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Viking SATADIMM: Nand flash SATA SSD in DDR3 DIMM slot?

Storage I/O trends

Today computer and data storage memory vendor Viking announced that SSD vendor Solidfire has deployed their SATADIMM modules in DDR3 DIMM (e.g. Random Access Memory (RAM) main memory) slots of their SF SSD based storage solution.

solidfire ssd storage with satadimm
Solidfire SD solution with SATADIMM via Viking

Nand flash SATA SSD in a DDR3 DIMM slot?

Per Viking, Solidfire uses the SATADIMM as boot devices and cache to complement the normal SSD drives used in their SF SSD storage grid or cluster. For those not familiar, Solidfire SF storage systems or appliances are based on industry standard servers that are populated with SSD devices which in turn are interconnected with other nodes (servers) to create a grid or cluster of SSD performance and space capacity. Thus as nodes are added, more performance, availability and capacity are also increased all of which are accessed via iSCSI. Learn more about Solidfire SD solutions on their website here.

Here is the press release that Viking put out today:

Viking Technology SATADIMM Increases SSD Capacity in SolidFire’s Storage System (Press Release)

Viking Technology’s SATADIMM enables higher total SSD capacity for SolidFire systems, offering cloud infrastructure providers an optimized and more powerful solution

FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif., August 12, 2013 – Viking Technology, an industry leading supplier of Solid State Drives (SSDs), Non-Volatile Dual In-line Memory Module (NVDIMMs), and DRAM, today announced that SolidFire has selected its SATADIMM SSD as both the cache SSD and boot volume SSD for their storage nodes. Viking Technology’s SATADIMM SSD enables SolidFire to offer enhanced products by increasing both the number and the total capacity of SSDs in their solution.

“The Viking SATADIMM gives us an additional SSD within the chassis allowing us to dedicate more drives towards storage capacity, while storing boot and metadata information securely inside the system,” says Adam Carter, Director of Product Management at SolidFire. “Viking’s SATADIMM technology is unique in the market and an important part of our hardware design.”

SATADIMM is an enterprise-class SSD in a Dual In-line Memory Module (DIMM) form factor that resides within any empty DDR3 DIMM socket. The drive enables SSD caching and boot capabilities without using a hard disk drive bay. The integration of Viking Technology’s SATADIMM not only boosts overall system performance but allows SolidFire to minimize potential human errors associated with data center management, such as accidentally removing a boot or cache drive when replacing an adjacent failed drive.

“We are excited to support SolidFire with an optimal solid state solution that delivers increased value to their customers compared to traditional SSDs,” says Adrian Proctor, VP of Marketing, Viking Technology. “SATADIMM is a solid state drive that takes advantage of existing empty DDR3 sockets and provides a valuable increase in both performance and capacity.”

SATADIMM is a 6Gb SATA SSD with capacities up to 512GB. A next generation SAS solution with capacities of 1TB & 2TB will be available early in 2014. For more information, visit our website www.vikingtechnology.com or email us at sales@vikingtechnology.com.

Sales information is available at: www.vikingtechnology.com, via email at sales@vikingtechnology.com or by calling (949) 643-7255.

About Viking Technology Viking Technology is recognized as a leader in NVDIMM technology. Supporting a broad range of memory solutions that bridge DRAM and SSD, Viking delivers solutions to OEMs in the enterprise, high-performance computing, industrial and the telecommunications markets. Viking Technology is a division of Sanmina Corporation (Nasdaq: SANM), a leading Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) provider. More information is available at www.vikingtechnology.com.

About SolidFire SolidFire is the market leader in high-performance data storage systems designed for large-scale public and private cloud infrastructure. Leveraging an all-flash scale-out architecture with patented volume-level quality of service (QoS) control, providers can now guarantee storage performance to thousands of applications within a shared infrastructure. In-line data reduction techniques along with system-wide automation are fueling new block-storage services and advancing the way the world uses the cloud.

What’s inside the press release

On the surface this might cause some to jump to the conclusion that the nand flash SSD is being accessed via the fast memory bus normally used for DRAM (e.g. main memory) of a server or storage system controller. For some this might even cause a jump to conclusion that Viking has figured out a way to use nand flash for reads and writes not only via a DDR3 DIMM memory location, as well as doing so with the Serial ATA (SATA) protocol enabling server boot and use by any operating system or hypervisors (e.g. VMware vSphere or ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen or KVM among others).

Note for those not familiar or needing a refresh on DRAM, DIMM and related items, here is an excerpt from Chapter 7 (Servers – Physical, Virtual and Software) from my book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC Press).

7.2.2 Memory

Computers rely on some form of memory ranging from internal registers, local on-board processor Level 1 (L1) and Level 2 (L2) caches, random accessible memory (RAM), non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) or Flash along with external disk storage. Memory, which includes external disk storage, is used for storing operating system software along with associated tools or utilities, application programs and data. Read more of the excerpt here…

Is SATADIMM memory bus nand flash SSD storage?

In short no.

Some vendors or their surrogates might be tempted to spin such a story by masking some details to allow your imagination to run wild a bit. When I saw the press release announcement I reached out to Tinh Ngo (Director Marketing Communications) over at Viking with some questions. I was expecting the usual marketing spin story, dancing around the questions with long answers or simply not responding with anything of substance (or that requires some substance to believe). Again what I found was the opposite and thus want to share with you some of the types of questions and answers.

So what actually is SATADIMM? See for yourself in the following image (click on it to view or Viking site).

Via Viking website, click on image or here to learn more about SATADIMM

Does SATADIMM actually move data via DDR3 and memory bus? No, SATADIMM only draws power from it (yes nand flash does need power when in use contrary to a myth I was told about).

Wait, then how is data moved and how does it get to and through the SATA IO stack (hardware and software)?

Simple, there is a cable connector that attached to the SATADIMM that in turn attached to an internal SATA port. Or using a different connector cable attach the SATADIMM (up to four) to a standard SAS internal port such as on a main board, HBA, RAID or caching adapter.

industry trend

Does that mean that Viking and who ever uses SATADIMM is not actually moving data or implementing SATA via the memory bus and DDR3 DIMM sockets? That would be correct, data movement occurs via cable connection to standard SATA or SAS ports.

Wait, why would I give up a DDR3 DIMM socket in my server that could be used for more DRAM? Great question and one that should be it depends on if you need more DRAM or more nand flash? If you are out of drive slots or PCIe card slots and have enough DRAM for your needs along with available DDR3 slots, you can stuff more nand flash into those locations assuming you have SAS or SATA connectivity.

satadimm
SATADIMM with SATA connector top right via Viking

satadimm sata connector
SATADIMM SATA connector via Viking

satadimm sas connector
SATADIMM SAS (Internal) connector via Viking

Why not just use the onboard USB ports and plug-in some high-capacity USB thumb drives to cut cost? If that is your primary objective it would probably work and I can also think of some other ways to cut cost. However those are also probably not the primary tenants that people looking to deploy something like SATADIMM would be looking for.

What are the storage capacities that can be placed on the SATADIMM? They are available in different sizes up to 400GB for SLC and 480GB for MLC. Viking indicated that there are larger capacities and faster 12Gb SAS interfaces in the works which would be more of a surprise if there were not. Learn more about current product specifications here.

Good questions. Attached are three images that sort of illustrates the connector. As well, why not a USB drive; well, there are customers that put 12 of these in the system (with up to 480GB usable capacity) that equates to roughly an added 5.7TBs inside the box without touching the drive bays (left for mass HDD’s). You will then need to raid/connect) all the SATADIMM via a HBA.

How fast is the SATADIMM and does putting it into a DDR3 slot speed things up or slow them down? Viking has some basic performance information on their site (here). However generally should be the same or similar to reach a SAS or SATA SSD drive, although keep SSD metrics and performance in the proper context. Also keep in mind that the DDR3 DIMM slot is only being used for power and not real data movement.

Is the SATADIMM using 3Gbs or 6Gbs SATA? Good questions, today is 6Gb SATA (remember that SATA can attach to a SAS port however not vise versa). Lets see if Viking responds in the comments with more including RAID support (hardware or software) along with other insight such as UNMAP, TRIM, Advanced Format (AF) 4KByte blocks among other things.

Have I actually tried SATADIMM yet? No, not yet. However would like to give it a test drive and workout if one were to show up on my doorstep along with disclosure and share the results if applicable.

industry trend

Future of nand flash in DRAM DIMM sockets

Keep in mind that someday nand flash will actually seem not only in a Webex or Powerpoint demo preso (e.g. similar to what Diablo Technology is previewing), as well as in real use for example what Micron earlier this year predicted for flash on DDR4 (more DDR3 vs. DDR4 here).

Is SATADIMM the best nand flash SSD approach for every solution or environment? No, however it does give some interesting options for those who are PCIe card, or HDD and SSD drive slot constrained that also have available DDR3 DIMM sockets. As to price, check with Viking, wish I could say tell them Greg from StorageIO sent you for a good value, however not sure what they would say or do.

Related more reading:
How much storage performance do you want vs. need?
Can RAID extend the life of nand flash SSD?
Can we get a side of context with them IOPS and other storage metrics?
SSD & Real Estate: Location, Location, Location
What is the best kind of IO? The one you do not have to do
SSD, flash and DRAM, DejaVu or something new?

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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Server and Storage IO Memory: DRAM and nand flash

Storage I/O trends

DRAM, DIMM, DDR3, nand flash memory, SSD, stating what’s often assumed

Often what’s assumed is not always the case. For example in along with around server, storage and IO networking circles including virtual as well as cloud environments terms such as nand (Negated AND or NOT And) flash memory aka (Solid State Device or SSD), DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory), DDR3 (Double Data Rate 3) not to mention DIMM (Dual Inline Memory Module) get tossed around with the assumption everybody must know what they mean.

On the other hand, I find plenty of people who are not sure what those among other terms or things are, sometimes they are even embarrassed to ask, particular if they are a self-proclaimed expert.

So for those who need a refresh or primer, here you go, an excerpt from Chapter 7 (Servers – Physical, Virtual and Software) from my book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC Press) available at Amazon.com and other global venues in print and ebook formats.

