SSD

This Week in Storage (3-13-09)

It was difficult to make it through this week without hearing about Solid State Disk (SSD). SSD seems to be following the Gartner Hype Cycle model to a T. Basically, every vendor on the planet has an evolving SSD strategy and is blitzing the media will a bazillion press releases on their latest and greatest flavor. Despite confusing customers, some cool technology is coming out of this – SSD is a game changer: to applications supported by SSD and basic storage economics.

EMC looks to be leading the pack. They were first out of the gate with SSD in their DMX systems, they are articulating the value proposition of “SSD-inside” better than anyone else right now, and they are already embarking on phase two to stay ahead of the pack. Other vendors are following – with basic support of SSD like HP, to large investments. SSD vendors are happy, coming up with new innovations (like Texas Memory) and looking to tie up as many OEM deals they can in this feeding frenzy. Sun is also investing heavily, putting SSDs everywhere they can. But the winners are going to be the ones that can provide true solutions to problems – not just cool technology…

Also See:

• Tweek N Storage 3-13-09
• Taylor’s Take on Delicious
• The Storage Buzz:

In: SSD | 5 Minutes Ago: Flash | Out: Memory

This Week’s Blog:

Boiling Tape, Screaming Disk & Windows on Steroids
The smartest move I have seen any marketing professional make is walk right into their local IT manager’s office and ask them what would get them excited about whatever technology their company is hocking…

Storage News:

Stephen Foskett’s Blog: Ten-Year Trend: Mobility
Dave Hitz at NetApp simulated some brain cells with his post asking what ten-year trend the industry is building to – in the 80’s it was getting a computer on every desk; and the 90’s brought networking all those computers together. Mr. Hitz throws out three trends: Clouds, Virtualization, and SSD. I like Stephen Foskett’s response – he pins the new trend as “information mobility” and I wholeheartedly agree. Our information no longer lives on a single device or in an application – it lives on an ever-growing and changing network of information and services. Clouds, Virtualization, and even SSDs are enablers to this macro trend….

Chuck’s Blog: EMC 2009 Strategic Forum
A great recap from Chuck on the main points of Joe Tucci’s keynote at EMC 2009 Strategic Forum. Some points that peaked my interest: In Q4, EMC did over $90M+ in dedupe products; Chuck’s analogy that SSD is “I/O dedupe”; EMC completely sold out of EFDs (enterprise flash drives) for DMX and CX in recent quarters; DMX-4 w/ SSD has 60% more IOPs and is 17% lower in cost than DMX-4 w/o SSD.

EMC CEO drops storage product hints at investors’ forum
Doesn’t look like Tucci spilled the beans on too many futures – most of it we already know: SSD, virtualization (VMware NOT for sale), Dedup, etc. A couple points – Data Domain is clearly in Tucci’s (and EMC’s) crosshairs. And the next SSD step for EMC looks to be array controllers that provide automated data migration to SSDs. Archive/compliance search and eDiscovery across multiple storage repositories continues to be a focus as well. (I am wondering where the EMC Cloud stuff is going however…)

Texas Memory brings out PCIe-based solid state
This type of SSD implementation is pretty cool because it leverages the small form factor of SSD by attached the high I/O and dense storage medium to a computer expansion card. Texas Memory has rolled out the RamSan-20, its first SSD-based PCIe card - It has a 450GB drive that delivers 120,000 IOPS. Pricing starts at $18,000 ($40/GB), which opens a whole new market opp for them – they are looking for OEMs and the SSD PCIe card will be targeted to apps that need large/fast buffer areas - DBs, financial modeling, scientific computing, video editing.

Sun flashes new NAND module
Sun is putting SSD everywhere – packed in storage appliances managed by ZFS as well as Flash-enabling their servers. Today they launched a module for holding NAND chips (Open Flash Module) which consists of 24GB attached to a small board with the same footprint as a SO-DIMM module. They also added support for small form factor (SFF) Intel SSDs.

Pillar adds solid-state disks to Axiom arrays
Pillar jumps on the SSD bandwagon with an SSD “brick” for its Axiom system. Pillar’s Axiom arrays are built with capacity nodes it calls “bricks” and compute nodes it calls “slammers”. Customers must purchase 12 SSDs in a brick; primarily b/c Axiom has up to 96GB of cache. Oracle-backed Pillar focuses on high-performing transactional storage systems.

HP puts solid state in EVA storage arrays
HP follows EMC, HDS, IBM, Sun with support for SSDs from STEC, their new EVAs will support six to eight 72GB FC SSD drives.

Isilon expands with transactional and archive systems
Isilon, best known for its clustered NAS systems, is looking to break into adjacent markets by coming out with two new NAS platforms: The S-Series that will target the primary/transactional market with quad-core x86 processors, 16GB of memory per node, and 15,000 rpm SAS disks. And the NL-Series node that will target the archive market with 36TB of SATA disk per 4U node.

• For more Industry News see Taylor’s Take on Delicious…

Boiling Tape, Screaming Disk & Windows on Steroids

I have been in many a marketing meeting and it can be easy to get caught up in grandiose “creative” plans and “out-of-the-box” thinking – and fly right over your target audience’s head (or at most make their eyes either roll or glaze over).

The smartest move I have seen any marketing professional make is walk right into their local IT manager’s office and ask them what would get them excited about whatever technology their company is hocking.

Boiling Tape Cartridges
About 10 years ago I was with a start-up that invented a new tape technology – VXA (now owned by Tandberg Data).  The cool thing about VXA was that is writes data to helical tape in data packets – then multiple read heads scan the tape to pick up the data.  If there are tape errors, ECC can use data around the surviving packets to rebuild lost data.

But how to market it?

We walked down to the IT folks and they said, “prove it to me.”  How to prove it?  They said, “boil the tape, freeze the tape, dunk it in coffee – torture it and then try a data restore – show me it works as advertised.”

Well, we did it in our labs first – and it worked!  Our VXA “extreme tested” marketing campaign was born.  We attended a Linux World conference and did a live test – we wrote data to a VXA tape, and then asked conference users to drop it into a large container of hot coffee.  We dried it overnight and the next day we restored 100% of the data from the tape – and signed two Linux OEM deals after that conference.

I am glad to say that this campaign is still being touted today, 10 years later!!!

Screaming at Disk Arrays
Sun Solaris has some pretty amazing monitoring and analytics software built in it.  But the best marketing of it I have seen didn’t come from Sun Marketing.  It came one of its developers posting a video of himself yelling at a couple JBODs.

Windows on Steroids
One of my best friends and best reporters on the planet, Hari Sreenivasan, sent me the following video because he knows I am a storage geek.  Kudos to the marketing folks at Samsung for walking down the hallway to talk to their IT folks on what would get other IT folks excited about SSD…

So, another video to add to the IT marketing Hall of Fame:

• Samsung SSD Awesomeness