DCIG 2014-15 Storage Array Buyer’s Guide Now Available

DCIG is pleased to announce the March 30 release of the DCIG 2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide that weights, scores and ranks more than 130 features of thirty-nine (39) different storage arrays from twenty (20) different storage providers.

Flash Memory Array Performance and Sales Rising Rapidly

Flash Memory Storage Arrays promise to deliver the dramatic performance benefits of flash memory including hundreds of thousands to millions of IOPS with sub-millisecond latencies while using as little as 1/10th the rack space, power and cooling of traditional enterprise storage arrays. The most recent generation of flash memory storage arrays generally deliver twice the IOPS of the prior generation and deliver a more complete set of features that enables them to address a broader set of use cases. Although enterprise storage professionals are traditionally cautious about adopting new technologies, many all-flash array vendors report that sales are growing in excess of 100% per year. Flash Memory Storage Arrays NowReplacing Traditional Enterprise Arrays

Multiple vendors we spoke with indicated that prospective customers are now looking to do a complete tier 1 storage refresh; transitioning to an all-flash environment for their critical business applications. Reflecting this trend, International Data Corporation (IDC)forecasts “capacity shipped in 2016 will increase to 611PB [petabyte] with a 2012–2016 CAGR [compound annual growth rate] of 110.8%”.

Driver #1: IT Budget Savings

For those with a responsibility for the technology budget, a flash-storage-enabled rethinking of the data center can generally achieve hard cost savings of over 30% in data center hardware and software, and realize an ROI of less than 11 months.2 In some cases, the Flash Memory Storage Array may prove less expensive than just the maintenance cost of the former SAN.

Driver #2: Accelerating the Enterprise

Flash-based storage systems typically create a seven-fold improvement in application performance. This accelerated performance is enabling progress on initiatives that were hampered by storage that could not keep up with business requirements. Savvy business people are finding many ways to generate business returns that make the flash storage investment easy to justify. In one case study the installation of a flash memory storage system was directly attributed with avoiding the need to hire between 10 and 40 additional employees. Flash storage enabled the company to grow their business without growing their head count.

About the DCIG 2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide

The plethora of vendors and products in the all-flash array marketplace–combined with a lack of readily available comparative data–can make product research and selection a daunting task. DCIG creates Buyer’s Guides in order to help end users accelerate the product research and selection process–driving cost out of the research process while simultaneously increasing confidence in the results.

The DCIG 2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide achieves the following objectives:

Provides an objective, third party evaluation of hybrid storage arrays that evaluates and scores their features from an end user’s perspective Ranks each array in each scoring category and then presenting these results in an easy to understand table Provides a standardized data sheet for each of the arrays so users may do quick side-by-side comparisons of products Provides insights into what features the arrays offer to optimize integration into VMware environments, as well as support for other hypervisors and operating systems Provides insight into which features will result in improved performance Gives any organization a solid foundation for getting competitive bids from different providers that are based on “apples-to-apples” comparisons

The DCIG 2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide Top 10 solutions include (in alphabetical order):

Hitachi Data Systems HUS VM HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 Storage NetApp FAS3250 Series AFA NetApp FAS6290 Series AFA Nimbus Data Gemini F400 Nimbus Data Gemini F600 PureStorage FA-400 Series Controller SolidFire SF6010 SolidFire SF9010 Tegile Zebi HA2800

The Nimbus Data Gemini F600 earned the Best-in-Class ranking among all Flash Memory Storage Arrays in this buyer’s guide. The Gemini F600 multiprotocol unified all-flash storage system stood out in the following ways:

Captured the highest score in the Management & Software as well as Hardware categories, and scored near the top in VMware Integration. In addition to excellent VMware integration, the Gemini F600 is one of just a handful of arrays supporting System Center (SCVMM SMAPI), Microsoft Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX), and SMB 3.0. Raw flash storage density of 24 TB per rack unit, scalable to 1PB in a 42U cluster. This raw flash density was exceeded by only two other arrays in this guide. The already high flash storage density is further enhanced through comprehensive flash optimization support, including lossless in-line deduplication and compression. One of the few arrays supporting 56 Gb FDR InfiniBand and 40 Gigabit , the fastest and lowest latency interfaces for host connectivity.

Nimbus Data claims that the Gemini F600 can deliver up to 1 million 4K write IOPS and 2 million 4K read IOPS with latencies of approximately 50 microseconds; at a 35% lower cost compared to the prior generation. The Gemini F600 starts under US$80,000, and typically sells for between $150,000 and $250,000 as configured by customers.

Flash Memory Storage Arrays Are a Systemic Business Opportunity

The purchase of a Flash Memory Storage Array will be most easily justified and have the greatest benefit in businesses that think this through as a systemic opportunity. Many who do so will discover that “Flash is free.” That is, the return on investment within the IT budget will be rapid, and the business benefits of accelerating all enterprise applications could truly present an opportunity to accelerate the enterprise.

The DCIG 2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide is immediately available through the DCIG analyst portal for subscribing users by following this link.

What a Difference a Year Makes: Insights from the Forthcoming DCIG 2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide

Changes Highlight a Dynamic Flash Memory Storage Array Marketplace

Many changes have taken place in the data center storage marketplace in the 14 months since the release of the inaugural DCIG 2013 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide. This blog entry highlights a few of those changes based on DCIG’s research for the forthcoming DCIG 2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide.

