Tag: FLASH

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SSD and Storage System Performance

Jacob Gsoedl has a new article over at SearchStorage titled How to add solidstate storage to your enterprise data storage systems.

In his article which includes some commentary by me, Jacob lays out various options on where and how to deploy solid state devices (SSD) in and with enterprise storage systems.

While many vendors have jumped on the latest SSD bandwagon adding flash based devices to storage systems, where and how they implement the technologies varies.

Some vendors take a simplistic approach of qualify flash SSD devices for attachment to their storage controllers similar to how any other Fibre Channel, SAS or SATA hard disk drive (HDD) would be.

Yet others take a more in depth approach including optimizing controller software, firmware or micro code to leverage flash SSD devices along with addressing wear leveling, read and write performance among other capabilities.

Performance is another area where on paper a flash SSD device might appear to be fast and enable a storage system to be faster.

However, systems that are not optimized for higher throughput and or increased IOPs needing lower latency may end up placing restrictions on the number of flash SSD devices or other configuration constraints. Even worse is when expected performance improvements are not realized as after all, fast controllers need fast devices, and fast devices need fast controllers.

RAM and flash based SSD are great enabling technologies for boosting performance, productivity and enabling a green efficient environment however do your homework.

Look at how various vendors implement and support SSD particularly flash based products with enhancements to storage controllers for optimal performance.

Likewise check out the activity of  the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) among other industry trade group or vendor initiatives around enhancing along with best practices for SSD.

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

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SPC and Storage Benchmarking Games

Storage I/O trends

There is a post over in one of the LinkedIn Discussion forums about storage performance council (SPC) benchmarks being miss-leading that I just did a short response post to. Here’s the full post as LinkedIn has a short post response limit.

While the SPC is far from perfect, it is at least for block, arguably better than doing nothing.

For the most part, SPC has become a de facto standard for at least block storage benchmarks independent of using IOmeter or other tools or vendor specific simulations, similar how MSFT ESRP is for exchange, TPC for database, SPEC for NFS and so forth. In fact, SPC even recently rather quietly rolled out a new set of what could be considered the basis for Green storage benchmarks. I would argue that SPC results in themselves are not misleading, particularly if you take the time to look at both the executive and full disclosures and look beyond the summary.

Some vendors have taken advantage of the SPC results playing games with discounting on prices (something that’s allowed under SPC rules) to show and make apples to oranges comparisons on cost per IOP or other ploys. This proactive is nothing new to the IT industry or other industries for that matter, hence benchmark games.

Where the misleading SPC issue can come into play is for those who simply look at what a vendor is claiming and not looking at the rest of the story, or taking the time to look at the results and making apples to apples, instead of believing the apples to oranges comparison. After all, the results are there for a reason. That reason is for those really interested to dig in and sift through the material, granted not everyone wants to do that.

For example, some vendors can show a highly discounted list price to get a better IOP per cost on an apple to oranges basis, however, when processes are normalized, the results can be quite different. However here’s the real gem for those who dig into the SPC results, including looking at the configurations and that is that latency under workload is also reported.

The reason that latency is a gem is that generally speaking, latency does not lie.

What this means is that if vendor A doubles the amount of cache, doubles the number of controllers, doubles the number of disk drives, plays games with actual storage utilization (ASU), utilizes fast interfaces from 10 GbE  iSCSI to 8Gb FC or FCoE or SAS to get a better cost per IOP number with discounting, look at the latency numbers. There have been some recent examples of this where vendor A has a better cost per IOP while achieving a higher number of IOPS at a lower cost compared to vendor B, which is what is typically reported in a press release or news story. (See a blog entry that also points to a CMG presentation discussion around this topic here.

Then go and look at the two results, vendor B may be at list price while vendor A is severely discounted which is not a bad thing, as that is then the starting list price as to which customers should start negotiations. However to be fair, normalize the pricing for fun, look at how much more equipment vendor A may need while having to discount to get the price to offset the increased amount of hardware, then look at latency.

