EMC DSSD D5 Rack Scale Direct Attached Shared SSD All Flash Array Part I

EMC DSSD D5 Rack Scale Direct Attached Shared SSD All Flash Array Part I

This is the first post in a two-part series pertaining to the EMC DSSD D5 announcement, you can read part two here.

EMC announced today the general availability of their DSSD D5 Shared Direct Attached SSD (DAS) flash storage system (e.g. All Flash Array or AFA) which is a rack-scale solution. If you recall, EMC acquired DSSD back in 2014 which you can read more about here. EMC announced four configurations that include 36TB, 72TB and 144TB raw flash SSD capacity with support for up to 48 dual-ported host client servers.

Via EMC Pulse Blog

What Is DSSD D5

At a high level EMC DSSD D5 is a PCIe direct attached SSD flash storage solution to enable aggregation of disparate SSD card functionality typically found in separate servers into a shared system without causing aggravation. DSSD D5 helps to alleviate server side I/O bottlenecks or aggravation issues that can be the result of aggregation of workloads or data. Think of DSSD D5 as an shared application server storage I/O accelerator for up to 48 servers to access up to 144TB of raw flash SSD to support various applications that have the need for speed.

Applications that have the need for speed or that can benefit from less time waiting for results, where time is money, or boosting productivity can enable high profitability computing. This includes legacy as well as emerging applications and workloads spanning little data, big data and big fast structure and unstructured data. From Oracle to SAS to HBASE and Hadoop among others, perhaps even Alluxio.

Some examples include:

• Clusters and scale-out grids
• High Performance COMpute (HPC)
• Parallel file systems
• Forecasting and image processing
• Fraud detection and prevention
• Research and analytics
• E-commerce and retail
• Search and advertising
• Legacy applications
• Emerging applications
• Structured database and key-value repositories
• Unstructured file systems, HDFS and other data
• Large undefined work sets
• From batch stream to real-time
• Reduces run times from days to hours

Where to learn more

Continue reading with the following links about NVMe, flash SSD and EMC DSSD.

What this all means

Today’s legacy, and emerging applications have the need for speed, and where the applications may not need speed, the users as well as Internet of Things (IoT) that depend upon, or feed those applications do need things to move faster. Fast applications need fast software and hardware to get the same amount of work done faster with less wait delays, as well as process larger amounts of structured and unstructured little data, big data and very fast big data.

Different applications along with the data infrastructures they rely upon including servers, storage, I/O hardware and software need to adapt to various environments, one size, one approach model does not fit all scenarios. What this means is that some applications and data infrastructures will benefit from shared direct attached SSD storage such as rack scale solutions using EMC DSSD D5. Meanwhile other applications will benefit from AFA or hybrid storage systems along with other approaches used in various ways.

Continue reading part two of this series here including how EMC DSSD D5 works and more perspectives.

Ok, nuff said (for now)

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

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