Industry Heavyweights Enter the All-Flash Array Marketplace

The 2013 Buyer’s Guide included 34 arrays from 10 storage vendors, none of which had good name recognition even among IT professionals. This year’s Buyer’s Guide will include about 40 arrays from nearly two dozen storage vendors; including industry heavyweights like Cisco, , EMC, HP, HDS, IBM and NetApp. These vendors either acquired one of the all-flash companies or enhanced one of their existing storage systems with flash-specific optimizations to create an all-flash array offering.

Flash Capacity and Storage Density Rising Rapidly

Increases in flash capacity and density deliver up to a 10x improvement in performance, capacity, rack space, power and cooling efficiency versus a traditional enterprise storage array. A traditional array maxes out at a storage density of about 5TB of Tier 1 storage per rack unit. The majority (62%) of the arrays in this forthcoming Buyer’s Guide deliver more than 5TB of raw flash capacity per rack unit. Seven (18%) offer more than 20TB per rack unit. Some of the arrays can deliver 44TB of raw flash capacity per rack unit.

Data efficiency technologies can effectively multiply that already impressive raw capacity by another 4x or more. Reasonable data center managers and designers should consider the impact that reclaiming 90% of the data center floor space, power and cooling that is currently dedicated to storage might have on their data center requirements.

OpenStack for Array Management Rapidly Gaining Vendor Support

One development worth noting is the rapid adoption of OpenStack as a supported method of array management. While twenty-five (64%) of arrays can be managed via VMware vCenter, and eight (21%) can be managed via Microsoft’s System Center or via the SMI-S standard, eighteen (46%) can be managed via OpenStack. This bodes well for OpenStack in particular, and for data center automation in general.

Cloud Storage Integration on the Rise In 2013 only WhipTail arrays claimed cloud storage integration. Now ten arrays (26%) make that claim, including arrays from Avere, EMC, HP, HDS, NetApp, and SolidFire.

Thin Provisioning and Compression Up More Than 2x

In the 2013 edition of this Buyer’s Guide, DCIG anticipated that data efficiency technologies would be more broadly adopted in Flash Memory Storage Arrays. At that point, only 43% of the arrays supported thin provisioning. The percentage of arrays supporting thin provisioning has more than doubled to 90%, with 56% also supporting automated storage reclamation. Support for compression more than tripled, rising from 12% to 38% of arrays. Support for inline deduplication remained flat at about 33% of arrays.

Microsoft Management and Storage Features Gaining Traction

Given the trend toward enterprises adopting a multi-hypervisor strategy, DCIG expected to find more arrays supporting integration with Microsoft Hyper-V for management and for Windows Server storage technologies. At this point only eight (21%) of the arrays in the forthcoming Buyer’s Guide support Microsoft System Center (SCVMM SMAPI) and Microsoft Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX). Only 5 (13%) support SMB 3.0.

VMware vSphere Integration

On the VMware integration front, some vendors have added comprehensive support for VMware’s storage-related APIs while others completely eschew them. Twenty-six (67%) support all VAAI v4.1 APIs.

Making Sense of a Fast Growing, Dynamic and Competitive Marketplace

The Flash Memory Storage Array marketplace is a fast growing, dynamic and competitive marketplace. Many vendors in this space report sales growth of over 100% per year. In the last 15 months, most all-flash array startups introduced new models or new software versions that doubled the performance of their offerings and added features important to enterprise customers, often at half the price of the prior generation. Meanwhile, many of the tech industry’s heavyweights entered the all-flash array marketplace.

The forthcoming DCIG 2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide will provide a current snapshot of this dynamic marketplace, and provide prospective array purchasers with a tool that will accelerate the research process, increase confidence in the results of that research, and help them quickly identify a short list of products to further research and/or acquire.

Update (3/30/2014): The DCIG 2014-15 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide is now available. It may be downloaded for no charge with registration by following this link.

Gemini X-series Delivers Painless Scale-out to Enterprises and Cloud Service Providers; Interview with Thomas Isakovich, Nimbus Data Systems, Inc. Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Part 3

In this final blog entry from our interview with Nimbus Data CEO and Founder Thomas Isakovich, we discuss his company’s latest product, the Gemini X-series. We explore the role of the Flash Director and how it Gemini X-series appeals to enterprises as well as cloud service providers.

DCIG: Tell us more about the role of the Flash Director. Does it have a role in how deduplication functions?

Thomas: The Flash Director does not have a role in deduplication. The IOs come into the switchboard on the Flash Director, and it’s just giving them out based on how many nodes are active behind it–and it’s doing so in a balanced kind of striping manner. But the Flash Director also has another cool feature, which is the ability to stripe with parity, in either single or dual parity. This is for customers who want to be able to survive a complete node failure in the cluster.

Our approach to this is very cool because you don’t have to mirror. You can do it with a RAID5 algorithm, as opposed to having it mirror the data. Again, I’m not sure how many customers are going to want to do that because every node is inherently HA; but if they want to, that ability is there. The Flash Director would handle that.

DCIG: That’s a RAID-style technology or erasure codes

Thomas: It’s RAID. If we went with erasure codes, we’d have to potentially have more capacity, or you’d have more overhead.

