Thoughts on Virtual Infrastructure Management

A Real Storage Revolution

I’m on my way to Orange County for a few meetings this week and I find myself with some time to actually sit and write a couple of postings without any interruptions!  I always find cross-country flights a good time to catch up on my writing.  My only problem is that my two batteries usually don’t  last for the whole flight so I’m going to have to type fast!

In a previous posting I mentioned that one of the technologies that is changing the storage industry is Solid State Drives (SSD’s).  Back in January EMC announced that all of it’s core products will now be offered with SSD’s.  We’re also beginning to see startups like Pilant Technologies sprout up that are focusing solely on this space.  These events really mark the beginning of the end for spinning media.  SSD’s have been talked about for many, many years but the technology is finally at a point to make the technology viable for this applications.

SSD’s today are made from FLASH memory devices.  FLASH technology is what you find in digital camera’s, some MP3 players, and USB memory sticks.  Over the past decade or so FLASH memory has proven itself as a reliable and rugged technology.  Although FLASH devices haven’t hit the cost/MB that spinning media has there are other industry trends that are driving the adoption of SSD’s.

FLASH based SSD’s provide four key attributes that are attractive to storage vendors these days.  First and foremost the densities are approaching parity, although spinning media still has a slight edge.  Second is power.  SSD’s offer a significant savings in power consumption.  These days anything "green" seems to be able to sell and SSD’s have a strong lead over spinning media on this front.  Another important metric is performance.  SSD’s are inherently faster than their spinning media counterparts.  One reason is that with SSD’s there is no rotational latency, the proper devices are addressed directly.  The last major factor is reliability.  SSD’s have much longer Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF’s) than spinning drives do.  Mechanical parts are prone to higher failure rates than their solid state counterparts.

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What we are seeing today is that Storage Array vendors are swapping their spinning drives for SSD’s.  They have fabricated SSD’s to fit the same footprint as the traditional spinning disk drive.  I guess one benefit of this approach is that customers now have a choice and they can decide whether to use spinning media in one tier of storage while using Solid State Drives in other tiers to improve performance and reliability.

As long as the Array vendors don’t unduly influence the purchasing decisions of customers I think you’ll see a large number of customers opt for the SSD technology.  Why wouldn’t they?  And once that really begins to take hold I bet you’ll see some innovative "redesign" of the Storage Array.

I wonder if this transition will be the death to the traditional storage protocols like SCSI.  Wouldn’t RDMA technologies such as iWarp make more sense?  I think the SSD revolution will have a much greater impact on the storage industry than any other previous transition.  I’m looking forward to be part of the evolution of the storage array over the next decade….it’s going to be an exciting ride!

July 1, 2008 | Filed Under Industry News & Opinion, Virtual infrastructure management | 2 Comments 

comments

2 Responses to “A Real Storage Revolution”

  1. Margaret Rouse on July 9th, 2008

    These days anything “green” seems to be able to sell and SSD’s have a strong lead over spinning media on this front.

    If Kermit the frog worked in IT right now, he’d be singing “IT IS easy being green.” Especially if you’re a vendor. Rich Corley gives a nice overview of what’s happening with vendors and SSD.

  2. The SAN Technologist on October 13th, 2008

    Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel……

    Image by HoldThatTiger via Flickr

     
         “Stay Tuned” is what M. Dell, CEO of Dell Computers Corp. said in response to DELL | EQUALLOGIC PS-Series storage future support of SSD drives. 
     
       ……

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