It’s important for IT professionals to understand that solid-state technology is used in storage for more than just specialty devices. IBM acquired more than flash storage systems from Texas Memory. The acquisition includes a storage controller designed to turn solid-state drives (SSDs) into the primary storage medium instead of solid-state masquerading as a spinning disk drive. This major acquisition follows the earlier acquisition of XtremIO by EMC.

The main focus of these deals should not be on what existing products IBM and EMC gain from their acquisition targets. They go beyond any shiny toys that Texas Memory and XtremIO bring.

The flash technology is the key. The design of a storage controller that can use solid-state most effectively as primary storage is different than a design based on the use of electro-mechanical based disk drives. Information is accessed in a different way if the controller really uses memory access instead of merely mapping access to software for low-level device protocols. There are also differences in amount of work done by the controllers, such as the number and sizes of queues for operations in progress.

Solid state storage systems can be either all-flash or they can include SSDs for tiering or caching of traditional spinning disk based systems. Some new solid- state technology systems are designed for solid state as primary storage while using spinning disk as less expensive storage for less active data. This may change over time as data reduction capabilities in solid-state increase and flash becomes less expensive.

The most important vendor acquisitions are strategic deals that bring a significant change in product direction, and advance the technology sold to IT customers. For solid state, these deals bring large vendors new designs that maximize the capabilities of flash. The success of these transactions will be measured by how fast these technologies can be effectively brought to market.

Vendors who continue to sell systems designed for spinning disk will be at a disadvantage in an increasingly flash dominated world. That’s why solid-state technology acquisitions and development will set the stage for the next generation of storage systems.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

Calligo CEO Julian Box said Calligo went live with SolidFire about a month ago. Calligo uses SolidFire storage as the back end for its CloudSafe (Disaster Recovery), CloudDesk (virtual desktop), CloudNet (virtual network), and CloudCore (Infrastructure as a Service) services.

Box cited SolidFire’s performance, automated reporting and monitoring, and the ability to scale capacity and performance independently as reasons why he chose the newcomer’s array.

Calligo has one SF3010 array with 10 300GB SSDs for 3 TB of raw capacity, and Box said SolidFire’s compression and deduplication gives him about 50 TB of effective capacity.

Before choosing SolidFire, Box said he looked at traditional storage arrays from Hewlett-Packard 3PAR and Dell Compellent. He said 3PAR would require hundreds if not thousands of disks to get the throughput he gets from SolidFire.

“We have oodles and oodles of power and throughput,” he said. “I have five nodes for 250,000 IOPS and it takes up 5u.”

He said he expects to add about one storage node a month to keep up with capacity demand. As for performance, he said “We have more IOPS now than we could ever consume.”

Box also likes that he can use SolidFire’s quality of service to guarantee performance on a volume basis.

“It’s broken the link for capacity and performance,” he said of the SolidFire array. “We can control capacity and performance like a dial.”

He said the one thing missing from SolidFire is replication, a feature that could facilitate disaster recovery.

The new models have twice the cache as the EVA6300 and EVA6500 they will replace. The EVA6350 has 8 GB of cache memory, and the EVA 6550 has 16 GB. The new EVAs also support solid state drives (SSDs). The previous generation EVAs support SSDs, but the original P6000 arrays did not. HP is selling 200 GB and 400 GB single-level cell (SLC) SSDs with the 6350 and 6550. Each controller can handle up to eight SSDs with a maximum of 25 SSDs in an array.

HP also added support for 3 TB SATA drives to bring the maximum capacity to 720 TB on the 6550. The new models are also the first EVA arrays to support vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI).

Pricing starts at $18,993 for the arrays, and 200 GB SSDs have a list price of $9,800.

The new systems include no features that other major storage vendors don’t already have, and will fail to quiet critics who claim HP fails to innovate with the EVA. But HP storage product manager Matthew Morrissey said there remains a place for the EVA and HP remains committed to it with more than 10,000 units in the field.