In some of the recent record reported results, the latency results are actually better for a vendor B than for a vendor A and why does latency matter? Beyond showing what a controller can actually do in terms of levering  the number of disks, cache, interface ports and so forth, the big kicker is for those talking about SSD (RAM or FLASH) in that SSD generally is about latency. To fully effectively utilize SSD which is a low latency device, you would want a controller that can do a decent job at handling IOPS; however you also need a controller that can do a decent job of handling IOPS with low latency under heavy workload conditions.

Thus the SPC again while far from perfect, at least for a thumb nail sketch and comparison is not necessarily misleading, more often than not it’s how the results are utilized that is misleading. Now in the quest for the SPC administrators to try and gain more members and broader industry participation and thus secure their own future, is the SPC organization or administration opening itself up to being used more and more as a marketing tool in ways that potentially compromise all the credibility (I know, some will dispute the validity of SPC, however that’s reserved for a different discussion ;) )?

There is a bit of Déjà here for those involved with RAID and storage who recall how the RAID Advisory Board (RAB) in its quest to gain broader industry adoption and support succumbed to marketing pressures and use or what some would describe as miss-use and is now a member of the “Where are they now” club!

Don’t get me wrong here; I like the SPC tests/results/format, there is a lot of good information in the SPC. The various vendor folks who work very hard behind the scenes to make the SPC actually work and continue to evolve it also all deserve a great big kudos, an “atta boy” or “atta girl” for the fine work that have been doing, work that I hope does not become lost in the quest to gain market adoption for the SPC.

Ok, so then this should all then beg the question of what is the best benchmark. Simple, the one that most closely resembles your actual applications, workload, conditions, configuration and environment.

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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Has SSD put Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) On Endangered Species List?

Storage I/O trends

Disclosure: I have been a user, vendor, author and analyst covering and a fan (and continue to be) of SSD for over 20 years

I have thought and wanting to post about this for a while, however recently several things popped up including moderating a panel where a vendor representative told the audience that the magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) would be dead in two, at most three years. While there were a few nods from those in the audience, the majority smiled politely, chuckled, looked at their watches or returned to doing email, twitters, texting or simply rolled their eyes in a way like, yeah right, we have heard this before ( ;) ).

Likewise, I have done many events including seminars, keynotes including at a recent CMG event (the performance and capacity planning group that I have been a part of for many years), webcasts and other interactions with IT pros, vendors, vars and media. These interactions have included among other topics, IT optimization, boosting server and storage efficiency, as well as the roll of tiering IT resources to boost efficiency, achieve better productivity while boosting performance in a cost-effective way during touch economic times, in other words, the other green IT!

Then the other day, I received an email from Mary Jander over at Internet Evolution. You may remember Mary from her days over at Byte & Switch. Mary was looking for a point, counter point, perspective and sound bit to a recent blog posting on her site and basically asked if I thought that the high performance HDD would be dead in a couple of years at the cost of FLASH SSD. Having given Mary some sound bits and perspectives which appear in her Article/Blog posting, there has since been a fun and lively discourse in Marys’ Internet Evolution blog comment section which could be seen by some as the pending funeral for high performance HDDs.

There has been a lot of work taking place including by industry trade groups such as the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) among others, not to mention many claims, discussions, banter and even some trash talk about how the magnetic hard disk drives (HDD) that as a technology is over 50 years old now, is nearing the end of the road and is about to be replaced by FLASH SSD in the next two to three years depending on who you talk with or listen to.

That may very well be the case, however, I have a strong suspicion that while the high performance 3.5" Fibre Channel 15,500 Revolution per minute (15.5K RPM) HDD is nearing the end of the line, I don’t believe that the 2.5" small form factor (SFF) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 15.5K (maybe faster in the future?) high performance and larger capacity HDD will have met its demise in the two to three-year timeframe.

The reason I subscribe to this notion is that of a need for balancing performance, availability, capacity, energy to a given power, cooling, floor space and environmental need along with price to meet different tiers of application and data quality of service and service level needs. Simply put, there continues to be a need even with some the new or emerging enhanced intelligence capabilities of storage systems for tiered media. That is tier-0 ultra fast SSD (FLASH or RAM) in a 2.5" form factor with SATA shifting to SAS connectivity, tier-1 fast 2.5" SAS 15.5K large capacity HDDs, tier-2 2.5" SATA and SAS high-capacity, 5.4 to 10K HDDs, or, ultra large capacity SAS and SATA 3.5" HDDs to meet different performance, availability, capacity, energy and economic points.