7.2.2 Memory

Computers rely on some form of memory ranging from internal registers, local on-board processor Level 1 (L1) and Level 2 (L2) caches, random accessible memory (RAM), non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) or nand Flash (SSD) along with external disk storage. Memory, which includes external disk storage, is used for storing operating system software along with associated tools or utilities, application programs and data. Main memory or RAM, also known as dynamic RAM (DRAM) chips, is packaged in different ways with a common form being dual inline memory modules (DIMMs) for notebook or laptop, desktop PC and servers.

RAM main memory on a server is the fastest form of memory, second only to internal processor or chip based registers, L1, L2 or local memory. RAM and processor based memories are volatile and non-persistent in that when power is removed, the contents of memory are lost. As a result, some form of persistent memory is needed to keep programs and data when power is removed. Read only memory (ROM) and NVRAM are both persistent forms of memory in that their contents are not lost when power is removed. The amount of RAM that can be installed into a server will vary with specific architecture implementation and operating software being used. In addition to memory capacity and packaging format, the speed of memory is also important to be able to move data and programs quickly to avoid internal bottlenecks. Memory bandwidth performance increases with the width of the memory bus in bits and frequency in MHz. For example, moving 8 bytes on a 64 bit buss in parallel at the same time at 100MHz provides a theoretical 800MByte/sec speed.

To improve availability and increase the level of persistence, some servers include battery backed up RAM or cache to protect data in the event of a power loss. Another technique to protect memory data on some servers is memory mirroring where twice the amount of memory is installed and divided into two groups. Each group of memory has a copy of data being stored so that in the event of a memory failure beyond those correctable with standard parity and error correction code (ECC) no data is lost. In addition to being fast, RAM based memories are also more expensive and used in smaller quantities compared to external persistent memories such as magnetic hard disk drives, magnetic tape or optical based memory medias.

Memory diagram
Memory and Storage Pyramid

The above shows a tiered memory model that may look familiar as the bottom part is often expanded to show tiered storage. At the top of the memory pyramid is high-speed processor memory followed by RAM, ROM, NVRAM and FLASH along with many forms of external memory commonly called storage. More detail about tiered storage is covered in chapter 8 (Data Storage – Data Storage – Disk, Tape, Optical, and Memory). In addition to being slower and lower cost than RAM based memories, disk storage along with NVRAM and FLASH based memory devices are also persistent.

By being persistent, when power is removed, data is retained on the storage or memory device. Also shown in the above figure is that on a relative basis, less energy is used for power storage or memory at the bottom of the pyramid than for upper levels where performance increases. From a PCFE (Power, Cooling, Floor space, Economic) perspective, balancing memory and storage performance, availability, capacity and energy to a given function, quality of service and service level objective for a given cost needs to be kept in perspective and not considering simply the lowest cost for the most amount of memory or storage. In addition to gauging memory on capacity, other metrics include percent used, operating system page faults and page read/write operations along with memory swap activity as well memory errors.

Base 2 versus base 10 numbering systems can account for some storage capacity that appears to “missing” when real storage is compared to what is expected to be seen. Disk drive manufacturers use base 10 (decimal) to count bytes of data while memory chip, server and operating system vendors typically use base 2 (binary) to count bytes of data. This has led to confusion when comparing a disk drive base 10 GB with a chip memory base 2 GB of memory capacity, such as 1,000,000,000 (10^9) bytes versus 1,073,741,824 (2^30) bytes. Nomenclature based on the International System of Units uses MiB, GiB and TiB to denote million, billion and trillion bytes for base 2 numbering with base 10 using MB, TB and GB . Most vendors do document how many bytes, sometimes in both base 2 and base 10, as well as the number of 512 byte sectors supported on their storage devices and storage systems, though it might be in the small print.

Related more reading:
How much storage performance do you want vs. need?
Can RAID extend the life of nand flash SSD?
Can we get a side of context with them IOPS and other storage metrics?
SSD & Real Estate: Location, Location, Location
What is the best kind of IO? The one you do not have to do
SSD, flash and DRAM, DejaVu or something new?

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).

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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How much storage performance do you want vs. need?

Storage I/O trends

How much storage I/O performance do you want vs. need?

The answer to how much storage I/O performance you need vs. want probably depends on cost, for which applications along with benefit among other things.

Storage I/O performance
View Part II: How many IOPS can a HDD, HHDD or SSD do with VMware?

I did a piece over at 21cit titled Parsing the Need for Speed in Storage that looks at those and other related themes including metrics that matter across tiered storage.

Here is an excerpt:

Can storage speed be too fast? Or, put another away, how do you decide a return on investments or innovation from the financial resources you spend on storage and the various technologies that go into storage performance.

Think about it: Fast storage needs fast servers, IO and networking interfaces, software, firmware, hypervisors, operating systems, drivers, and a file system or database, along with applications. Then there are the other buzzword bingo technologies that are also factors, among them fast storage DRAM and flash Solid State Devices (SSD).

Some questions to ask about storage I/O performance include among others:

  • How do response time, latency, and think or wait-times effect your environment and applications?
  • Do you know the location of your storage or data center performance bottlenecks?
  • If you remove bottlenecks in storage systems or appliances as well as in the data path, how will your application or the CPU in the server it runs on behave?
  • If your application server is currently showing high CPU due to the system overhead of having to wait for storage I/Os, you may see a positive improvement.
  • If more real work can be done now, will all of the components be ready to support each other without creating a new bottleneck?
  • Also speaking of storage I/O performance, how about can we get a side of context with them IOPs and other metrics that matter!

So how about it, how much performance, for primary, secondary, backup, cloud or virtual storage do you want vs. need?

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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Can RAID extend the life of nand flash SSD?

Storage I/O trends

Can RAID extend nand flash SSD life?

Imho, the short answer is YES, under some circumstances.

There is a myth and some FUD that RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) can shorten the life durability of nand flash SSD (Solid State Device) vs. HDD (Hard Disk Drives) due to extra IOP’s. The reality is that depending on how configured, RAID level, implementation and other factors, nand flash SSD can be extended as I discuss in this here video.

Video

Nand flash SSD cells and wear

First, there is a myth that nand flash SSD does not have moving parts like hard disk drives (HDD’s) thus do not wear out or break. That is just a myth in that nand flash by its nature wears out with write usage. This is due to how they store data in cells that have a rated number of program erase (P/E) cycles that vary by type of medium. For example, Single Level Cell (SLC) has a longer P/E life duration vs. Multi-Level Cells (MLC) and eMLC that stack multiple cells together.

There are a number of factors that contribute to nand flash wear, also known as duty cycle or durability tied to P/E. For example, some storage systems or controllers do a better job both at the lower level flash translation layer (FTL) in addition to controllers, firmware, caching using DRAM and IO optimization such as write ordering or grouping.

Now what about this RAID and SSD thing?

Ok first as a recap keep in mind that there are many RAID levels along with variations, enhancements and where, or how implemented ranging from software to hardware, adapters to controllers to storage systems.

In the case of RAID 1 or mirroring, just like replication or other one to one or one too many copy operation a write to one device is echoed to another. In the case of RAID 5, data is spread across drives and parity; however, the parity is rotated across all drives in an equal manner.

Some FUD or myths or misunderstandings come into play is that not all RAID 5 implementations as an example are not the same. Some do a better job of buffering or caching data in battery protected mirrored DRAM memory until a full stripe write can occur, or if needed, a partial write.

Another attribute is the chunk or shard size (how much data is sent to each drive member) along with the stripe width (how many drives). Some systems have narrow stripes of say 3+1 or 4+1 or 5+1 while others can be 14+1 or 15+1 or wider. Thus, data can be written across a wider number of drives reducing the P/E consumption or use of a single drive depending on implementation.

How about RAID 6 (dual parity)?

Same thing, it is a matter of how well the implementation is, how the write gathering is done and so forth.

What about RAID wearing out nand flash SSD?

While it is possible that it has or can occur depending on type of RAID implementation, lack of caching or optimization, configuration, type of SSD, RAID level and other things, in general I will say myth busted.

Want some proof?

I could go through a long technical proof point and citing lots of facts, figures, experts and so forth leaving you all silenced and dazed similar to the students listening to Ben Stein in Ferris Buelers day off (Click here to see what I mean) asking “anybody anybody Buleler?

Ben Stein via https://nostagjicmoviesandthings.blogspot.com
Image via nostagjicmoviesandthings.blogspot.com

How about some simple SSD and storage math?

On a very conservative basis, my estimate is that around 250PB of nand flash SSD drives are shipped and installed on a revenue basis attached to or in storage systems and appliances. Combine what Dell + DotHill + EMC + Fujitsu + HDS + HP + IBM (including TMS) + NEC + NetApp + NEC + Oracle among other legacy along with new all flash as well as hybrid vendors (e.g. Cloudbyte, FusionIO (Via their Nexgen acquisition), Kaminario, Greenbytes, Nutanix or Nimble, Purestorage, Starboard or Solidfire, Tegile or Tintri, Violin or Whiptail among others).

It is also a safe assumption based on how customers configure and use those and other storage systems is with some form of RAID. Thus if things were as bad as some researchers were, vendors and their pundits have made them out to be, wouldn’t’t we be hearing of those issues?

Is it just a RAID 5 problem and that RAID 6 magically corrects the problem?

Well, that depends on apples to apples vs. apples to oranges comparisons.

For example if you are using a 14+2 (16 drive) RAID 6 to compare to say a 3+1 (4 drive) RAID 5 that is not a fair comparison. Granted, it is a handy one if you are a vendor that supports wider RAID groups, stripes and ranks vs. those who do not. However also keep in mind that some legacy vendors actually also support wide stripes and RAID groups.

So in some cases the magic is not in the RAID level, rather the implementation or how configured or lack thereof.

Video

Watch this TechTarget produced video recorded live while I was at EMCworld 2013 to learn more.

Otherwise, 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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Virtual, Cloud and IT Availability, its a shared responsibility and common sense

IT Availability, it’s a shared responsibility and common sense

In case you missed it, recently the State of Oregon had a data center computer problem (ok, storage and application outage) that resulted in unemployment benefits not being provided. Tony Knotzer over at Network Computing did a story Oregon Storage Debacle Highlights Need To Plan For Failure and asked me for some perspectives that you can read here.