DCIG: So deduplication is offloaded to the controllers on the Flash Nodes?

Thomas: Yes. Behind this RDMA port is a CPU and everything that’s dedicated to doing those hardware offloading functions. DCIG: The reason for choosing RDMA was low latency and high data rates?

Thomas: Exactly that, yes. The latency is key. RDMA allows you to keep the CPU out of the data transfer process. And that keeps latency down.

DCIG: Are you looking at FICON at all?

Thomas: The direction that we’re going in is more the RDMA protocols. We currently have SRP, but we’re also going to be introducing iSER which is the iSCSI RDMA transport. The other big thing we’re working on is SMB 3. You’ll see that in the HALO 2014 announcement. And that allows us to kind of target the Hyper-V space where Microsoft wants to realign everyone away from iSCSI back to SMB. There are very few native SMB 3 implementations out there.

DCIG: Could you talk about what developments were tailored to the enterprise versus the cloud service provider?

Thomas: I think the key was to provide the multiprotocol services, because an enterprise customer is going to have a diversity of storage requirements and we didn’t want to diminish that. If you try to name the multiprotocol scale-out storage systems in the market, there really aren’t any.

So, I think the fact that we can deliver very painless scale- out with full multiprotocol services and data services, so it plugs right in and it looks and smells just like the storage you have now from a connectivity and functionality perspective, but of course is way faster and way more efficient — I think that’s what’s going to be appealing to the enterprise customer.

Cloud customers may look at this and talk about their desire to use NFS. Because there are a lot of cloud providers that really like NFS. And NFS is high enough performance, especially if you combine it with flash and you’re using it in kind of a cloud context.

And so here by providing a single name space, near-petabyte flash repository that is VMware certified and fully offloaded, with all the VAAI integration and so on, I think that’s going to be another real big win. There isn’t anyone else that’s got that–at least that I’m aware of–because all the other flash arrays are pretty much block. There are maybe a couple here or there that are file, but certainly not scale-out file, so that’s another big advantage of the Nimbus DataGemini X- series.

In the Part 1 of this interview series, Thomas Isakovich guided us through the development of the Nimbus Data Gemini X- series, and where he sees it fitting into the current market.

In the Part 2 of this interview series, Thomas Isakovich described how the Gemini X architecture delivers highly available inline deduplication and consistent low latencies at scale.

Five Technologies that Companies Should Prioritize in 2014

One of the more difficult tasks for anyone deeply involved in technology is the ability to see the forest from the trees. Often responsible for supporting the technical components that make up today’s enterprise infrastructures, to step back and recommend which technologies are the right choices for their organization going forward is a more difficult feat. While there is no one right answer that applies to all organizations, five (5) technologies – some new as well as some old technologies that are getting a refresh – merit that organizations prioritize them in the coming months and years.

Already in 2014 DCIG has released three Buyer’s Guides and has many more planned for release in the coming weeks and months. While working on those Guides, DCIG has also engaged with multiple end-users to discuss their experiences with various technologies and how they prioritize technology buying decisions. This combination of sources – a careful examination of included features on products coupled with input from end- users and vendors – is painting a new picture of five specific technologies that companies should examine and prioritize in their purchasing plans going forward.

Backup software with a recovery focus. Survey after survey shows that backup remains a big issue in many organizations. However I am not sure who is conducting these surveys or who they are surveying because I now regularly talk to organizations that have backup under control. They have largely solved their ongoing backup issues by using new or updated backup software that is better equipped to use disk as the primary backup target.

It is as they adopt this new backup software and eliminate their backup problems, their focus is turning to recovery. A good example is an individual with whom I spoke this past week. He switched to a new backup software solution that solved his organization’s long standing backup issues while enabling it to lay a foundation for application recovery to the cloud.

Converged infrastructures. Converged infrastructure solutions are currently generating a great deal of interest as they eliminate much of the time and effort that organizations have to internally exert to configure, deploy and support a solution. However in conversations I have had over the last few weeks and months, it is large organizations that appear to be the most apt to deploy them. Heterogeneous infrastructures.Heterogeneous infrastructures were all the rage for many years among all size organizations as they got IT vendors to compete on price. But having too many components from too many providers created too much complexity and resulting administrative costs– especially in large organizations.

That said, small and midsized businesses (SMBs) with smaller IT infrastructures still have the luxury of acquiring IT gear from multiple providers without resulting in their environments becoming too complex to manage. Further, SMBs remain price conscious. As such, they are more willing to sacrifice the notion of “proven” end-to-end configurations to get the cutting edge features and/or the lower prices that heterogeneous infrastructures are more apt to offer.

Flash primed to displace more HDDs. Those close to the storage industry recognize flash for the revolutionary technology that it is. However I just spoke to an individual this past week that is very technical but who has a web design and programming focus so he and his company were not that familiar with flash. He said that as they have learned more about it, they are re- examining their storage infrastructure and how and where they can best deploy it to accelerate the performance of their applications.

Conversations such as these hint that while flash has already gained acceptance among techies, its broader market adoption and acceptance is yet to come. To date, its cost has been relatively high. However more products offer flash as a cache (such as occurs in hybrid storage arrays) and offer technologies such as deduplication and compression. This will further drive down its effective cost per TB. By way of example, I was talking to one individual yesterday who aleadys offers a flash-based solution for under $300/TB (less than 30 cents/GB.)