Why not just use SSD FLASH for all high performance activity, after all it excels in reads correct? Yup, however, take a closer look at write performance which is getting better and better, even with less reliance on intelligent controllers, firmware and RAM as a buffer. However, there is still a need for a balance of Tier-0, Tier-1, Tier-2, Tier-3 etc mediums to balance different requirements and stretch strained IT budgets to do more efficiency.

Maybe I’m stuck in my ways and spend to much time talking with IT professionals including server or storage architects, as well as IT planners, purchasers and others in the trenches and not enough time drinking the cool-aid and believing the evangelists and truth squads ;). However there is certainly no denying that Solid State Devices (SSD) using either RAM or FLASH are back in the spotlight again as SSD has been in the past, this time for many reasons with adoption continuing to grow. I think that its safe to say that some HDDs will fade away like other earlier generations have, such as the 3.5" FC HDD, however other HDDs like the high performance 2.5" SAS HDDs have some time to enjoy before their funeral or wake.

What say you?

BTW, check out this popular (and its Free) StorageIO Industry Trends and Perspectives White Paper Report that looks at various data center performance bottlenecks and how to discuss them to transition towards becoming more efficient. However a warning, you might actually be inclined to jump on the SSD bandwagon.

Oh, and there’s nothing wrong with SSD, after all as I mentioned earlier, I’m a huge fan, however, I’m also a huge fan of spinning HDDs having skipped SSD in my latest computer purchases for fast 7.2K (or faster) HDDs with FLASH for portability (encrypted of course). After all, it’s also about balancing the different tiers of storage mediums to the task at hand, that is, unless you subscribe to the notion that one tool or technique should be used to solve all problems which is fine if that is your cup of tea.

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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March and Mileage Mania Wrap-up

Today’s flight to Santa Ana (SNA) Orange County California for an 18 hour visit marks my 3rd trip to the left coast in the past four weeks that started out with a trip to Los Angeles. The purpose of today’s trip is to deliver a talk around Business Continuance (BC) and Disaster recovery (DR) topics for virtual server and storage environments along with related data transformation topics themes, part of a series of on-going events.

Planned flight path from MSP to SNA, note upper midwest snow storms. Thanks to Northwest Airlines, now part of Delta!
Planned flight path from MSP to SNA courtesy of Northwest Airlines, now part of Delta

This is a short trip to southern California in that I have to be back in Minneapolis for a Wednesday afternoon meeting followed by keynoting at an IT Infrastructure Optimization Seminar downtown Minneapolis Thursday morning. Right after Thursday morning session, its off to the other coast for some Friday morning and early afternoon sessions in the Boston area, the results of which I hope to be able to share with you in a not so distant future posting.

Where has March gone? Its been a busy and fun month out on the road with in-person seminars, vendor and user group events in Minneapolis, Los Angles, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Atlanta, St. Louis, Birmingham, Minneapolis for CMG user group, Cincinnati and Orange County not to mention some other meetings and consulting engagements elsewhere including participating in a couple of webcast and virtual conference/seminars while on the road. Coverage and discussion around my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) continues expand, read here to see what’s being said.

What has made the month fun in addition to traveling around the country is the interaction with the hundreds of IT professionals from organizations of all size hearing what they are encountering, what their challenges are, what they are thinking, and in general what’s on their mind.

Some of the common themes include:

  • There’s no such thing as a data recession, however the result is doing more with less, or, with what you have
  • Confusion abounds around green hype including carbon footprints vs. core IT and business issues
  • There is life beyond consolidation for server and storage virtualization to enable business agility
  • Security and encryption remain popular topic as does heterogeneous and affordable key management
  • End to end IT resource management for virtual environments is needed that is scalable and affordable
  • Performance and quality of service can not be sacrificed in the quest to drive up storage utilization
  • Clouds, SSD (FLASH), Dedupe, FCoE and Thin Provisioning among others are on the watch list
  • Tape continues to be used complimenting disks in tiered storage environments along with VTLs
  • Dedupe continues to be deployed and we are just seeing the very tip of the ice-berg of opportunity
  • Software licensing cost savings or reallocation should be a next step focus for virtual environments

    • Now, for a bit of irony and humor, overheard was a server sales person talking to a storage sales person comparing notes on how they are missing their forecasts as their customers are buying fewer servers and storage now that they are consolidating with virtualization, or using disk dedupe to eliminate disk drives. Doh!!!