Data center

The reason I bring this incident up is not to join in the feeding frenzy that usually occurs when something like this happens, instead, to touch on what should be common. What is lacking at times (or more needed) is common sense when it comes to designing and managing flexible scalable data infrastructures.

“Fundamental IT 101 is that all technology will fail, despite what the vendors tell you,” Schulz said. And the most likely time technology will fail, he notes, is when people are involved — doing configurations, making changes or updates, or performing upgrades. – Via Network Computing

Note that while any technology can or has fail at some point, how it fails along with fault containment via design best practices and vendor resolution are important.

Good vendors learn and correct things so that they don’t happen again as well as work with customers on best practices to isolate and contain faults from expanding into disasters. Thus when a sales or marketing person tries to tell me that they have never had a failure I wonder if a: they are making something up, b: have not actually shipped to a customer in production, c: not aware of other deployments, d: towing the company line, e: too good to be true or f: all the above.

People talking

On the other hand, when a vendor tells me how they have resiliency in their product as well as processes, best practices and can even tell me (public or under NDA) how they have addressed issues, then they have my attention.

A common challenge today is cost cutting along with focus on the newest technology from servers to storage, networking to cloud, virtualization and software defined among other buzzword bingo themes and trends.

buzzword bingo

What also gets overlooked as mentioned above is common sense.

Perhaps if somebody could package and launch a good public relations campaign profiling common sense such as Software Defined Common Sense (SDCS) that might help?

On the other hand, similar to public service announcements (PSA) that may seem like common sense to some, there is a reason they are being done. That is to pass on the information to others who may not know about it thus lack what is perceived as common sense.

Lets get back to the state of Oregon’s computer systems issues and the blame game.

You know the blame game? That is when something happens or does not happen as you want it to simply find somebody else to blame or pivot and point a finger elsewhere.

the blame game

While perhaps good for CYA, the blame games usually does not help to prevent something happening again, or in the first place.

Hence in my comments about the state of Oregon computer storage system problems, I took the tone of what is common these days of no fault, shared responsibility and blame.

In other words does not matter who did what first or did not do, both sides could have prevented it.

For some this might resonate of it does not matter who misbehaved in the sandbox or play room, everybody gets a time out.

This is not to say that one side or the other has to assume or take on more blame or responsibility than the other, rather there is a shared responsibility to look out for each other.

Storage I/O trends

Just like when you drive a car, the education focus is on defensive safe driving to watch out for what the other person might do or not do (e.g. use turn signals or too busy to look in a mirror while talking or texting and driving among other things). The goal is to prevent accidents by watching out for those who are not taking responsibilities for themselves, not to mention learning from others mishaps.

teamwork
Working together vs. the blame game

Different views of customer vs. vendor

Having been a customer, as well as a vendor in the past not surprisingly I have some different views on this.

Sure the customer or client is always right, however sometimes there needs to be unpleasant conversations to help the customer help themselves, or keep themselves out of trouble.

Likewise a vendor may also take the blame when something does go wrong, even if it was entirely not their own fault just to stay in good graces with the customer or get that next deal.

Sometimes a vendor deserves to get beat up when something goes wrong, or at a least tell their story including if needed behind closed doors or under NDA. Likewise to have a meaningful relationship or partnership with the vendor, supplier or VAR, there needs to be trust and confidence which means not everything gets put out for media or blog venues to feed on.

Sure there is explaining what happened without spin, however there is also learning from mistakes to prevent them from happening which should be common sense. If part of that sharing of blame and responsibility requires being not in public that’s fine, as well as enough information of what happened is conveyed to clarify concerns and create confidence.

With vendor lockin, when I was a customer some taught that it’s the vendors fault (or for CYA, blame them), as a vendor the thinking was enforced that the customer is always right and its the competition who causes lockin.

As an analyst advisory consulting, my thinking not surprisingly is that of shared responsibility.

This means only you can allow vendor lockin, not to mention decide if lockin is bad or not.

Likewise only you can prevent data loss in cloud, virtual or traditional environments which also includes loss of access.

Granted somebody higher up the organization structure may over-ride you, however ask yourself if you did what was needed?

Likewise if a vendor is going to be doing some maintenance work in the middle of the week and there is a risk of something happening, even if they have told or sold you there is no single point of failure (NSPOF), or non disruptive upgrades.

Anytime there is a person involved regardless of if hardware, cables, software, firmware, configurations or physical environments something can happen. If the vendor drops the ball or a cable or card or something else and causes an outage or downtime, it is their responsibility to discuss those issues. However it is also the customers responsibility to discuss why they let the vendor do something during that time without taking adequate precautions. Likewise if the storage system was a single point of failure for an important system, then there is the responsibility to discuss the cost cutting concerns of others and have them justify why a redundant solution is not needed (that’s CYA 101 btw ).

Some other common sense tips

For some these might be familiar and if so, are they being done, and for others, perhaps they are new or revolutionary.

In the race to jump to a new technology or vendor, what are the unknowns? For example you may know what the issues or flaws are in an existing systems, solution, product, service or vendor, however what about the new one? Will you be the production beta customer and if so, how can you mitigate any risk?

Ask vendors tough, yet fair questions that are relevant to your needs and requirements including how they handle updates, upgrades and other tasks. Don’t be afraid to go under NDA if needed to get a better view of where they are at, have been and going to avoid surprises.

If this is not common IT sense, then take the responsibility to learn.

On the other hand, if this is common sense, take the responsibility to share and help others learn what it is that you know.

Also understand your availability needs and wants as well as balance those with costs along with risks. If something can go wrong it will if people are involved, thus design for resiliency including maintenance to offset applicable threat risks. Remember in the data center not everything is the same.

Storage I/O trends

Here is my point.

There is enough blame as well as accolades to go around, however take some shared responsibility and use it wisely.

Likewise in the race to cut cost, watch out for causing problems that compromise your information systems or services.

Look into removing complexity and costs without compromise which has long-term benefits vs. simply cutting costs.

Here are some related links and perspectives:
Don’t Let Clouds Scare You Be Prepared
Cloud conversation, Thanks Gartner for saying what has been said
Cloud conversations: Gaining cloud confidence from insights into AWS outages (Part II)
Make Your Company Ready for the Cloud
What do you do when your service provider drops the ball
People, Not Tech, Prevent IT Convergence
Pulling Together a Converged Team
Speaking of lockin, does software eliminate or move the location of vendor lock-in?

Ok, nuff said for now, what say you?

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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Cloud, Virtual, Server, Storage I/O and other technology tiering

Storage I/O trends

Tiering technology and the right data center tool for a given task

Depending on who or what is your sphere of influence, or your sources of information and insight are, there will be different views of tiering, particular when it comes to tiered storage and storage tiering for cloud, virtual and traditional environments.

Recently I did piece over at 21st century IT (21cit) titled Tiered Storage Explained that looks at both tiered storage and storage tiering (e.g. movement and migration, automated or manual) that you can read here.

In the data center (or information factory) everything is not the same as different applications have various performance, availability, capacity and economics among other requirements. Consequently there are different levels or categories of service along with associated tiers of technology to support them, more on these in few moments.

Technology tiering is all around you

Tiering is not unique to Information Technology (IT) as it is more common than you may realize, granted, not always called tiering per say. For example there are different tiers of transportation (beside public or private, shared or single use) ranging from planes, trains, bicycles and boats among others.

Dutch BikesDutch TrainAirbus A330Gondola
Tiered transportation (Bikes, Trains, Planes, Gondolas)

Storage I/O trends

Moving beyond IT (we will get back to that shortly), there are other examples of tiered technologies. For example I live in the Stillwater / Minneapolis Minnesota area thus have a need for different types of snow movement and management tools, after all, not all snow situations are the same.

Snow plow
Tiered snow movement technology (Different tools for various tasks)

The other part of the year when the snow is not actually accumulating or the St. Croix river is not frozen which on a good year can be from March to November, its fishing time. That means having different types of fishing rods rigged for various things such as casting, trolling or jigging, not to mention big fish or little fish, something like how a golfer has different clubs. While like a golfer a single fishing rod can do the task, it’s not as practical thus different tools for various tasks.

Kyak FishingWalleye FishBig Fish
Different sizes and types of fish


Speaking of transportation and automobiles, there are also various metrics some of which have a correlation to Data Center energy use and effectiveness, not to mention EPA Energy Star for Data Centers and Data Center Storage.


Storage I/O trends

Technology tiering in and around the data center

IT data center

Now let’s get back to technology tiering the data center (or information factory) including tiered storage and storage tiering (here’s link to the tiered storage explained piece I mentioned earlier). The three primary building blocks for IT services are processing or compute (e.g. servers, workstations), networking or connectivity and storage that include hardware, software, management tools and applications. These resources in turn get accessed by yes you guessed it, different tiers or categories of devices from mobile smart phones, tablets, laptops, workstations or terminals browsers, applets and other presentation services.

IT building blocks, server, storage, networks

Lets focus on storage for a bit (pun intended)

Keep in mind that not everything is the same in the data center from a performance, availability, capacity and economic perspective. This means different threat risks to protect applications and data against, performance or space capacity needs among others.

data protection tiers
Avoid treating all threat risks the same, tiered data protection

Tiered data protection
Part of modernizing data protection is aligning various tools and technologies to meet different requirements including Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) along with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLO’s).

In addition to protecting data and applications to meet various needs, there are also tiered storage mediums or media (e.g. HDD, SSD, Tape) along with storage systems.

Storage Tiers
Storage I/O trends

Excerpt, Chapter 9: Storage Services and Systems from my book Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking book (CRC Press) available via Amazon (also Kindle) and other venues.

9.2 Tiered Storage

Tiered storage is often referred to by the type of disk drives or media, by the price band, by the architecture or by its target use (online for files, emails and databases; near line for reference or backup; offline for archive). The intention of tiered storage is to configure various types of storage systems and media for different levels of performance, availability, capacity and energy or economics (PACE) capabilities to meet a given set of application service requirements. Other storage mediums such as HDD, SSD, magnetic tape and optical storage devices are also used in tiered storage.