Tape poised to be become the cloud archive medium of choice. When organizations currently look at how to best utilize the cloud, they typically view it as the ideal place to store their archival data for long term retention. This sets the cloud up as an ideal place in which to deploy tape as preferred medium to store this data largely due to its low operational costs, long media life and infrequent data access.

To accommodate this shift in how organizations are using tape libraries as well as make them more appealing to cloud services providers, tape library providers are adding REST APIs to their tape library interfaces so they appear as a storage target. While most organizations may not know (or care) that the data they send to the cloud is stored to tape, they do care about its cost. By cloud providers storing data on tape, they can drive down these costs to a penny or less per GB per month.

When Microseconds Matter: Delivering Highly Available Inline Deduplication and Consistent Low Latencies at Scale; Interview with Thomas Isakovich, Nimbus Data Systems, Inc. Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Part 2

In this second blog entry from our interview with Nimbus Data CEO and Founder Thomas Isakovich,we discuss microsecond latencies and how the recently announced Gemini X-series scale-out all-flash platform performs against the competition.

DCIG: Could you address what kind of latencies we should expect to see with the Gemini X-series?

Thomas: With the Gemini X latency is going to be around 100 microseconds, whereas the Gemini F can get as low as 50 microseconds. That latency is consistent regardless of the number of Flash Nodes, which is pretty impressive.

DCIG: Is that difference even detectable for the end user?

Thomas: We had a potential client who was looking at purchasing 100 units. Our product delivered, I think, something like 95 microseconds in their tests. The next vendor delivered 150, and then the next one delivered 190. Even though we cost a little bit more, they bought all of it with us, because to them, that app hits so hard that it’s a 2x delta between 95 microseconds and 190 microseconds. One is twice as fast. So certainly not everybody, but a lot of these web-scale guys that run these Oracle databases — they get that much transaction load, they really do care.

Also, with us if you lose a controller there’s no change in performance. The design is such that all the IO — on the regular configuration basis, anyway — is processed by one controller, even though it’s active/active. It’s what we call asymmetric active/active. So, if you lose a controller, then all the IO remains at the same rate; there’s no change in the performance. If you lose a drive with our product, it’s like a 5 or 10 percent hit.

With some other competitive offerings, if they lose a controller, they’ll lose half their performance as well. They truly relied on balancing every IO and LUN ownership between two controllers. So you lose one controller, and you lose half the horsepower.

DCIG: When you talk about the Gemini X’s ability to lose a controller without a significant performance impact, are you talking about losing one of the two controllers in a Flash Node or losing one of the Flash Directors?

Thomas: Either. In either scenario there’s no performance impact.

DCIG: The metadata management happens at the Flash Node level?

Thomas: Yes.

DCIG: And each Flash Node is independent in terms of deduplication?

Thomas: Correct. It’s possible that we could add kind of global cross-node deduplication. I’ll be honest though, at 4K I don’t think that’s really going to do much, because the metadata tables are already going to have so many 4K variations. I can’t imagine there being a slight variation from one or the other very often.

If we ended up doing it globally, then we kind of lose scale- out in a sense because you put the burden for that calculation on the Flash Director. I don’t think we’re going to do it. Given how granular the deduplication is, I think we’re fine. If we’re doing, say, 64K granularity, then you can maybe make an argument that global deduplication would help. But at 4K, I think we’re good.

In the Part 1 of this interview series, Thomas Isakovich guided us through the development of the Nimbus Data Gemini X- series, and where he sees it fitting into the current market.

In the final part of this interview series, we discuss the appeal of Gemini X to enterprise and cloud service providers.

Capacity Equivalence: Flash Memory Storage Crosses the Next Disruptive Boundary

In 2014, high-density flash memory storage such as the 4TB Viking Technology αlpha SSD will accelerate the flash-based disruption of the storage industry and of the data center. Technology providers that engage in a fresh high-density flash-storage-enabled rethinking of their products will empower savvy data center architects to substantially improve the performance, capacity and efficiency of their data centers. Businesses will benefit by reducing the cost of running their IT infrastructures while increasing their capacity to serve customers and generate profits.

Expensive Low Capacity Flash Storage Already Disrupting the Data Center Cost Equation

Flash memory has already caused significant change in the design of storage systems. The relative high cost and low capacity of SSDs has been a key driver of the Hybrid Storage Array market. Hybrid Storage Arrays featuredynamic data placement in a hybrid storage pool that combines flash memory and traditional hard disk drives; with flash generally making up 5%-15% of the total storage capacity. In 2013 we also saw SSDs achieve cost parity with enterprise HDD. This cost/GB equivalence was achieved through data efficiency technologies like in-line deduplication and data compression. As a result, Hybrid Storage Arrays are making significant inroads into enterprise data centers. Indeed, a June 2013 survey found that hybrid storage adoption is real and growing with more than one-third of the respondents (37%) indicating they had already deployed a hybrid storage array.

