Storage Nation

Hopefully, some of the Xiotech folks have their ears on.  In response to my previous post questioning the marketecture around Flash SSD, one reader (Pq65) said that my commentary underscored Xiotech’s limitations in the sense that they (1) are closely tied to Seagate, which doesn’t have a Flash story yet, and (2) were not jumping on

I’m not a fan of making press releases on behalf of other companies however once in a while, a news item catches my interest.  So it is with the announcement of the Violin Memory Inc. 3200 series of all-memory storage arrays.  Why are these interesting?  Because I think they are moving and potentially blurring the boundaries between spinning drives and memory-based permanent data storage

Yesterday Nimbus Data Systems announced the release of their S-Class storage array.  What’s different about this storage device is that it uses purely NAND memory rather than traditional spinning disk.  With it’s arrival, we’re seeing another nail in the coffin of the traditional hard drive. OK, so the S-Class isn’t going to replace hard drives overnight – at $25,000 for 2.5TB of storage (or a hefty $10/GB) it seems expensive.  But in reality it isn’t.  The $10/GB mark is about what you’d pay for tier 1 Enterprise storage and for that you get a device which is lower on power, footprint and offers performance far exceeding traditional tier 1 arrays. Nimbus are clearly looking to fill the gap between Enterprise arrays that have shoe-horned in SSDs (EMC and others) and the super-fast super-expensive arrays produced by the likes of Texas Memory Systems ( RamSAN ).  This continues to blur the boundaries between disk and memory and in the short term meets customer requirements for faster storage, overcoming the limitations the hard drive.

There were some problems with the links that were posted this week regarding Oracle's ASM Storage Reclamation Utility (ASRU) and 3PAR's Thin Persistence. ASRU is a stand alone utility that compacts data in a specified Oracle disk group and then frees up space that Oracle no longer needs. Here is a short white paper on it (PDF).

Who gets to: Wear the beeper 24 x 7?  The sysadmin.

Yesterday, 3PAR announced Adaptive Optimization (AO), our solution for storage tiering and support for SSD flash drives. Here are the elements of this technology that I believe will have the most impact on customers and the rest of the industry. 1) Tiering works by making copies of data on lower cost, low-IOPS storage to high-IOPS storage – and back again.  Storage tiering has been associated with ILM, which assumed data is initially located on more expensive, high-IOPS storage and, as it ages and is accessed less frequently, is moved to lower-cost, low-IOPS storage. The perception that tiering implies fast to slow data migration was reinforced by Compellent with it's early entrant storage tiering technology, Data Progression .

I’m not the first to post on the subject of Netapp’s President and CEO Tom Georgens commenting during their latest earnings call on the apparent death of tiering as we know it today. In Netapp’s view, there will be no tiering of storage in the future.  Instead we will be using SATA drives for our data and cache cards.  Here’s Tom’s words, taken from the call transcript : Second of all, frankly I think the concept of tiering is dying.

From a conversation with Eric Herzog, lately of Tarmin, this data seemed interesting. In 2005, venture capital amounting to about $1 Billion found its way into the hands of storage hardware start-ups. In 2007, this shrank to $650 Million. In 2008, more shrinkage:  $520 Million

Everyone has no doubt gotten the word about today’s announcement from Isilon about their next-gen clustered NAS product line.  If not, here are their talking points in a nutshell. I

While some have wondered whether or not EMC was going to be able to get their FAST product announced this year, others have been keeping their heads down getting work done.  For instance, Symantec, who today announced their Dynamic Storage Tiering feature for SSDs in their Storage Foundation products. Of course, many probably wonder why the heck I'm writing about this seeing how 3PAR doesn't have support for SSDs in it's products yet.  That's easy. A v-Max with FAST is going to be more of a science project than a production system that actually gets work done.  I'm more concerned about customers buying somebody else's SSD-enabled array and using it with Symantec's Dynamic Storage Tiering than I am about FAST on v-Max. But I'm not that concerned because the SSD market has been slow to develop – even by EMC, the company that has been leading the charge (and inventory buildup).  And even though they like to point to the check boxes in the feature checklist, big wide striping (the kind that flattens disk contention problems) with a v-Max is still an exercise in storage contortionism, unlike on a 3PAR, where its the default behavior