Storage tiering can mean different things to different people. For some it is describing storage or storage systems tied to business, application or information services delivery functional need. Others classify storage tiers by price band or how much the solution costs. For others it’s the size or capacity or functionality. Another way to think of tiering is by where it will be used such as on-line, near-line or off-line (primary, secondary or tertiary). Price bands are a way of categorizing disk storage systems based on price to align with various markets and usage scenarios. For example consumer, small office home office (SOHO) and low-end SMB in a price band of under $5,000 USD, mid to high-end SMB in middle price bands from $50,000 to $100,000 range, and small to large enterprise systems ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars.

Another method of classification is by high performance active or high-capacity inactive or idle. Storage tiering is also used in the context of different mediums such as high performance solid state devices (SSD) or 15,500 revolution per minute (15.5K RPM) SAS of Fibre Channel hard disk drives (HDD), or slower 7.2K and 10K high-capacity SAS and SATA drives or magnetic tape. Yet another category is internal dedicated, external shared, networked and cloud accessible using different protocols and interfaces. Adding to the confusion are marketing approaches that emphasize functionality as defining a tier in trying to standout and differentiate above competition. In other words, if you can’t beat someone in a given category or classification then just create a new one.

Another dimension of tiered storage is tiered access, meaning the type of storage I/O interface and protocol or access method used for storing and retrieving data. For example, high-speed 8Gb Fibre Channel (8GFC) and 10GbE Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) versus older and slower 4GFC or low-cost 1Gb Ethernet (1GbE) or high performance 10GbE based iSCSI for shared storage access or serial attached SCSI (SAS) for direct attached storage (DAS) or shared storage between a pair of clustered servers. Additional examples of tiered access include file or NAS based access of storage using network file system (NFS) or Windows-based Common Internet File system (CIFS) file sharing among others.

Different categories of storage systems, also called tiered storage systems, combine various tiered storage mediums with tiered access and tiered data protection. For example, tiered data protection includes local and remote mirroring, in different RAID levels, point-in-time (pit) copies or snapshots and other forms of securing and maintaining data integrity to meet various service level, RTO and RPO requirements. Regardless of the approach or taxonomy, ultimately, tiered servers, tiered hypervisors, tiered networks, tiered storage and tiered data protection are about and need to map back to the business and applications functionality.

Storage I/O trends

There is more to storage tiering which includes movement or migration of data (manually or automatically) across various types of storage devices or systems. For example EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering), HDS Dynamic Tiering, IBM Easy Tier (and here), and NetApp Virtual Storage Tier (replaces what was known as Automated Storage Tiering) among others.

Likewise there are different types of storage systems or appliances from primary to secondary as well as for backup and archiving.

Then there are also markets or price bands (cost) for various storage systems solutions to meet different needs.

Needless to say there is plenty more to tiered storage and storage tiering for later conversations.

However for now check out the following related links:
Non Disruptive Updates, Needs vs. Wants (Requirements vs. wish lists)
Tiered Hypervisors and Microsoft Hyper-V (Different types or classes of Hypervisors for various needs)
tape summit resources (Using different types or tiers of storage)
EMC VMAX 10K, looks like high-end storage systems are still alive (Tiered storage systems)
Storage comments from the field and customers in the trenches (Various perspectives on tools and technology)
Green IT, Green Gap, Tiered Energy and Green Myths (Energy avoidance vs. energy effectiveness and tiering)
Has SSD put Hard Disk Drives (HDD’s) On Endangered Species List? (Tiered storage systems and devices)
Tiered Storage, Systems and Mediums (Storage Tiering and Tiered Storage)
Cloud, virtualization, Storage I/O trends for 2013 and beyond (Industry Trends and Perspectives)
Amazon cloud storage options enhanced with Glacier (Tiered Cloud Storage)
Garbage data in, garbage information out, big data or big garbage? (How much data are your preserving or hoarding?)Saving Money with Green IT: Time To Invest In Information Factories
I/O Virtualization (IOV) and Tiered Storage Access (Tiered storage access)
EMC VFCache respinning SSD and intelligent caching (Storage and SSD tiering including caching
Green and SASy = Energy and Economic, Effective Storage (Tired storage devices)
EMC Evolves Enterprise Data Protection with Enhancements (Tiered data protection)
Inside the Virtual Data Center (Data Center and Technology Tiering)
Airport Parking, Tiered Storage and Latency (Travel and Technology, Cost and Latency)
Tiered Storage Strategies (Comments on Storage Tiering)
Tiered Storage: Excerpt from Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, see more here)
Using SAS and SATA for tiered storage (SAS and SATA Storage Devices)
The Right Storage Option Is Important for Big Data Success (Big Data and Storage)
VMware vSphere v5 and Storage DRS (VMware vSphere and Storage Tiers)
Tiered Communication and Media Venues (Social and Traditional Media for IT)
Tiered Storage Explained

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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Non Disruptive Updates, Needs vs. Wants

Storage I/O trends

Do you want non disruptive updates or do you need non disruptive upgrades?

First there is a bit of play on words going on here with needs vs. wants, as well as what is meant by non disruptive.

Regarding needs vs. wants, they are often used interchangeably particular in IT when discussing requirements or what the customer would like to have. The key differentiator is that a need is something that is required and somehow cost justified, or hopefully easier than a want item. A want or like to have item is simply that, its not a need however it could add value being a benefit although may be seen as discretionary.

There is also a bit of play on words with non disruptive updates or upgrades that can take on different meanings or assumptions. For example my Windows 7 laptop has automatic Microsoft updates enabled some of which can be applied while I work. On the other hand, some of those updates may be applied while I work however they may not take effect until I reboot or exit and restart an application.

This is not unique to Windows as my Ubuntu and Centos Linux systems can also apply updates, and in some cases a reboot might be required, same with my VMware environment. Lets not forget about applying new firmware to a server, or workstation, laptop or other device, along with networking routers, switches and related devices. Storage is also not immune as new software or firmware can be applied to a HDD or SSD (traditional or NVMe), either by your workstation, laptop, server or storage system. Speaking of storage systems, they too have new software or firmware that gets updated.

Storage I/O trends

The common theme here though is if the code (e.g. software, firmware, microcode, flash update, etc) can be applied non disruptive something known as non disruptive code load, followed by activation. With activation, the code may have been applied while the device or software was in use, however may need a reboot or restart. With non disruptive code activation, there should not be a disruption to what is being done when the new software takes effect.

This means that if a device supports non disruptive code load (NDCL) updates along with non disruptive code activation (NDCA), the upgrade can occur without disruption or having to wait for a reboot.

Which is better?

That depends, I want NDCA, however for many things I only need NDCL.

On the other hand, depending on what you need, perhaps it is both NDCL and NDCA, however also keep in mind needs vs. wants.

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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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As the platters spin, HDD’s for cloud, virtual and traditional storage environments

HDDs for cloud, virtual and traditional storage environments

Storage I/O trends

Updated 1/23/2018

As the platters spin is a follow-up to a recent series of posts on Hard Disk Drives (HDD’s) along with some posts about How Many IOPS HDD’s can do.

HDD and storage trends and directions include among others

HDD’s will continue to be declared dead into the next decade, just as they have been for over a decade, meanwhile they are being enhanced, continued to be used in evolving roles.

hdd and ssd

SSD will continue to coexist with HDD, either as separate or converged HHDD’s. Where, where and how they are used will also continue to evolve. High IO (IOPS) or low latency activity will continue to move to some form of nand flash SSD (PCM around the corner), while storage capacity including some of which has been on tape stays on disk. Instead of more HDD capacity in a server, it moves to a SAN or NAS or to a cloud or service provider. This includes for backup/restore, BC, DR, archive and online reference or what some call active archives.

The need for storage spindle speed and more

The need for faster revolutions per minute (RPM’s) performance of drives (e.g. platter spin speed) is being replaced by SSD and more robust smaller form factor (SFF) drives. For example, some of today’s 2.5” SFF 10,000 RPM (e.g. 10K) SAS HDD’s can do as well or better than their larger 3.5” 15K predecessors can for both IOPS and bandwidth. This is also an example where the RPM speed of a drive may not be the only determination for performance as it has been in the past.


Performance comparison of four different drive types, click to view larger image.

The need for storage space capacity and areal density

In terms of storage enhancements, watch for the appearance of Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) enabled HDD’s to help further boost the space capacity in the same footprint. Using SMR HDD manufactures can put more bits (e.g. areal density) into the same physical space on a platter.


Traditional vs. SMR to increase storage areal density capacity

The generic idea with SMR is to increase areal density (how many bits can be safely stored per square inch) of data placed on spinning disk platter media. In the above image on the left is a representative example of how traditional magnetic disk media lays down tracks next to each other. With traditional magnetic recording approaches, the tracks are placed as close together as possible for the write heads to safely write data.

With new recording formats such as SMR along with improvements to read/write heads, the tracks can be more closely grouped together in an overlapping way. This overlapping way (used in a generic sense) is like how the shingles on a roof overlap, hence Shingled Magnetic Recording. Other magnetic recording or storage enhancements in the works include Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Helium filed drives. Thus, there is still plenty of bits and bytes room for growth in HDD’s well into the next decade to co-exist and complement SSD’s.

DIF and AF (Advanced Format), or software defining the drives

Another evolving storage feature that ties into HDD’s is Data Integrity Feature (DIF) that has a couple of different types. Depending on which type of DIF (0, 1, 2, and 3) is used; there can be added data integrity checks from the application to the storage medium or drive beyond normal functionality. Here is something to keep in mind, as there are different types or levels of DIF, when somebody says they support or need DIF, ask them which type or level as well as why.

Are you familiar with Advanced Format (AF)? If not you should be. Traditionally outside of special formats for some operating systems or controllers, that standard open system data storage block, page or sector has been 512 bytes. This has served well in the past, however; with the advent of TByte and larger sized drives, a new mechanism is needed. The need is to support both larger average data allocation sizes from operating systems and storage systems, as well as to cut the overhead of managing all the small sectors. Operating systems and file systems have added new partitioning features such as GUID Partition Table (GPT) to support 1TB and larger SSD, HDD and storage system LUN’s.