Capacity Equivalence: Flash Memory Storage Crosses the Next Disruptive Boundary

In 2014, the advent of multi-terabyte SSDs such as the soon to be released Viking Technology αlpha 12Gb SAS SSD with raw capacity up to 4TB in a standard 2.5” form factor, and innovative SSD form factors like the Viking Technology SATADIMM and the recently announced IBM eXFlash that convert server DIMM slots into flash storage capacity—mean that flash memory storage has achieved capacity parity—and even storage density supremacy—compared to enterprise HDD-based storage.

Flash and hybrid storage systems were already able to deliver dramatically better IOPS and latencies for random IO workloads, and much better power efficiency than HDD-based storage. Now they can also beat HDD-based storage systems on storage density per rack unit.

Implications of Flash Storage Capacity Equivalence

1. Accelerate Any Application. The limited capacity of flash memory storage devices has meant that businesses have had to be selective about which workloads are migrated to flash-based storage. The new flash-denser- than-HDD reality means that capacity requirements are no longer a barrier to flash acceleration. Virtually any enterprise application can be accelerated. 2. Flash arrays can replace Tier 1 HDD-based storage systems. Thomas Isakovich of Nimbus Data made just such an assertion on the announcement of their Gemini X scale-out all flash storage system–a system which, interestingly enough, will utilize 4TB SSDs. This dynamic will push older HDD-based architectures toward obsolescence. 3. Hybrid Storage Array vendors will multiply the percentage of flash memory in their system designs, or even introduce all-flash arrays based on their hybrid architecture. 4. Converged infrastructures will fit an even broader range of enterprise applications. Vendors will use multi- terabyte SSDs to multiply the overall and per rack unit performance and storage capacity of their converged solutions. The same dynamics will apply to blade architectures. 5. Virtual SANs will grow. Virtual SANS convert server-side storage into shared storage. Vendors who adopt multi- terabyte flash drives into their pre-configured appliances–or support the end user installation of the same–will open up a whole new set of opportunities for their solutions. 6. Storage software is key. Software will provide key differentiation among products, especially enterprise software features in the areas of data efficiency, data protection and high availability.

Quick ROI and Enhanced Business Productivity Mean Cost is Not a Barrier

As I have previously noted, a flash-storage-enabled rethinking of the data center can generally achieve hard cost savings of over 30% in data center hardware and software, and generally realize an ROI of less than 11 months.

Although flash storage can result in substantial IT cost savings, the most significant flash storage payoff may actually be enhanced business productivity. Real businesses are seeing critical business applications accelerated by 6x to 9x when migrated to flash memory storage. The value of this application acceleration is often hard to quantify, but in one case study the installation of a flash memory storage system was directly attributed with avoiding the need to hire between 10 and 40 additional employees. The company grew their business without growing their head count.

Conclusion

The ongoing advances in flash memory technology and in the storage systems that deliver this technology to the enterprise have crossed several critical boundaries, leading to widespread adoption in enterprises. The advent of multi- terabyte SSDs will unleash another wave of products that will multiply the overall capacity of existing data centers. Businesses that embrace these solutions will reduce the cost of running their IT infrastructures while simultaneously increasing their capacity to serve customers and generate profits.

Gemini X All Flash Scale-Out Storage Ready to Replace HDD as Enterprise Tier One; Interview with Thomas Isakovich, Nimbus Data Systems, Inc. Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Part 1

Recognized as an innovator in storage system technology, Thomas Isakovich sat down withDCIG to discuss the development, capabilities, and innovation in Nimbus Data’s latest release: the Gemini X. In this first blog entry, he guides us through the development of the X-series, and where he sees it fitting into the current market.

DCIG: Can you tell us what is so different about the X-series?

Thomas: In terms of availability, this is probably the most advanced product — well, it is the most advanced product we’ve ever made, because it builds on everything that we’ve been improving. It takes that Gemini technology and then amps it up with true scale-out capability that is managed by our all-new Flash Director device. We’ve been working on it for the past two years. It’s been a real challenge and also a pleasure developing it.

And, really, for us it completes the story. We believe we have the most competitive all-flash system currently in the market with the Gemini F. The only caveat being how do we scale to huge, huge sets of capacity? We now provide that with the Gemini X, and we’ve done it in a way that keeps the software and the hardware building blocks about 90 percent shared between the two platforms.

Customers can start with the F series and go to the X series later. There’s a lot of commonality between the two. From a manageability perspective, that familiarity will be a big plus. I think from an all-flash array portfolio perspective, we’ve got customers covered from three terabytes to a petabyte now — from a $50,000 entry point to multimillion dollar solutions — all on the same Nimbus Data technology. The timing of this product from our perspective is pretty perfect because our sales force is increasingly encountering customers that want to do wholesale refreshes of their entire tier-1 infrastructure. Not just flash for individual applications like databases and VDI, but really observing all- flash as a potential contender for the entirety of the tier-1 infrastructure. So having the ability to scale is well-timed and we’re excited to be putting it out there now.

DCIG: Can you talk more about the deduplication and compression of Gemini X?

Thomas: The deduplication and compression is really a sneak preview to an important feature of our forthcoming HALO 2014 operating system that we’ll announce later this spring.

One of the challenges in scaling an array that uses inline deduplication is managing the vast metadata hash table that is the result of that, and keeping it in a manner where it’s very rapidly accessible. And, as you know, a lot of solutions consume inordinate amounts of RAM to hold all this. But it’s actually the RAM constraints of the controllers that may be limiting the ability for these inline deduplicating storage arrays to scale. So, many of those guys have been resorting to scale-out because, really, who’s going to build an server that can hold 20 terabytes of RAM? And even if it could, how do you protect it?