“HP’s view on storage is that it’s evolving,” Morrissey said. “We don’t think every business is ready to make a move to the cloud or virtualization, and we think the EVA plays well in optimized traditional IT environments.”

Western Digital is paying $3.9 billion in cash and 25 million shares of its common stock currently valued at $900 million for HGST, the world’s second largest enterprise drive vendor.

The deal had to clear regulation hoops from regulatory groups around the world because the deal makes the combined companies the largest hard drive vendor with 47% of the market, surpassing Seagate’s 32% market share.

HGST owns 9% of the enterprise market compared to Seagate’s 56%. Western Digital has only 1% of the enterprise market and 30% of the overall hard drive market without HGST.

Western Digital said it will operate HGST as a subsidiary, and it will maintain the HGST brand and separate product lines.

HGST’s enterprise products include solid-state drives (SSDs), and it scored a big win this week when it revealed that EMC is shipping Hitachi Ultrastar SSD400S single-level cell (SLC) 2.5-inch SAS SSDs in its VNX unified storage arrays.

Mitch Abbey, HGST’s senior enterprise product line manager, said he expects more SSD qualifications with EMC and other storage vendors. He also said HGST has cheaper multi-level cell (MLC) drives in the works and is reviewing the PCIe market for server-based flash to determine if it’s worth putting out that type of product.

Seagate is acquiring Samsung’s M8 product line of 2.5-inch high capacity hard drives and will supply disk drives to Samsung for PCs, notebooks and consumer devices. Samsung will supply Seagate with chips for enterprise solidstate drives (SSDs). Seagate already uses those chips for its SSD and hybrid drives. Seagate is also acquiring employees from Samsung’s Korea design center.

The deal was first disclosed in April, but the companies had to clear regulatory hurdles. Even with the close of the deal, Seagate and Samsung face a long transition. Seagate will retain the Samsung brand for some of its hard drives for a year, and establish independent sales, product and development operations during that period.

The other blockbuster hard drive deal in the works is Western Digital’s proposed $4.3 billion takeover of Hitachi Global Storage Technology (HGST). The European Union last month gave its blessing to that deal, but ordered Western Digital to sell off some assets. The Western Digital-HGST acquisition is expected to close next March, one year after it was first announced.

Storage consolidation is one of the major benefits from automated tiering. The Evaluator Group survey of IT professionals illustrates the benefits of storage consolidation, including:

• Increased utilization by reducing the number of storage systems with reserved or unused capacity.
• Reduced requirements for management and administration of storage systems. Along with bringing more advanced management software with newer storage systems, reducing the number of storage systems reduces the amount of time required for administration.
• Reduction in power, cooling, and physical space is a common result of implementing new technology. Consolidating systems where a new storage system can support larger workloads typically has a greater impact on the environmental reductions.
• Reduced maintenance costs/support contracts from fewer storage systems.

What role does storage tiering play in consolidation? Tiering can maximize the performance of a storage system and may be the most important enabler for consolidation from an economic standpoint.

Implementing storage tiering on solid state drives (SSDs) and high capacity disks requires capabilities built into the embedded storage system software to intelligently and automatically move data for optimal performance.

Results from deployments in customer environments verify the effectiveness of storage tiering, even when SSDs make up only four percent or less of the total capacity. This brings a new economic calculation to bear for storage tiering and the return on investment for a storage consolidation project.

Vendors are increasingly focusing on the automation and effectiveness of the tiering implementation, especially with the emergence of SSD as a storage tier. These are not esoteric elements in a storage system but critical, high value functions with the potential for storage efficiency improvements and relatively quick economic payback. This means the understanding of how the tiering works, how effective it is, and the differences in product costs with the amount of SSDs required for optimization requires evaluation and independent information for making a decision. Tiering has huge payback and needs to be included in the strategy for IT operations.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

Samsung sells hard drives for PCs and consumer electronics, so the SSD part of the deal is the key piece for enterprises.

“This provides Seagate with an important source of leading-edge NAND supply and early visibility into the next-generation of NAND,” Seagate CEO Steve Luczo said on a conference call to discuss the deal.

