD are cost and concern around number of writes to these devices before failure (or MTBF in traditional terms).

When it comes to cost, the average cost per terabyte for SSD is still 8x the cost of standard FC disk.  It is for this reason that companies such as EMC are pulling the proverbial wool over the customers eyes by telling customers that the formula they need to consider when it comes to storage costs is no longer about dollars per gigabyte but dollars per gigabyte per disk I/O.  And while this is an important and useful formula, the overall cost is still critical end users.  By performing compression before the data gets to the SSD you can, at a minimum, reduce the cost by 2x and in some cases 10x (depending upon your compression ratio) and if compression is being performed in real-time, the storage performance can even increase (imagine that, increasing your SSD performance and cutting the cost in half!)

The next issue with SSD is the issue with write failures over time.  Weather this is a myth or an issue that is blown out of proportion it still comes up with customers.  The two characteristics that are important to customers when buying storage are performance (noted above as a function of dollars per I/O) and availability.  If there is the slightest chance that SSD will loose data, I don't care how fast it is, I can't use it.  Now, if real-time compression sits in front of SSD drives, and does the compression before the data is stored on disk then the disk I/O is cut by 50% or more which extends the life of the disk.  Less I/O means less less reads and writes from the SSD which in turn means greater long term value of the SSD.

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Feb 24, 2010 | 0 comments View Post