So we’ve come up with an algorithm here that effectively uses about 1/50th the RAM and can deliver the same 4K block size in-line deduplication. This is one of the reasons we can build such high scale systems in such a small size. The Gemini X takes advantage of that technology, and so will the Gemini F, as part of running the HALO 2014 OS.

DCIG: What environments are you seeing that are pushing high IOPS?

Thomas: It’s definitely geared more toward folks that just need huge amounts of capacity in a single domain. A lot of our customers, like our biggest one, which has 100 Gemini systems — they have no interest in actually presenting that as a single logical name space. They really do want 100 different name spaces, because of the way they’re doing their scale-out. But they’re a very sophisticated cloud provider, they can do very specific fancy things. For general purpose enterprise that doesn’t have that level of sophistication — they’re used to having their 500 terabyte hard drives or whatever — they need something that can present as one big box, and that’s where this guy plays.

For example, a port on a good day can do 100,000 IOPS. You’re not going to get a million IOPS into a single server unless you’re prepared to stick ten Fibre Channel cards in that server — which is going to be a challenge — and then run everything perfectly parallelized and all this other stuff. So our thought process in supporting four million IOPS is that we’re going to need to support dozens or maybe hundreds of physical machines. And at 100,000 IOPS a port, that actually works out to about four million IOPS because you can have up to forty host ports on the Gemini X.

It’s not so much that there’s any one application that can come close to that, but you need to maintain a reasonable sort of IOPS-per-terabyte/IOPS-per-port kind of ratio. That’s what our rationale is on achieving four million, because if you look at the Gemini F, by itself it’s doing north of a million in a read-write balance scenario. So on an IOPS-per-terabyte basis, the Gemini F is actually better, because when you do a cluster scale-out like this, you’re going to have at least a little bit of latency from the cluster grid. We’ve kept latency very low because of the Flash Director design.

In part two of this interview series, we discuss micro-latency and how the Gemini X performs against the competition. Hybrid Storage Hits the Sweet Spot as SSDs are No Silver Bullet; Interview with iXsystems CTO Jordan Hubbard, Part III

Some claim that all-flash memory and/or solid state drive (SSD) storage arrays will become the silver bullets that solve all of today’s challenges with enterprise storage arrays. Those closer to the manufacturing of storage arrays have a much different viewpoint as they see a long and healthy life ahead for traditional spinning media. In this third installment in DCIG’s interview series with iXsystem’s CTO Jordan Hubbard, he discusses how hybrid storage arrays hit the sweet spot for the storage needs of most organizations.

Ben: How is iX introducing flash into the storage systems and in what ways is it managing it?

Jordan: We are definitely coming up on an inflection point. We are not quite at the stage yet where pure flash arrays are financially compelling, unless you truly need performance at a level where it is absolutely king in your deployment scenario.

We can certainly build all flash storage solutions, and we do so for those specific scenarios. But, honestly, where we are right now is not yet where we need to be yet in terms of fulfilling NAND’s real potential —wear leveling strategies, price/performance, reliability, and whatnot are still evolving. SSDs are no silver bullet. However, what they are is an incredibly good cache at the moment. Hard drive technology is not standing still. They are continuing to evolve, and everyone who predicted the death of spinning media 10 years ago, well, they were spectacularly wrong! The prices continue to plummet and the capacities and areal densities continue to grow. Perhaps not as fast as in previous years, no, but we still have not seen the limit of what can be done with hard drives.

We are just not going to see the end of spinning rust any time soon. It is actually getting better and better, and more and more reliable.

That makes the hybrid approach the sweet spot right now. If you have lots of spindles, you can distribute your IOPS across them and get really good performance and, more importantly, capacity because that is what SSDs still lack unless you have got an unlimited budget.

You just are not going to build a PB of SSD for anything reasonable in terms of cost. You can, however, take a PB of hard disk storage and front it with a much smaller amount of SSD storage for the second level cache, and for write transaction logs, and get really good cache level performance to the network without paying the full cost of what an all SSD solution would cost you.

In Part I of this interview series with iXsystems’ CTO Jordan Hubbard, we take a look at some ways in which iX’s value propositions set it apart from its competitors.

In Part II of this interview series, we discuss iXsystems’ ability to consult with their clients and how that practice helps them create more customizable storage appliance and server configurations. In Part IV of this interview series, we look at how closely iXsystems works with the FreeBSD kernel community and Jordan discusses the split of external developers between hobbyists and enterprise users.

In Part V of this interview series, we discuss Jordan’s views of proprietary versus open source code, and how he views the responsibility of iXsystems to the open source community.

In Part VI of this interview series, we discuss Jordan’s ideas on if the open source community is a meritocracy, and what type of person has the chance to rise above the rest in the field.

Customized Storage Solutions Trump the Cookie Cutter Approach Every Time; Interview with iXsystems CTO Jordan Hubbard Part II

One of the most common requests that DCIG gets from its readers is to include the actual cost of storage systems in its Buyer’s Guides. The reason DCIG continues to decline that request and only includes starting list prices is that most storage systems may be configured in multiple different ways. This makes it impossible to arrive at a definitive price point. The second part in DCIG’s interview series with iXsystem’s Jordan Hubbard illustrates this point as he discusses how the availability of multiple different storage configurations and services trumps a cookie cutter approach to buying storage every time.