    Now if those sales people can get their marketing folks to get them the play book for virtualization for business agility, improving performance and enabling business growth in an optimized, transformed environment, they might be able to talk a different story with their customers for new opportunities…

    What’s on deck for April? More of the same, however also watch and listen for some additional web based content including interviews quotes and perspectives on industry happenings, articles, tips and columns, reports, blogs, videos, podcasts, webcasts and twitter activity as well as appearances at events in Boston, Chicago, New Jersey and Providence among other venues.

    To all of those who came out to the various events in March, thank you very much and look forward to future follow-up conversations as well as seeing you at some of the upcoming future events.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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    On The Road Again: An Update

    A while back, I posted about a busy upcoming spring schedule of activity and events, and then a few weeks ago, posted an update, so this can be considered the latest "On The Road Again" update. While the economy continues to be in rough condition and job reductions or layoffs continuing, or, reduction in hours or employees being asked to take time off without pay or to take sabbaticals, not to mention the race to get the economic stimulus bill passed, for many people, business and life goes on.

    Airport parking lots have plenty of cars in them, airplanes while not always full, are not empty (granted there has been some fleet optimization aka aligning capacity to best suited tier of aircraft and other consolidation or capacity improvements). Many organizations cutting back on travel and entertainment (T&E) spending, either to watch the top and bottom line, avoid being perceived or seen on the news as having employees going on junkets when they may in fact being going to conferences, seminars, conventions or other educational and related events to boost skills and seek out ways to improve business productivity.

    One of the reason that I have a busy travel schedule in addition to my normal analyst and consulting activities is that many events and seminars are being scheduled close to, or in the cities where IT professionals are located who might otherwise have T&E restrictions or other constraints from traveling to industry events, some of which are or will be impacted by recent economic and business conditions.

    Last week I was invited to attend and speak at the FujiFilm Executive Seminar, no private jets were used or seen, travel was via scheduled air carriers (coach air-fare). FujiFilm has a nice program for those interested in or involved with tape whether for disk to tape backup, disk to disk to tape, long term archive, bulk storage and other scenarios involving the continued use and changing roles of tape as a green data storage medium for in-active or off-line data. Check out FujiFilm TapePower Center portal.

    This past week I was in the big "D", that’s Dallas Texas to do another TechTarget Dinner event around the theme of BC/DR, Virtualization and IT optimization. The session was well attended by a diverse audience of IT professionals from around the DFW metroplex. Common themes included discussions about business and economic activity as well as the need to keep business and IT running even when budgets are being stretched further and further. Technology conversations included server and storage virtualization, tiered storage including SSD, fast FC and SAS disk drives, lower performance high capacity "fat" disk drives as well as tape not to mention tiered data protection, tiered servers and other related items.

    The Green Gap continues to manifest itself in that when asked, most people do not have Green IT initiatives, however, when asked they do have power, cooling, floor-space, environmental (PCFE) or business economic sustainability concerns, aka, the rest of the Green story.

    While some attendees have started to use some new technologies including dedupe technology, most I find are still using a combination of disk and tape with some considering dedupe for the future for certain applications. Other technologies and trends being watched, however also ones with concerns as to their stability and viability for enterprise use include FLASH based SSD, Cloud computing and thin provisioning among others. Common themes I hear from IT professionals are that these are technologies and tools to keep an eye on, or, use on a selective basis and are essentially tiered resources to have in a tool box of technologies to apply to different tasks to meet various service requirements. Hopefully the Cowboys can put a fraction of the amount of energy and interest into and improving their environment that the Dallas area IT folks are applying to their environments, especially given the strained IT budgets vs. the budget that the Cowboys have to work with for their player personal.

