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…

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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

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Questions?

21WhipTail 2012. All Rights Reserved.

Ryan Snellrsnell@whiptail.com312-833-3586@ryguysnelllinkedin.com/in/ryansnell