These enhancements are enabling larger devices to be used in place of traditional Master Boot Record (MBR) or other operating system partition and allocation schemes. The next step, however, is to teach operating systems, file systems, and hypervisors along with their associated tools or drives how to work with 4,096 byte or 4 Kbyte sectors. The advantage will be to cut the overhead of tracking all of those smaller sectors or file system extents and clusters. Today many HDD’s support AF however by default may have 512-byte emulation mode enabled due to lack of operating system or other support.

Intelligent Power Management, moving beyond drive spin down

Intelligent Power Management (IPM) is a collection of techniques that can be applied to vary the amount of energy consumed by a drive, controller or processor to do its work. These include in the case of an HDD slowing the spin rate of platters, however, keep in mind that mass in motion tends to stay in motion. This means that HDD’s once up and spinning do not need as much relative power as they function like a flywheel. Where their power draw comes in is during reading and write, in part to the movement of reading/write heads, however also for running the processors and electronics that control the device. Another big power consumer is when drives spin up, thus if they can be kept moving, however at a lower rate, along with disabling energy used by read/write heads and their electronics, you can see a drop in power consumption. Btw, a current generation 3.5” 4TB 6Gbs SATA HDD consumes about 6-7 watts of power while in active use, or less when in idle mode. Likewise a current generation high performance 2.5” 1.2TB HDD consumes about 4.8 watts of energy, a far cry from the 12-16 plus watts of energy some use as HDD fud.

Hybrid Hard Disk Drives (HHDD) and Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSDHD)

Hybrid HDD’s (HHDD’s) also known as Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD) have been around for a while and if you have read my earlier posts, you know that I have been a user and fan of them for several years. However one of the drawbacks of the HHDD’s has been lack of write acceleration, (e.g. they only optimize for reads) with some models. Current and emerging HDDD’s are appearing with a mix of nand flash SLC (used in earlier versions), MLC and eMLC along with DRAM while enabling write optimization. There are also more drive options available as HHDD’s from different manufactures both for desktop and enterprise class scenarios.

The challenge with HHDD’s is that many vendors either do not understand how they fit and compliment their tiering or storage management software tools or simply do not see the value proposition. I have had vendors and others tell me that the HHDD’s don’t make sense as they are too simple, how can they be a fit without requiring tiering software, controllers, SSD and HDD’s to be viable?

Storage I/O trends

I also see a trend similar to when the desktop high-capacity SATA drives appeared for enterprise-class storage systems in the early 2000s. Some of the same people did not see where or how a desktop class product or technology could ever be used in an enterprise solution.

Hmm, hey wait a minute, I seem to recall similar thinking when SCSI drives appeared in the early 90s, funny how some things do not change, DejaVu anybody?

Does that mean HHDD’s will be used everywhere?

Not necessarily, however, there will be places where they make sense, others where either an HDD or SSD will be more practical.

Networking with your server and storage

Drive native interfaces near-term will remain as 6Gbs (going to 12Gbs) SAS and SATA with some FC (you might still find a parallel SCSI drive out there). Likewise, with bridges or interface cards, those drives may appear as USB or something else.

What about SCSI over PCIe, will that catch on as a drive interface? Tough to say however I am sure we can find some people who will gladly try to convince you of that. FC based drives operating at 4Gbs FC (4GFC) are still being used for some environments however most activity is shifting over to SAS and SATA. SAS and SATA are switching over from 3Gbs to 6Gbs with 12Gbs SAS on the roadmaps.

So which drive is best for you?

That depends; do you need bandwidth or IOPS, low latency or high capacity, small low profile thin form factor or feature functions? Do you need a hybrid or all SSD or a self-encrypting device (SED) also known as Instant Secure Erase (ISE), these are among your various options.

Disk drives

Why the storage diversity?

Simple, some are legacy soon to be replaced and disposed of while others are newer. I also have a collection so to speak that get used for various testing, research, learning and trying things out. Click here and here to read about some of the ways I use various drives in my VMware environment including creating Raw Device Mapped (RDM) local SAS and SATA devices.

Other capabilities and functionality existing or being added to HDD’s include RAID and data copy assist; securely erase, self-encrypting, vibration dampening among other abilities for supporting dense data environments.

Where To Learn More

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

Do not judge a drive only by its interface, space capacity, cost or RPM alone. Look under the cover a bit to see what is inside in terms of functionality, performance, and reliability among other options to fit your needs. After all, in the data center or information factory not everything is the same.

From a marketing and fun to talk about new technology perspective, HDD’s might be dead for some. The reality is that they are very much alive in physical, virtual and cloud environments, granted their role is changing.

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Seagate provides proof of life: Enterprise HDD enhancements

Storage I/O trends

Proof of life: Enterprise Hard Disk Drives (HDD’s) are enhanced

Last week while hard disk drive (HDD) competitor Western Digital (WD) was announcing yet another (Velobit) in a string of acquisitions ( e.g. earlier included Stec, Arkeia) and investments (Skyera), Seagate announced new enterprise class HDD’s to their portfolio. Note that it was only two years ago that WD acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) the disk drive manufacturing business of Hitachi Ltd. (not to be confused with HDS).

Seagate

Similar to WD expanding their presence in the growing nand flash SSD market, Seagate also in May of this year extended their existing enterprise class SSD portfolio. These enhancements included new drives with 12Gbs SAS interface, along with a partnership (and investment) with PCIe flash card startup vendor Virident. Other PCIe flash SSD card vendors (manufacturers and OEMs) include Cisco, Dell, EMC, FusionIO, HP, IBM, LSI, Micron, NetApp and Oracle among others.

These new Seagate enterprise class HDD’s are designed for use in cloud and traditional data center servers and storage systems. A month or two ago Seagate also announced new ultra-thin (5mm) client (aka desktop) class HDD’s along with a 3.5 inch 4TB video optimized HDD. The video optimized HDD’s are intended for Digital Video Recorders (DVR’s), Set Top Boxes (STB’s) or other similar applications.

What was announced?

Specifically what Seagate announced were two enterprise class drives, one for performance (e.g. 1.2TB 10K) and the other for space capacity (e.g. 4TB).

 

Enterprise High Performance 10K.7 (aka formerly known as Savio)

Enterprise Terascale (aka formerly known as constellation)

Class/category

Enterprise / High Performance

Enterprise High Capacity

Form factor

2.5” Small Form Factor (SFF)

3.5”

Interface

6Gbs SAS

6Gbs SATA

Space capacity

1,200GB (1.2TB)

4TB

RPM speed

10,000

5,900

Average seek

2.9 ms

12 ms

DRAM cache

64MB

64MB

Power idle / operating

4.8 watts

5.49 / 6.49 watts

Intelligent Power Management (IPM)

Yes – Seagate PowerChoice

Yes – Seagate PowerChoice

Warranty

Limited 5 years

Limited 3 years

Instant Secure Erase (ISE)

Yes

Optional

Other features

RAID Rebuild assist, Self-Encrypting Device (SED)

Advanced Format (AF) 4K block in addition to standard 512 byte sectors

Use cases

Replace earlier generation 3.5” 15K SAS and Fibre Channel HDD’s for higher performance applications including file systems, databases where SSD are not practical fit.

Backup and data protection, replication, copy operations for erasure coding and data dispersal, active in dormant archives, unstructured NAS, big data, data warehouse, cloud and object storage.

Note the Seagate Terascale has a disk rotation speed of 5,900 (5.9K RPM) which is not a typo given the more traditional 5.4K RPM drives. This slight increase in performance from 5.4K to 5.9K should give when combined with other enhancements (e.g. firmware, electronics) to boost performance for higher capacity workloads.

Let us watch for some performance numbers to be published by Seagate or others. Note that I have not had a chance to try these new drives yet, however look forward to getting my hands on them (among others) sometime in the future for a test drive to add to the growing list found here (hey Seagate and WD, that’s a hint ;) ).

What this all means?

Storage I/O trends

Wait, weren’t HDD’s supposed to be dead or dying?

Some people just like new and emerging things and thus will declare anything existing or that they have lost interest in (or their jobs need it) as old, boring or dead.

For example if you listen to some, they may say nand flash SSD are also dead or dying. For what it is worth, imho nand flash-based SSDs still have a bright future in front of them even with new technologies emerging as they will take time to mature (read more here or listen here).

However, the reality is that for at least the next decade, like them or not, HDD’s will continue to play a role that is also evolving. Thus, these and other improvements with HDD’s will be needed until current nand flash or emerging PCM (Phase Change Memory) among other forms of SSD are capable of picking up all the storage workloads in a cost-effective way.

Btw, yes, I am also a fan and user of nand flash-based SSD’s, in addition to HDD’s and see roles for both as being viable complementing each other for traditional, virtual and cloud environments.

In short, HDD’s will keep spinning (pun intended) for some time granted their roles and usage will also evolve similar to that of tape summit resources.

Storage I/O trends

With this announcement by Seagate along with other enhancements from WD show that the HDD will not only see its 60th birthday, (and here), it will probably also easily see its 70th and not from the comfort of a computer museum. The reason is that there is yet another wave of HDD improvements just around the corner including Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) (more info here) along with Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) among others. Watch for more on HAMR and SMR in future posts. With these and other enhancements, we should be able to see a return to the rapid density improvements with HDD’s observed during the mid to late 2000 era when Perpendicular recording became available.

What is up with this ISE stuff is that the same as what Xiotech (e.g. XIO) had?

Is this the same technology that Xiotech (now Xio) referred to the ISE the answer is no. This Seagate ISE is for fast secure erase of data on disk. The benefit of Instant Secure Erase (ISE) is to cut from hours or days the time required to erase a drive for secure disposal to seconds (or less). For those environments that already factor drives erase time as part of those overall costs, this can increase the useful time in service to help improve TCO and ROI.

Wait a minute, aren’t slower RPM’s supposed to be lower performance?

Some of you might be wondering or asking the question of wait, how can a 10,000 revolution per minute (10K RPM) HDD be considered fast vs. a 15K HDD, let alone SSD?