    I always find it interesting when talking to groups of IT professionals which tend to be enterprise, SME and SMB hearing what they are doing and looking at or considering which often is in stark contrast to some of the survey results on technology adoption trends one commonly reads or hears about. Hummm, nuff said, what say you?

    Hope to see you at one of the many upcoming events perhaps coming to a venue near you.

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

    twitter @storageio

    All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

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    Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?

    Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?
    Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?
    Updated 9/28/18

    There are many faces and thus functionalities of virtualization beyond the one most commonly discussed which is consolidation or aggregation. Other common forms of virtualization include emulation (which is part of enabling consolidation) which can be in the form of a virtual tape library for storage to bridge new disk technology to old software technology, processes, procedures and skill sets. Other forms of virtualization functionality for life beyond consolidation include abstraction for transparent movement of applications or operating systems on servers, or data on storage to support planned and un-planned maintenance, upgrades, BC/DR and other activities.

    So the gist is that there are many forms of virtualization technologies and techniques for servers, storage and even I/O networks to address different issues including life beyond consolidation. However the next wave of consolidation could and should be that of reducing the number of logical images, or, the impact of the multiple operating systems and application images, along with their associated management costs.

    This may be easier said than done, however, for those looking to cut costs even further than from what can be realized by reducing physical footprints (e.g. going from 10 to 1 or from 250 to 25 physical servers), there could be upside however it will come at a cost. The cost is like that of reducing data and storage footprint impacts with such as data management and archiving.

    Savings can be realized by archiving and deleting data via data management however that is easier said than done given the cost in terms of people time and ability to decide what to archive, even for non-compliance data along with associated business rules and policies to be defined (for automation) along with hardware, software and services (managed services, consulting and/or cloud and SaaS).

    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

    Ok, nuff said, for now.

    Gs

    Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. 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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    Industry Trend: Five year HDD (hard disk drive) warranties

    Storage I/O trends

    I received a note from Seagate the other day (they requested that this be embargoed until today) about changes to their warranty program for their various disk drive products.

    Now I get a ton of updates, press releases, briefing notes and other news from vendors, resellers, industry trade groups and public relations folks among others every day (and thats in addition to the spam), all of which help to fill up my hard disk drives and backups stored on removable hard disk drives faster than the hard disk drive on my HD-DVR fills up from HD programming.

    However this note from Seagate stood out and I want to share with you my industry trends and perspective. That is, this IMHO signals the realities of how long different storage technologies are used before being discarded (e.g. lifecycle or useful life) as much as what the reliability and endurance of the products is which I explain a bit further down in this post.

    So here’s what Seagate is doing and draw your own conclusion and see my additional perspectives and opinions below.

    Seagate Warranty Change

    Overview
    Seagate’s leadership in product quality and reliability has given it an edge in offering customers better value when they need it. Seagate’s current 5-year limited warranty will remain in place for consumer retail products as well as for enterprise-class hard drives, and we will now provide our distributor customers with a 3-year limited warranty for all other hard drives. Based on our data, we know that 95% of all returns take place during the first three years, so by offering a 3-year warranty (which Seagate believes is more in line with the rest of the industry), we can make other aspects of our customer support and warranty programs more attractive with negligible impact to customer product return needs. The 3-year limited warranty on notebook, desktop and consumer electronics bare drives offers new advantages and enhancements to the business proposition for our channel customers while improving cost efficiencies for Seagate. We expect little, if any change for consumers since hard drives used in computer systems other devices are covered by the individual manufacturer’s warranty.

    Warranty at a high level:
    3-year warranty – Seagate Desktop, Notebook & Consumer Electronics drives sold to customers
    5-year warranty – Seagate enterprise drives and certain Seagate and Maxtor branded retail products (both consumer solutions and HDD retail kits)

    Q&A

    Q. Does this change effect products sold to OEMs?
    A. No, there are no changes to our OEM standard warranties in these classes of products

    Q. When does this change go into effect?
    A. It will begin January 3, 2009

    Q. What about products purchased before Jan. 3, 2009? Will Seagate still honor the warranty in place at time of time of original purchase?
    A. Yes, any customers who purchase products prior to Jan. 3 will be covered by the warranty in place at the time of purchase.