Ben: What is the theoretical limit to deployment and what is your largest deployment?

Jordan: I do not have immediate access to our complete customer database, but I could definitely say it’s in the petabyte (PB) range. I have to be a little bit vague. The limitations, as it were, with the size of such deployments are primarily hardware. There are only so many bytes you can push through a 10GbE interface. Even if you want to link multiple 10 GbE interfaces together, you can go no more than 12-16 ports, and that’s assuming you have the maximum number of slots available to put the appropriate multiport 10 GbE cards in there and don’t mind the fact that PCIe bus bandwidth limitations means you’ll never even approach that theoretical maximum.

Even in the highest end configuration, there is always going to be ingress and egress bottlenecks to contend with. Even with all of the network bandwidth you could possibly want, the number of spindles that one can physically fit into a box or daisy chain across a reasonable number of JBODs without compromising reliability is going to put a certain upper limit on the number of IOPS you can get out of a single head. There are also single point of failure arguments to be made that might discourage organizations from adopting this approach. Once you get to a certain stage of hanging a given number of enclosures off a single head — or even a pair of heads where you have some failover capability — you start to ask yourself, “How many more eggs do I want to put in this one basket?”

At that point, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that you should start spreading your storage out into multiple racks, and once you start doing that and are confronted with physically distinct boxes, you start asking yourself, “How do I want to manage all this data?” Maybe that’s a better way of putting it. The sheer data management challenges are the bigger bottlenecks. To be honest, no one has really cracked that nut yet.

Ben: Do you provide services to help organizations come up with those configurations?

Jordan: iXsystems obviously does a lot of consulting, and at the front end of its sales process is a lot of Q&A. We ask:

What are you trying to do? What is your workload? How much data are we talking about?

Even for just one box, there are a lot of key decisions to be made.

How much ARC do you need (e.g. How much memory?) How much L2ARC (secondary cache) do you need? How much SSD secondary cache is appropriate?

If you are doing a lot of NFS operations then a ZIL, a ZFS intent log, is probably going to be important for getting the maximum performance out of just one box. Then, of course, once you start scaling to multiple boxes, other concerns emerge such as:

How are you distributing the flow of information? How are you dealing with replication and backups?

All of these questions are asked during our consulting and pre-sales process. Nobody has truly cracked the storage “blob of mercury” model which everyone would love to have, where you add another box to your network and it just seamlessly disappears into the one big blob of data and no management of it is required whatsoever – just frictionless scaling. Some of the storage players are touting that in their roadmaps, but no one is actually providing it.

Ben: Is configurability a big part of your value proposition? Jordan: Yes. A lot of our customers come to us because they have kind of fallen out of the templates that the other folks offer. “None of those quite meet my needs.” Or they might, but they’re over-spec’d or under-spec’d, and the customer would have to do some gyrations to be able to fit into one of those configurations.

For the bigger players, their configurations are often more of an exercise in cutting off everything that does not fit, so the bespoke storage market is definitely an area where iXsystems plays well and there is still a lot of room left to play. Obviously there is also the cost competitiveness that comes with being smaller and more agile, with support plans that can be tailored to smaller customers. That’s another area in which iXsystems competes well.

I think the most important attribute is the personal service, however. Being able to call and talk with someone who can understand your storage needs, someone who will work interactively with you to define what is precisely the right storage solution, all of that is a big part of what iXsystems offers. A lot of people definitely come to us without a clear notion of how to address their storage problems, and we help them find that clarity.

This is just not something people get from seeing a couple of fixed product tiers and generic marketing text with little to no clue as to whether or not any of it will actually solve their problems. Customers often start with only the most basic problem statement as to where they want to store a certain kind of data or roughly how much of it. Since they are frequently not storage administrators, they need someone to map their problem to a solution. iXsystems offers a very compelling proposition. We will actually figure out how to solve your problem and map it to a solution that will work for your application. A cookie cutter approach to buying storage solutions really just doesn’t work as well!

In Part I of this interview series with iXsystems’ CTO Jordan Hubbard, we take a look at some ways in which iX’s value propositions set it apart from its competitors.

In Part III of this interview series, we discuss how iXsystems is introducing and managing flash drives in its storage systems, and why Jordan believes that a hybrid storage approach is currently the best solution.

In Part IV of this interview series, Hubbard shares how companies in general and iXsystems specifically benefits short and long term for its developers doing work at home and in the FreeBSD kernel community.

In Part V of this interview series, we discuss Jordan’s views of proprietary versus open source code, and how he views the responsibility of iXsystems to the open source community.

In Part VI of this interview series, we discuss Jordan’s ideas on if the open source community is a meritocracy, and what type of person has the chance to rise above the rest in the field.

Four Key Features in Selecting a Hybrid Storage Array

Hybrid storage arrays use flash memory in combination with hard disk drives to create storage that balances performance, capacity and cost. Because the majority of the data will ultimately be stored on slower HDD instead of flash memory, the trick is to achieve consistently high performance without 100% flash. The secret sauce the Hybrid Storage Array vendors bring to the table is a combination of storage architecture, hardware, and software features. What is the business value of a Hybrid Storage Array? Time is money, and old storage architectures take too much time. They are too hard to manage and can’t keep up with customer needs or the random I/O demands of the virtualized data center. Desired business results are often hampered by inadequate storage system performance.