Storage I/O trends

There is a trend occurring with HDD’s that the old rules of IOPS or performance being tied directly to the size and rotational speed (RPM’s) of drives, along with their interfaces. This comes down to being careful to judge a book or in this case a drive by its cover. While RPM’s do have an impact on performance, new generation drives at 10K such as some 2.5” models are delivering performance equal to or better than earlier generation 3.5” 15K device’s.

Likewise, there are similar improvements with 5.4K devices vs. previous generation 7.2K models. As you will see in some of the results found here, not all the old rules of thumbs when it comes to drive performance are still valid. Likewise, keep those metrics that matter in the proper context.


Click on above image to see various performance results

For example as seen in the results (above), the more DRAM or DDR cache on the drives has a positive impact on sequential reads which can be good news if that is what your applications need. Thus, do your homework and avoid judging a device simply by its RPM, interface or form factor.

Other considerations, temperature and vibration

Another consideration is that with increased density of more drives being placed in a given amount of space, some of which may not have the best climate controls, humidity and vibration are concerns. Thus, the importance of drives having vibration dampening or safeguards to keep up performance are important. Likewise, even though drive heads and platters are sealed, there are also considerations that need to be taken care of for humidity in data center or cloud service providers in hot environments near the equator.

If this is not connecting with you, think about how close parts of Southeast Asia and the India subcontinent are to the equator along with the rapid growth and low-cost focus occurring there. Your data center might be temperature and humidity controlled, however others who very focused on cost cutting may not be as concerned with normal facilities best practices.

What type of drives should be used for cloud, virtual and traditional storage?

Good question and one where the answer should be it depends upon what you are trying or need to do (e.g. see previous posts here or here and here (via Seagate)).For example here are some tips for big data storage and storage making decisions in general.

Disclosure

Seagate recently invited me along with several other industry analysts to their cloud storage analyst summit in San Francisco where they covered roundtrip coach airfare, lodging, airport transfers and a nice dinner at the Epic Roast house.

hdd image

I also have received in the past a couple of Momentus XT HHDD (aka SSHD) from Seagate. These are in addition to those that I bought including various Seagate, WD along with HGST, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Samsung (SSD and HDD’s) that I use for various things.

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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Can we get a side of context with them IOPS server storage metrics?

Can we get a side of context with them server storage metrics?

Whats the best server storage I/O network metric or benchmark? It depends as there needs to be some context with them IOPS and other server storage I/O metrics that matter.

There is an old saying that the best I/O (Input/Output) is the one that you do not have to do.

In the meantime, let’s get a side of some context with them IOPS from vendors, marketers and their pundits who are tossing them around for server, storage and IO metrics that matter.

Expanding the conversation, the need for more context

The good news is that people are beginning to discuss storage beyond space capacity and cost per GByte, TByte or PByte for both DRAM or nand flash Solid State Devices (SSD), Hard Disk Drives (HDD) along with Hybrid HDD (HHDD) and Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD) based solutions. This applies to traditional enterprise or SMB IT data center with physical, virtual or cloud based infrastructures.

hdd and ssd iops

This is good because it expands the conversation beyond just cost for space capacity into other aspects including performance (IOPS, latency, bandwidth) for various workload scenarios along with availability, energy effective and management.

Adding a side of context

The catch is that IOPS while part of the equation are just one aspect of performance and by themselves without context, may have little meaning if not misleading in some situations.

Granted it can be entertaining, fun to talk about or simply make good press copy for a million IOPS. IOPS vary in size depending on the type of work being done, not to mention reads or writes, random and sequential which also have a bearing on data throughout or bandwidth (Mbytes per second) along with response time. Not to mention block, file, object or blob as well as table.

However, are those million IOP’s applicable to your environment or needs?

Likewise, what do those million or more IOPS represent about type of work being done? For example, are they small 64 byte or large 64 Kbyte sized, random or sequential, cached reads or lazy writes (deferred or buffered) on a SSD or HDD?

How about the response time or latency for achieving them IOPS?

In other words, what is the context of those metrics and why do they matter?

storage i/o iops
Click on image to view more metrics that matter including IOP’s for HDD and SSD’s

Metrics that matter give context for example IO sizes closer to what your real needs are, reads and writes, mixed workloads, random or sequential, sustained or bursty, in other words, real world reflective.

As with any benchmark take them with a grain (or more) of salt, they key is use them as an indicator then align to your needs. The tool or technology should work for you, not the other way around.

Here are some examples of context that can be added to help make IOP’s and other metrics matter:

  • What is the IOP size, are they 512 byte (or smaller) vs. 4K bytes (or larger)?
  • Are they reads, writes, random, sequential or mixed and what percentage?
  • How was the storage configured including RAID, replication, erasure or dispersal codes?
  • Then there is the latency or response time and IO queue depths for the given number of IOPS.
  • Let us not forget if the storage systems (and servers) were busy with other work or not.
  • If there is a cost per IOP, is that list price or discount (hint, if discount start negotiations from there)
  • What was the number of threads or workers, along with how many servers?
  • What tool was used, its configuration, as well as raw or cooked (aka file system) IO?
  • Was the IOP’s number with one worker or multiple workers on a single or multiple servers?
  • Did the IOP’s number come from a single storage system or total of multiple systems?
  • Fast storage needs fast serves and networks, what was their configuration?
  • Was the performance a short burst, or long sustained period?
  • What was the size of the test data used; did it all fit into cache?
  • Were short stroking for IOPS or long stroking for bandwidth techniques used?
  • Data footprint reduction (DFR) techniques (thin provisioned, compression or dedupe) used?
  • Were write data committed synchronously to storage, or deferred (aka lazy writes used)?

The above are just a sampling and not all may be relevant to your particular needs, however they help to put IOP’s into more contexts. Another consideration around IOPS are the configuration of the environment, from an actual running application using some measurement tool, or are they generated from a workload tool such as IOmeter, IOrate, VDbench among others.

Sure, there are more contexts and information that would be interesting as well, however learning to walk before running will help prevent falling down.

Storage I/O trends

Does size or age of vendors make a difference when it comes to context?

Some vendors are doing a good job of going for out of this world record-setting marketing hero numbers.

Meanwhile other vendors are doing a good job of adding context to their IOP or response time or bandwidth among other metrics that matter. There is a mix of startup and established that give context with their IOP’s or other metrics, likewise size or age does not seem to matter for those who lack context.

Some vendors may not offer metrics or information publicly, so fine, go under NDA to learn more and see if the results are applicable to your environments.

Likewise, if they do not want to provide the context, then ask some tough yet fair questions to decide if their solution is applicable for your needs.

Storage I/O trends

Where To Learn More

View additional NAS, NVMe, SSD, NVM, SCM, Data Infrastructure and HDD related topics via the following links.

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

What this means is let us start putting and asking for metrics that matter such as IOP’s with context.

If you have a great IOP metric, if you want it to matter than include some context such as what size (e.g. 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K, etc.), percentage of reads vs. writes, latency or response time, random or sequential.

IMHO the most interesting or applicable metrics that matter are those relevant to your environment and application. For example if your main application that needs SSD does about 75% reads (random) and 25% writes (sequential) with an average size of 32K, while fun to hear about, how relevant is a million 64 byte read IOPS? Likewise when looking at IOPS, pay attention to the latency, particular if SSD or performance is your main concern.

Get in the habit of asking or telling vendors or their surrogates to provide some context with them metrics if you want them to matter.

So how about some context around them IOP’s (or latency and bandwidth or availability for that matter)?

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2017 (vSAN and vCloud). Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

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Part II: EMC Evolves Enterprise Data Protection with Enhancements

Storage I/O trends

This is the second part of a two-part series on recent EMC backup and data protection announcements. Read part I here.

What about the products, what’s new?

In addition to articulating their strategy for modernizing data protection (covered in part I here), EMC announced enhancements to Avamar, Data Domain, Mozy and Networker.

Data protection storage systems (e.g. Data Domain)

Building off of previously announced Backup Recovery Solutions (BRS) including Data Domain operating system storage software enhancements, EMC is adding more application and software integration along with new platform (systems) support.

Data Domain (e.g. Protection Storage) enhancements include:

  • Application integration with Oracle, SAP HANA for big data backup and archiving
  • New Data Domain protection storage system models
  • Data in place upgrades of storage controllers
  • Extended Retention now available on added models
  • SAP HANA Studio backup integration via NFS
  • Boost for Oracle RMAN, native SAP tools and replication integration
  • Support for backing up and protecting Oracle Exadata
  • SAP (non HANA) support both on SAP and Oracle

Data in place upgrades of controllers for 4200 series models on up (previously available on some larger models). This means that controllers can be upgraded with data remaining in place as opposed to a lengthy data migration.

Extended Retention facility is a zero cost license that enables more disk drive shelves to be attached to supported Data Domain systems. Thus there is a not a license fee, however you do pay for the storage shelves and drives to increase the available storage capacity. Note that this feature increases the storage capacity by adding more disk drives and does not increase the performance of the Data Domain system. Extended Retention has been available in the past however is now supported via more platform models. The extra storage capacity is essentially placed into a different tier that an archive policy can then migrate data into.

Boost for accelerating data movement to and from Data Domain systems is only available using Fibre Channel. When asked about FC over Ethernet (FCoE) or iSCSI EMC indicated its customers are not asking for this ability yet. This has me wondering if it is that the current customer focus is around FC, or if those customers are not yet ready for iSCSI or FCoE, or, if there were iSCSI or FCoE support, more customers would ask for it?

With the new Data Domain protection storage systems EMC is claiming up to:

  • 4x faster performance than earlier models
  • 10x more scalable and 3x more backup/archive streams
  • 38 percent lower cost per GB based on holding price points and applying improvements


EMC Data Domain data protection storage platform family


Data Domain supporting both backup and archive

Expanding Data Domain from backup to archive

EMC continues to evolve the Data Domain platform from just being a backup target platform with dedupe and replication to a multi-function, multi-role solution. In other words, one platform with many uses. This is an example of using one tool or technology for different purposes such as backup and archiving, however with separate polices. Here is a link to a video where I discuss using common tools for backup and archiving, however with separate polices. In the above figure EMC Data Domain is shown as being used for backup along with storage tiering and archiving (file, email, Sharepoint, content management and databases among other workloads).