    Q. Why is this change being made now?
    A. We have identified the opportunity to offer our customers warranty terms that we believe are in line with industry standard warranty offerings, and that better align to the requirements of our partners and customers.

    Q. You say that by moving to a 3-year warranty you can make other aspects of customer and warranty support more attractive. Can you be more specific?
    A. Seagate believes that enhancing the declining credit scale in the second year from 75% to 100% will provide customers better value on returns. This means that if a customer returns a drive in the second year, they are eligible to receive a credit, equal to the drive’s price at the time the drive is returned, applied to their replacement drive.

    Q. Why are Enterprise-class hard drives still receiving a 5-year warranty?
    A. Seagate believes the standard industry warranty for enterprise-class products is 5 years.

    Q. Will customers in other countries receive different warranty periods?
    A. Customers located in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand will continue to receive a 5 year limited warranty for selected products.

    Q. Why will customers located in these countries still receive a 5-year warranty?
    A. In these markets we have determined that business conditions support offering a 5-year warranty period.

    Q. Isn’t this a step backward in terms of demonstrating your confidence in the quality of your products?
    A. Absolutely not. Our product quality remains excellent, and, as the worldwide leader in drive storage, Seagate is committed to providing our customers with the most reliable storage solutions available anywhere. We know that 95% of all returns take place during the first three years, so by going to a 3-year warranty (which is more in line with the rest of the industry) we can make other aspects of our customer support and warranty programs more attractive with negligible impact to customer product return needs.

    Q. Are there exceptions to the 3-year warranty?
    A. If a customer believes there is a competitive business case for an exception, they can present their business case to Seagate for review.

    Q. What will happen to the inventory authorized distributors currently have?
    A. On-hand inventory located at the sites of Seagate distributors will keep the warranty in place at the time of original purchase. The 3-year warranty will apply to products shipped starting Jan 3rd, 2009.

    Q. Does this change affect Seagate and Maxtor retail products?
    A. Retail drive products will continue with their current 3 or 5 year limited warranty

    So what does this all mean?

    IMHO, this signals that Seagate is aligning their warranties for different products to the market realities including the life cycle of the product or solution before replacement for what ever reasons. For example, an enterprise class disk drive deployed in an enterprise class storage system may be deployed for a period of from 3 to 5 years, perhaps initially being deployed as primary storage for a couple of years, then being redeployed in a secondary or hand me down role.

    Or, in the case of an archive or secondary near-line role, being used for a longer life cycle than would be the case with more traditional storage. It can also signal that many organizations are acquiring and holding on to in general technologies for longer periods of time to maximize ROI and minimize the occurrence of timely and expensive data movement/migration to support technology replacements.

    Certainly in general the technologies are much more reliable than previous generations, capacities are increasing as are availability and capacities while power consumption and footprint also improve, not to mention the continued need for more storage and I/O processing capabilities.

    On the flip side, non enterprise storage type solutions for example desktops, laptops or other products tend to have shorter lifecycles and thus make sense to align the warranties with the market economic and buying habits taking place not to mention competitive alignment.

    Needless to say, despite reports that the magnetic disk drive is now dead at the hands of FLASH SSD (here and here among others) after over 50 years of service, its safe to say the magnetic disk drive will be around for several more years to come as FLASH based SSD will actually help to keep disk drives around, similar to how disk drives are helping to keep magnetic tape around by taking over tasks and enabling true tiered storage and technology alignment to occur.

    Heres a link to Seagates Warranty page for more information.

    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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    SSD activity continues to go virtually round and round

    Storage I/O trends

    Solid State Disk (SSD) (both FLASH and RAM based) activities and discussions continue to go round and round (pun intended) with announcements (here, here, here, here, here, and here and among others) of various improvements and evolution for technologies focused from the consumer to the small office home office (SOHO) to small medium business (SMB) to enterprise with technologies from vendors including Intel, Sandisk, Seagate and many others.

    Recent innovations are looking to address write performance issues or challenges associated with FLASH based SSD, which while better than magnetic hard disk drives (HDD), are slower than their RAM based counterparts.