Seagate and Samsung announced a NAND partnership last August. Seagate launched its first enterprise SSDs in March with its Pulsar .2 mult-layer cell (MLC) and Pulsar XT.2 single-level cell (SLC) SSD using Samsung NAND chips. Seagate was slow entering the SSD market, but Luczo said those Pulsar products should be coming into the market through storage system OEM partners soon and Seagate is on schedule for its next generation of SSDs in partnership with Samsung. Still, Seagate’s OEM customers wanted assurances that the Seagate-Samsung arrangement would remain intact.

“This addresses an issue that customers have raised,” he said. “While they have a lot of confidence for Samsung and Seagate to design flash products, there always has been a bit of a concern that without a formal supply agreement, what was the whole package going to look like?”

Seagate also sells hybrid systems with SSDs and hard drives.

The Samsung deal, which Seagate expects to close around the end of the year, is the second major disk drive merger in barely a month. Western Digital said in March it intends to buy disk drive rival Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) for $4.3 billion.

Luczo said the consolidation reflects the growth of storage capacity worldwide and the need for investment in new storage technologies.

“Demand for storage is accelerating,” he said. “Petabyte growth is very strong and has been for the last six to eight quarters, even in an economy that has been lackluster.”

That’s the plan laid out by Jonathan Huberman, president of EMC-owned Iomega. The vendor today launched the Iomega External USB 3.0 SSD Flash Drive that is about the size of an iPhone. The SSD device comes in capacities of 64 GB, 128 GB and 256 GB.

Huberman said the same form factor will be used for Iomega’s NAS soon. He doesn’t have a timeframe because the company has to make tweaks to optimize it for the SMB NAS devices.

“It will be the same flash and the same form factor,” he said. “We’re architecting our NAS stack now.”

Huberman said USB 3.0 support is the key driver for the external drive, as well as decreasing Flash prices. “Without USB 3, you miss a lot of the benefits of Flash because you’re capped by USB 2 performance,” he said. “And price points continue to come down. Historically, the price/value equation wasn’t attractive. Now it makes sense for our customer base.”

The External SSD Flash drive costs $229 for 64 GB, $399 for 128 GB and $749 for 256 GB.

Fibre Channel Industry Association

Despite the rise of iSCSI and the emergence of 10-gigabit Ethernet, enhanced Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is charging ahead on its road map for at least the next decade.

The FC storage networking vendors who make up the FCoE say 16 Gbps FC products are just around the corner, with demonstrations anticipated by fall SNW, a 16-gig plugfest by the end of this year and shipping products by late 2011 or early 2012. The FCIA roadmap also calls for 32 Gbps devices by late 2014.

And it won’t stop there. QLogic director of technology Skip Jones, who chairs the FCIA, says the goal is for 1 Tbps FC interswitch links (ISL) by around 2000.

Jones also says the FCIA is committed to optimizing FC’s role in emerging FCoE technology although he says FCoE so far is mostly hype that has created “a trough of disillusionment that’s bigger than the Grand Canyon,” Jones said. “We’re pushing storage networks, regardless of how you pipe them. We want to see a good user experience.”

The FCIA is also working on a projected proposal called FC-SCM (simplified configuration and management), which includes a limited set of capabilities aimed at making FC easier to manage for remote offices.

One FC roadmap has hit a dead end, though. Development of FC disk drives has stopped at 4 Gbps. “That’s becoming uninteresting to us,” Jones said. “What we care about is having more spindles to manage.”

Sepaton

Sepaton’s backup boxes have been virtual tape libraries (VTL) from day one, meaning they use Fibre Channel connectivity and sell primarily to enterprises. But that could be changing with the vendor’s embracing of Symantec’s NetBackup OpenStorage (OST) API. Symantec hasn’t certified Sepaton’s OST support yet, but Sepaton did a demonstration at Symantec Vision this week running backups directly to disk without tape emulation by using OST on a S2100-E2 VTL running DeltaStor deduplication software.