Hybrid Storage Arrays promise to deliver the dramatic performance benefits of an all flash array at a lower cost than an all flash array. In addition, by combining flash memory and high-capacity HDD in a single system, HSAs accelerate access for a broader set of applications than can be housed on a smaller capacity all flash array. Unifying more storage under one modern management umbrella adds to the benefits a business realizes from the storage investment, while subtracting from the overall storage management cost.

Why now? Storage industry veterans from a number of companies recognized the opportunity to combine a new generation of server hardware, flash memory and HDD into a system that could enable IT to deliver the performance businesses seek at a lower cost than either all flash or traditional arrays. How is a Hybrid Storage Array different from an all Flash Memory Storage Array? A Hybrid Storage Array uses flash memory–generally in the form of either PCIe cards or SSDs–in combination with hard disk drives to create server-addressable storage pools. It is the addition of hard disk drives to the flash memory storage that creates the “Hybrid” distinction. Because not all storage in the Hybrid array is flash, it is necessary to implement sophisticated caching/tiering algorithms to place the “hot” data in flash memory and the warm/cold data on the hard disk drives. How is a Hybrid Storage Array different from a traditional array? Many traditional arrays can incorporate flash memory as a cache or as a high performance storage tier. A Hybrid Storage Array is architected for flash memory, and generally adopts a “flash first” approach to storage. In a Hybrid Storage Array, caching/tiering algorithms are often combined with in-line deduplication and data compression–along with cache hardware and specialized software algorithms–to maximize the amount of storage I/O that is satisfied from high speed cache and flash memory.

Because of the “flash first” design, many of the Hybrid Arrays contain only flash memory and high capacity multi-terabyte 7.2K RPM SAS or SATA hard disk drives.

Bypassing relatively expensive and lower capacity Tier 1 15K SAS/FC and Tier 2 10K

SAS/FC hard disk drives reduces data tiering complexity and overall cost.

Hybrid Storage Arrays generally leverage the latest generation of commodity server hardware with multi-core CPUs and large RAM capacities. This high-performance hardware makes it possible to implement data optimizations such as in-line deduplication and compression without impeding the flow of data.

What features are especially important in selecting a Hybrid Storage Array?

1. Caching/tiering capabilities 2. Consistent application performance 3. VMware integration 4. Performance monitoring

How are Hybrid Storage Array vendors addressing these key features? Caching/tiering capabilities From an engineering standpoint, the design and implementation of caching/tiering capabilities is perhaps the most significant differentiator among Hybrid Storage Arrays and between HSAs and all-flash or traditional arrays. They want to ensure that I/O requests are almost always satisfied from cache or flash, particularly those associated with critical systems. Vendors employ multiple strategies to achieve optimum caching/tiering results. These include:

Much larger DRAM caches than in traditional arrays In-line deduplication and/or compression of data in the cache as well as on disk Separate read and write caches using dedicated hardware for each cache Highest performance media for write caches, including NVRAM, SLC, mirrored SSDs Multiple physical or logical write caches Metadata stored separately from file data on very high performance media QoS policies per VM/LUN/Volume that determine how read and write queues are serviced

Consistent application performance Another important feature is the ability of an array to deliver consistently good application performance, and the vendors are taking different approaches to this requirement. Some vendors are focused on making the storage as smart as possible about the data so that users can simply rely on the system to do the performance management for them. Other vendors, including Nexgen, believe that the ability to specify, enforce and measure quality of service metrics on a per VM/LUN/Volume basis is critical for running multiple application workloads simultaneously. VMware integration VMware integration is another critical feature. The need for a new storage architecture is largely driven by virtualization. VMware not only has a large installed base, it provides multiple API hooks into the VMware environment that can make a significant difference in how servers and storage work in concert with one another. Most of the HSAs take advantage of these VMware APIs. Performance monitoring Visibility into the performance of the storage system is important for troubleshooting application performance problems when they arise as well as for capacity planning. Vendors approach this differently. Some have implemented VMaware monitoring that reveals performance at the virtual machine level, a capability that should speed the troubleshooting process. Who are the players? Although the traditional storage vendors have been slow to address this opportunity, some are now coming to market with hybrid solutions. Quite a number of newer companies are now delivering hybrid systems that were designed from the ground up to address the need of businesses for high performing, high capacity storage. These companies include Avere, GreenBytes, Nexgen (now part of Fusion-IO), Nexsan, Nimble, Nutanix, Starboard, Tegile, Tintri and Xiotech. DCIG believes that both Hybrid Storage Arrays and Flash Memory Storage Arrays are ready to not only supplement, but to begin displacing traditional storage arrays in many data centers. Any business contemplating the purchase of a storage array should take a close look at these new alternatives to traditional arrays. Earlier this year we published the DCIG 2013 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide to help organizations make faster and better informed purchasing decisions regarding flash memory storage arrays. DCIG is now in the process of creating a buyer’s guide for hybrid flash/HDD storage arrays that should become available this summer.