    Other activity includes extending the useful life or duration of how many times a FLASH based device can be rewritten or modified before problems arise or performance degrades. Yet another activity is Sandisk introducing “virtual RPM” (vRPM) metrics to provide consumers an indication of relative revolutions per minute (RPM) of a non-rotating SSD device to make comparisons to help with shopping decisions makings. Can you say SSDs going round and round and round at least in a virtual world? Now that should make for some interesting “virtual benchmarking” discussions!

    Meanwhile industry trade groups include the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) are gathering momentum to address marketing, messaging, awareness, education as well as metrics or benchmarks among things normally done around industry trade group camp fires and camp outs.

    So, as the HDDs spin, so to does the activity in and around SSD based technologies.

    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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    The Many Faces of Solid State Devices/Disks (SSD)

    Storage I/O trends

    Here’s a link to a recent article I wrote for Enterprise Storage Forum titled “Not a Flash in the PAN” providing a synopsis of the many faces, implementations and forms of SSD based technologies that includes several links to other related content.

    A popular topic over the past year or so has been SSD with FLASH based storage for laptops, also sometimes referred to as hybrid disk drives along with announcements late last year by companies such as Texas Memory Systems (TMS) of a FLASH based storage system combining DRAM for high speed cache in their RAMSAN-500 and more recently EMC adding support for FLASH based SSD devices in their DMX4 systems as a tier-0 to co-exist with other tier-1 (fast FC) and tier-2 (SATA) drives.

    Solid State Disks/Devices (SSD) or memory based storage mediums have been around for decades, they continue to evolve using different types of memory ranging from volatile dynamic random access (DRAM) memory to persistent or non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) and various derivatives of NAND FLASH among other users. Likewise, the capacity cost points, performance, reliability, packaging, interfaces and power consumption all continue to improve.

    SSD in general, is a technology that has been miss-understood over the decades particularly when simply compared on a cost per capacity (e.g. dollar per GByte) basis which is an unfair comparison. The more approaches comparison is to look at how much work or amount of activity for example transactions per second, NFS operations per second, IOPS or email messages that can be processed in a given amount of time and then comparing the amount of power and number of devices to achieve a desired level of performance. Granted SSD and in particular DRAM based systems cost more on a GByte or TByte basis than magnetic hard disk drives however it also requires more HDDs and controllers to achieve the same level of performance not to mention requiring more power and cooling than compared to a typical SSD based device.

    The many faces of SSD range from low cost consumer grade products based on consumer FLASH products to high performance DRAM based caches and devices for enterprise storage applications. Over the past year or so, SSD have re-emerged for those who are familiar with the technology, and emerged or appeared for those new to the various implementations and technologies leading to another up swinging in the historic up and down cycles of SSD adoption and technology evolution in the industry.

    This time around, a few things are different and I believe that SSD in general, that is, the many difference faces of SSD will have staying power and not fade away into the shadows only to re-emerge a few years later as has been the case in the past.

    The reason I have this opinion is based on two basic premises which are economics and ecological”. Given the focus on reducing or containing costs, doing more with what you have and environmental or ecological awareness in the race to green the data center and green storage, improving on the economics with more energy efficiency storage, that is, enabling your storage to do more work with less energy as opposed to avoiding energy consumption, has the by product of improved economics (cost savings and improved resource utilization and better service delivery) along with ecological (better use of energy or less use of energy).

    Current implementations of SSD based solutions are addressing both the energy efficiency topics to enable better energy efficiency ranging from maximizing battery life to boosting performance while drawing less power. Consequently we are now seeing SSD in general are not only being used for boosting performance, also we are seeing it as one of many different tools to address power, cooling, floor space and environmental or green storage issues.

    Here’s a link to a StorageIO industry trends and perspectives white paper at www.storageio.com/xreports.htm.

    Here’s the bottom line, there are many faces to SSD. SSD (FLASH or DRAM) based solutions and devices have a place in a tiered storage environment as a Tier-0 or as an alternative in some laptop or other servers where appropriate. SSD compliments other technologies and SSD benefits from being paired with other technologies including high performance storage for tier-1 and near-line or tier-2 storage implementing intelligent power management (IPM).

    Cheers gs

    Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

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