Sepaton VP of worldwide marketing Jay Kramer says OST support will open the door for Sepaton to run over 10-Gigabit Ethernet, and eventually NFS and CIFS NAS protocols.

“OST is a great complementary technology to the direction we’re going,” Kramer said. “OST treats disk as disk, rather than as a tape cartridge. This is a start for us to move to open formats, and we have other things coming.”

Kramer says Sepaton still expects a strong demand for FC VTLs, but NAS support will make it more competitive with EMC’s Data Domain in midrange shops. Data Domain’s NAS interface is one reason it has dominated that market.

Kramer says he’s not impressed with Data Domain’s new Global Deduplication Array, calling it a “bolt-on” product and pointing out that Sepaton supports eight clustered nodes with full dedupe and replication. Data Domain’s GDA clusters two nodes through OST.

Ocarina Networks

While Ocarina Networks is known as a primary data deduplication vendor, its vice president of products Carter George says there are customers using Ocarina for backup. George also said Ocarina is pursuing OEM deals with major vendors to use Ocarina reduction technology in NAS, iSCSI and object storage array systems, as well as on backup appliances.

“Our strategy is to get our stuff built into end user products,” George says.

CommVault

While tape vendors are pitching their medium as the best way to archive, CommVault direct of cloud solutions Jeff Echols says tape will get a run for its money from the cloud.

Echols says a good deal of the interest in CommVault’s Cloud Connector option is from customers looking to archive data.

“We’re seeing a lot of interest in archiving to the cloud instead of tape,” Echols said. “Long-term, this is going to be real interesting for tape.”

Avere Systems

Avere CEO Ron Bianchini says he misread the market when first launching his tiered NAS systems last year, but he doesn’t regret it.

Avere first came to market with two boxes containing SAS and flash solid state drives (SSDs) last year, and planned to follow with a bigger version of those systems. But Bianchini says talking to early customers and potential customers changed his mind, and the FXT 2700 that Avere came out with in January consisted of only SSD and RAM without any spinning disk.

“About 85 percent of the people we talked to already have Fibre Channel spindles and the system runs great the first and second months of the quarter, and rolls over and dies in the last month when orders come flooding in,” he said. “They wanted only SSDs to improve performance. I went to market expecting to sell one thing and got pulled in a completely different direction.”

Bianchini says Avere will issue a software upgrade this year improving its management features and user interface.

LSI

LSI demonstrated new software capabilities for its MegaRAID SAS controllers to optimize performance of direct attached storage (DAS) systems running SSDs. FastPath is designed to improve transactional application throughput to up to 150,000 IOPS while CacheCade is tiering software that turns SSD into a secondary tier of cache to improve transactional I/O performance. LSI claims CacheCade will significantly improve performance of OLTP and server workloads, and other read-sensitive applications.

The announcement comes less than a year after Intel and Micron first joined up to form a joint venture called IM Flash Technologies, which started by collaborating on 34 nanometer (nm) Flash components. IM Flash Technologies also has a partnership with Hitachi GST.

Tom Rampone, vice president of the Technology and Manufacturing Group and general manager of the NAND Solutions Group at Intel, said in a press conference on Friday that the vendors are qualifying 25 nm NAND wafers and sampling them to OEM customers at Intel’s fabrication plants. Rampone showed this product at Friday’s conference (see YouTube video)–a 167 square millimeter block he said is twice as dense as Flash devices created with the 34 nm lithography process.

The first products to be built using this technology will be an 8 GB multi-level cell (MLC) consumer Flash device, Rampone said, and most of the discussion Friday revolved around its consumer applications — an ability to hold 2000 songs in that small footprint, for example.

But Intel and Micron’s press release also makes reference to the product’s uses in solid-state drives (SSDs), and the 25 nanometer process holds at least some hope for enterprise users interested in Flash but put off currently by its high prices and relatively low densities. Moreover, traditionally MLC drives have been first to market and seen as consumer-grade, but recently SSD vendors like STEC and system builders like WhipTail have come along claiming to offer enterprise-level reliability and endurance with MLC Flash.