EMC Data Domain supporting different functions and workloads

Also shown are various tools from other vendors such as Commvault Simpana that can be used as both a backup or archiving tool with Data Domain as a target. Likewise Dell products acquired via the Quest acquisition are shown along with those from IBM (e.g. Tivoli), FileTek among others. Note that if you are a competitor of EMC or simply a fan of other technology you might come to the conclusion that the above may not be different from others. Then again others who are not articulating their version or vision of something like the above figure probably should be also stating the obvious vs. arguing they did it first.

Data source integration (aka data protection software tools)

It seems like just yesterday that EMC acquired Avamar (2006) and NetWorker aka Legato (2003), not to mention Mozy (2007) or Dantz (Retrospect, since divested) in 2004. With the exception of Dantz (Retrospect) which is now back in the hands of its original developers, EMC continues to enhance and evolve Avamar, Mozy and NetWorker including with this announcement.

General Avamar 7 and Networker 8.1 enhancements include:

  • Deeper integration with primary storage and protection storage tiers
  • Optimization for VMware vSphere virtual server environments
  • Improved visibility and control for data protection of enterprise applications

Additional Avamar 7 enhancements include:

  • More Data Domain integration and leveraging as a repository (since Avamar 6)
  • NAS file systems with NDMP accelerator access (EMC Isilon & Celera, NetApp)
  • Data Domain Boost enhancements for faster backup / recovery
  • Application integration with IBM (DB2 and Notes), Microsoft (Exchange, Hyper-V images, Sharepoint, SQL Server), Oracle, SAP, Sybase, VMware images

Note that Avamar dat is still used mainly for ROBO and desktop, laptop type backup scenarios that do not yet support Data Domain. Also see Mozy enhancements below).

Avamar supports VMware vSphere virtual server environments using granular change block tracking (CBT) technology as well as image level backup and recovery with vSphere plugins. This includes an Instant Access recovery when images are stored on Data Domain storage.

Instant Access enables a VM that has been protected using Avamar image level technology on Data Domain to be booted via an NFS VMware Dat. VMware sees the VM and is able to power it on and boot directly from the Data Domain via the NFS Dat. Once the VM is active, it can be Storage vMotion to a production storage VMware Dat while active (e.g. running) for recovery on the fly capabilities.


Instant Access to a VM on Data Domain storage

EMC NetWorker 8.1 enhancements include:

  • Enhanced visibility and control for owners of data
  • Collaborative protection for Oracle environments
  • Synchronize backup and data protection between DBA and Backup admin’s
  • Oracle DBAs use native tools (e.g. RMAN)
  • Backup admin implements organizations SLA’s (e.g. using Networker)
  • Deeper integration with EMC primary storage (e.g. VMAX, VNX, etc)
  • Isilon integration support
  • Snapshot management (VMAX, VNX, RecoverPoint)
  • Automation and wizards for integration, discovery, simplified management
  • Policy-based management, fast recovery from snapshots
  • Integrating snapshots into and as part of data protection strategy. Note that this is more than basic snapshot management as there is also the ability to roll over a snapshot into a Data Domain protection storage tier.
  • Deeper integration with Data Domain protection storage tier
  • Data Domain Boost over Fibre Channel for faster backups and restores
  • Data Domain Virtual Synthetics to cut impact of full backups
  • Integration with Avamar for managing image level backup recovery (Avamar services embedded as part of NetWorker)
  • vSphere Web Client enabling self-service recovery of VMware images
  • Newly created VMs inherit backup polices automatically

Mozy is being positioned for enterprise remote office branch office (ROBO) or distributed private cloud where Avamar, NetWorker or Data Domain solutions are not as applicable. EMC has mentioned that they have over 800 enterprises using Mozy for desktop, laptop, ROBO and mobile data protection. Note that this is a different target market than the Mozy consumer product focused which also addresses smaller SMBs and SOHOs (Small Office Home Offices).

EMC Mozy enhancements to be more enterprise grade:

  • Simplified management services and integration
  • Active Directory (AD) for Microsoft environments
  • New storage pools (multiple types of pools) vs. dedicated storage per client
  • Keyless activation for faster provisioning of backup clients

Note that EMC enhanced earlier this year Data Protection Advisor (DPA) with version 6.0.

What does this all mean?

Storage I/O trends

Data protection and backup discussions often focus around tape summit resources or cloud arguments, although this is changing. What is changing is growing awareness and discussion around how data protection storage mediums, systems and services are used along with the associated software management tools.

Some will say backup is broke often pointing a finger at a media or medium (e.g. tape and disk) about what is wrong. Granted in some environments the target medium (or media) destination is an easy culprit to point a finger to as the problem (e.g. the usual tape sucks or is dead) mantra. However, for many environments while there can be issues, it is more often than not the media, medium, device or target storage system that is broke, instead how it is being used or abused.

This means revisiting how tools are used along with media or storage systems allocated, used and retained with respect to different threat risk scenarios. After all, not everything is the same in the data center or information factory.

Thus modernizing data protection is more than swapping media or mediums including types of storage system from one to another. It is also more than swapping out one backup or data protection tool for another. Modernizing data protection means rethinking what different applications and data need to be protected against various threat risks.

Storage I/O trends

What this has to do with today’s announcement is that EMC is among others in the industry moving towards a holistic data protection modernizing thought model.

In my opinion what you are seeing out of EMC and some others is taking that step back and expanding the data protection conversation to revisit, rethink why, how, where, when and by whom applications and information get protected.

This announcement also ties into finding and removing costs vs. simply cutting cost at the cost of something elsewhere (e.g. service levels, performance, availability). In other words, finding and removing complexities or overhead associated with data protection while making it more effective.

Some closing points, thoughts and more links:

There is no such thing as a data or information recession
People and data are living longer while getting larger
Not everything is the same in the data center or information factory
Rethink data protection including when, why, how, where, with what and by whom
There is little data, big data, very big data and big fast data
Data protection modernization is more than playing buzzword bingo
Avoid using new technology in old ways
Data footprint reduction (DFR) can be help counter changing data life-cycle patterns
EMC continues to leverage Avamar while keeping Networker relevant
Data Domain evolving for both backup and archiving as an example of tool for multiple uses

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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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EMC Evolves Enterprise Data Protection with Enhancements (Part I)

Storage I/O trends

A couple of months ago at EMCworld there were announcements around ViPR, Pivotal along with trust and clouds among other topics. During the recent EMCworld event there were some questions among attendees what about backup and data protection announcements (or lack there of)?

Modernizing Data Protection

Today EMC announced enhancements to its Backup Recovery Solutions (BRS) portfolio (@EMCBackup) that continue to enable information and applications data protection modernizing including Avamar, Data Domain, Mozy and Networker.

Keep in mind you can’t go forward if you can’t go back, which means if you do not have good data protection to go to, you can’t go forward with your information.

EMC Modern Data Protection Announcements

As part of their Backup to the Future event, EMC announced the following:

  • New generation of data protection products and technologies
  • Data Domain systems: enhanced application integration for backup and archive
  • Data protection suite tools Avamar 7 and Networker 8.1
  • Enhanced Cloud backup capabilities for the Mozy service
  • Paradigm shift as part of data protection modernizing including revisiting why, when, where, how, with what and by whom data protection is accomplished.

What did EMC announce for data protection modernization?

While much of the EMC data protection announcement is around product, there is also the aspect of rethinking data protection. This means looking at data protection modernization beyond swapping out media (e.g. tape for disk, disk for cloud) or one backup software tool for another. Instead, revisiting why data protection needs to be accomplished, by whom, how to remove complexity and cost, enable agility and flexibility. This also means enabling data protection to be used or consumed as a service in traditional, virtual and private or hybrid cloud environments.

EMC uses as an example (what they refer to as Accidental Architecture) of how there are different group and areas of focus, along with silos associated with data protection. These groups span virtual, applications, database, server, storage among others.

The results are silos that need to be transformed in part using new technology in new ways, as well as addressing a barrier to IT convergence (people and processes). The theme behind EMC data protection strategy is to enable the needs and requirements of various groups (servers, applications, database, compliance, storage, BC and DR) while removing complexity.

Moving from Silos of data protection to a converged service enabled model

Three data protection and backup focus areas

This sets the stage for the three components for enabling a converged data protection model that can be consumed or used as a service in traditional, virtual and private cloud environments.


EMC three components of modernized data protection (EMC Future Backup)

The three main components (and their associated solutions) of EMC BRS strategy are:

  • Data management services: Policy and storage management, SLA, SLO, monitoring, discovery and analysis. This is where tools such as EMC Data Protection Advisor (aka via WysDM acquisition) fit among others for coordination or orchestration, setting and managing polices along with other activities.
  • Data source integration: Applications, Database, File systems, Operating System, Hypervisors and primary storage systems. This is where data movement tools such as Avamar and Networker among others fit along with interfaces to application tools such as Oracle RMAN.
  • Protection storage: Targets, destination storage system with media or mediums optimized for protecting and preserving data along with enabling data footprint reduction (DFR). DFR includes functionality such as compression and dedupe among others. Example of data protection storage is EMC Data Domain.

Read more about product items announced and what this all means here in the second of this two-part series.

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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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HDS Mid Summer Storage and Converged Compute Enhancements

Storage I/O trends

Converged Compute, SSD Storage and Clouds

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) announced today several enhancements to their data storage and unified compute portfolio as part of their Maximize I.T. initiative.

Setting the context

As part of setting the stage for this announcement, HDS has presented the following strategy vision as part their vision for IT transformation and cloud computing.

https://hds.com/solutions/it-strategies/maximize-it.html?WT.ac=us_hp_flash_r11

What was announced

This announcement builds on earlier ones around HDS Unified Storage (HUS) primary storage using nand flash MLC Solid State Devices (SSD) and Hard Disk Drives (HDD’s), along with unified block and file (NAS), as well Unified Compute Platform (UCP) also known as converged compute, networking, storage and software. These enhancements follow recent updates to the HDS Content Platform (HCP) for object, file and content storage.

There are three main focus areas of the announcement:

  • Flash SSD storage enhancements for HUS
  • Unified with enhanced file (aka BlueArc based)
  • Enhanced unified compute (UCP)

HDS Flash SSD acceleration

The question should not be if SSD is in your future, rather when, where, with what and how much will be needed.

As part of this announcement, HDS is releasing an all flash SSD based HUS enterprise storage system. Similar to what other vendors have done, HDS is attaching flash SSD storage to their HUS systems in place of HDD’s. Hitachi has developed their own SSD module announced in 2012 (read more here). The HDS SSD module use Multi Level Cell (MLC) nand flash chips (dies) that now supports 1.6TB of storage space capacity unit. This is different from other vendors who either use nand flash SSD drive form factor devices (e.g. Intel, Micron, Samsung, SANdisk, Seagate, STEC (now WD), WD among others) or, PCIe form factor cards (e.g. FusionIO, Intel, LSI, Micron, Virident among others) or, attach a third-party external SSD device (e.g. IBM/TMS, Violin, Whiptail etc.).

Like some other vendors, HDS has also done more than simply attach a SSD (drive, PCIe card, or external device) to their storage systems calling it an integrated solution. What this means is that HDS has implemented software or firmware changes into their storage systems to manage durability and extend flash duty cycles caused by program erase (P/E) cycle wear. In addition HDS has implemented performance optimization in their storage systems to leverage the faster SSD modules, after all, faster storage media or devices need fast storage systems or controllers.

While the new all flash storage system can be initially bought with just SSD, similar to other hybrid storage solutions, hard disk drives (HDD’s) can also be installed. For enabling full performance at low latency, HDS is addressing both the flash SSD modules as well as the storage systems they attach to including back-end, front-end and caching in-between.

The release enables 500,000 or half a million IOPS (no IOP size, reads or writes, random or sequential. Future firmware (non-disrupted) to enable higher performance that HDS is claiming will be 1,000,000 IOPS at under a millisecond) were indicated.

In addition to future performance improvements, HDS is also indicating increased storage space capacity of its MLC flash SSD modules (1.6TB today). Using 12 modules (1.6TB each), 154TB of flash SSD can be placed in a single rack.

HDS File and Network Attached Storage (NAS)

HUS unified NAS file system and gateway (BlueArc based) enhancements include:

  • New platforms leveraging faster processors (both Intel and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA’s))
  • Common management and software tools from 3000 to new 4000 series
  • Bandwidth doubled with faster connections and more memory
  • Four 10GbE NAS serving ports (front-end)
  • Four 8Gb Fibre Channel ports (back-end)
  • FPGA leveraged for off-loading some dedupe functions (faster performance)

HDS Unified Complete Platform (UCP)

As part of this announcement, HDS is enhancing the Unified Compute Platform (UCP) offerings. HDS re-entered the compute market in 2012 joining other vendors offering unified compute, storage and networking solutions. The HDS converged data infrastructure competes with AMD (Seamicro) SM15000, Dell vStart and VRTX (for lower end market), EMC and VCE vBlock, NetApp FlexPod along with those from HP (or Moonshot micro servers), IBM Puresystems, Oracle and others.

UCP Pro for VMware vSphere

  • Turnkey converged solution (Compute, Networking, Storage, Software)
  • Includes VMware vSphere pre-installed (OEM from VMware)
  • Flexible compute blade options
  • Three storage system options (HUS, HUS VM and VSP)
  • Cisco and Brocade IP networking
  • UCP Director 3.0 with enhanced automation and orchestration software

UCP Select for Microsoft Private Cloud

  • Supports Hyper-V 3.0 server virtualization
  • Live migration with DR and resynch
  • Microsoft Fast Track certified

UCP Select for Oracle RAC

  • HDS Flash SSD storage
  • SMP x86 compute for performance
  • 2x improvements for IOPS less than 1 millisecond
  • Common management with HiCommand suite
  • Integrated with Oracle RMAN and OVM

UCP Select for SAP HANA

  • Scale out to 8TBs memory (DRAM)
  • Tier 1 storage system certified for SAP HANA DR
  • Leverages SAP HANA SAP storage connector API

What this all means?

Storage I/O trends

With these announcements HDS is extending its storage centric hardware, software and services solution portfolio for block, file and object access across different usage tiers (systems, applications, mediums). HDS is also expanding their converged unified compute platforms to stay competitive with others including Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, NEC, NetApp and Oracle among others. For environments with HDS storage looking for converged solutions to support VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle or SAP HANA these UCP systems are worth checking out as part of evaluating vendor offerings. Likewise for those who have HDS storage exploring SSD offerings, these announcements give opportunities to enable consolidation as do the unified file (NAS) offerings.

Note that now HDS does not have a public formalized message or story around PCIe flash cards, however they have relationships with various vendors as part of their UCP offerings.

Overall a good set of incremental enhancements for HDS to stay competitive and leverage their field proven capabilities including management software tools.

Ok, nuff said

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

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

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Upgrading Lenovo X1 Windows 7 with a Samsung 840 SSD

Storage I/O trends

I recently upgraded my Lenovo X1 laptop from a Samsung 830 256GB Solid State Device (SSD) drive to a new Samsung 840 512GB SSD. The following are some perspectives, comments on my experience in using the Samsung SSD over the past year, along with what was involved in the upgrade.

Background

A little over a year ago I upgraded my then new Lenovo X1 replacing upon its arrival the factory supplied Hard Disk Drive (HDD) with a Solid State Device (SSD) drive. After setup and data migration the 2.5” 7,200 RPM 320GB Toshiba HDD was cloned to a SATA 256GB Samsung model 830 SSD. By first setting up and configuring, copying files, applications, going through Windows and other updates, when it came time to clone to the SSD, the HDD effectively became a backup.

Note that prior to using the Samsung SSD in my Lenovo X1, I was using Hybrid HDD (HHDD’s) as my primary storage to boost read performance and space capacity. These were in addition to other external SSD and HDD that I used along with NAS devices. Read more about my HHDD experiences in a series of post here.

Fast forward to the present and it is time to do yet another upgrade, not because there is anything wrong with the Samsung SSD other than I was running low on space capacity. Sure 256GB was a lot of space, however I also had become used to having a 500GB and 750GB HHDD before downsizing to the SSD. Granted some of the data I have on the SSD is more for convenience, as a cache or buffer when not connected to the network. Not to mention if you have VMware Workstation for running various Virtual Machines (VMs) you know how those VMs can add up quickly, not to mention videos and other items.

Stack of HDD, HHDD and SSDs

Over the past year, my return on investment (ROI) and return on innovation (the new ROI) was as low as three months, or worse case about six months. That was based on the amount of time I was able to not have to wait while saving data. Sure, I had some read and boot performance improvements, as well as being able to do more IOPs and other things. However those were not as significant due to having been using HHDDs vs. if had gone from HDD to SSD.

My productivity was saving 3 to 5 minutes per day when storing large files, documents, videos or other items as part of generating or working on content. Not to mention seeing faster snapshots and other copy functions for HA, BC, DR take less time enabling more productivity to occur vs. waiting.

Thus the ROI timeframe varies depends on what I value my time on or for a particular project among other things.

Sure IOPS are important, so to is simple wall clock or stop watch based timing to measure work being done or time spent waiting.

Upgrade Time

While this was replacing one SSD with another, the same things and steps would apply if going from an HDD to SSD.

Before upgrade
Free space and storage utilization before the upgrade

Make sure that you have a good full and consistent backup copy of your data.

If it is enabled, disable bit locker or other items that might interfere with the clone. Here is a post if you are interested in enabling Windows bitlocker on Windows 7 64 bit.

Run a quick cleanup, registry repair or other maintenance to make sure you have a good and consistent copy before cloning it.

Install any migration or clone software, in the past I have used Seagate Discwizard (Acronis) along with full Acronis in the past. This time I used the Samsung Data Migration powered by Clonix, which is an improvement IMHO vs. what they used to supply which was Norton Ghost.

Shutdown Time

Attach the new drive, for this upgrade I removed the existing Samsung 830 SSD from its internal bay and replaced it with the new Samsung 840. The Samsung 830 was then attached to Lenovo X1 laptop using a USB to SATA cable. Note that you could also do the opposite which is attach the new drive using the USB to SATA cable for the clone operation, then install that into the internal drive bay which would drop need for changing boot sequence.


Samsung 830, Samsung 840 and Lenovo X1


Old Samsung 830 removed, new 840 being installed


Samsung 840 goes in Lenovo X1, Samsung 830 with SATA to USB cable

Since I removed the old drive and attached that to the Lenovo X1 via a SATA to USB cable, and the new drive internal, I also had to change the boot sequence. Remember to change this boot sequence back after the upgrade is complete. On the other hand, if you leave the original drive internally and attach the new drive via a USB to SATA, or eSATA to SATA cable for the clone, you do not need to change the boot sequence.


Changing boot sequence , note one SSDs appears as USB cable being used

Before running the data migration software, I disabled my network connection to make sure the system was isolated during the upgraded and then run the data migration software tool.


Samsung Data Migration tool (powered by Clonix Ltd.) during clone operation

Unlike tools such as Seagate DiscWizard based on Acronis, the Samsung tool based on Clonix does not shutdown or performs upgrade off-line. There is a tradeoff here that I observed, the Acronis shutdown approach while being offline, seemed quicker, however that is subjective. The Samsung tool seemed longer, about 2.5 hours to clone 256G to 512G however, I was still able to do things on the PC (making screen shots).

Even though the Clonix powered Samsung data migration tool works on-line enabling things to be done, best to leave all applications shutdown.

Once the data migration tool is done and it says 100 percent complete DO NOT DO ANYTHING until you see a prompt telling you to do something.

WAIT, as there is some background things that occur after you get the 100 percent complete. When you see prompt screen, only then it will be ok to move forward.

At that point, shutdown window, remove old drive, change any setup boot sequence and reboot to verify all is ok.

Also, remember to turn bit locker back on if needed.

Post Mortem

How is the new SSD drive is running?

So far so good, as fast if not better than the old one.


About a month after the upgrade and the space is being put to use.

How about the Samsung 830?

That is now being used for various things in my test lab environment joining other SSD, HHDD and HDDs supporting various physical and virtual server activities including in some testing as part of this series (watch for more in this series soon).

Ok, nuff said.

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)
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