A new article, co-authored by myself and Tom Coughlin, can now be read from the SNIA Europe website.  "Solid State Drives for Energy Savings" explains the energy benefits that are being discovered when IT managers start to bring SSDs into their data centers.  The article is a quick two pager, and it introduces SNIA's new TCO Calculator (Total Cost of Ownership), a clever tool that helps estimate the power, rack space, and other savings that come along with a conversion of fast storage from enterprise HDDs to SSDs. [Update: After clicking on the above link, it will be necessary to download the April 2010 edition of  Storage Networking Times, in order to read the article.]

In London this week, I was invited to present on solid state storage at the SNIA Europe Data Center Academy event.  It was  a well-attended event with a good mix of  IT managers, consultants and press in the audience – including Chris Mellor from The Register who subsequently published this blog.  Chris is one of the most perceptive journalists in the industry and really nailed the key issues in his blog.  Check it out!

BTW, the presentation is among the latest batch of SNIA tutorials, which you can find here.

Some SSD advocates project that SSD price per gigabyte will cross over that of HDDs, due to slower growth in areal density of HDDs in the future than it has grown in the past.  HDD price per GB declines will slow as a result of a slower areal density growth.  The argument is that this would allow flash gigabyte prices to blow past HDD prices just as they slipped below DRAM gigabyte prices in 2004.  Some of these advocates recently predict that 3.5" HDDs will “only” reach 6TB by 2015.  Although we find it likely that we will have 6 TB HDDs in mass production by then, Coughlin Associates expects to see 10TB maximum announced product capacity of 3.5-inch hard disk drives by that time.   Slower areal density growth of hard disk drives may result from transition difficulties to new recording technologies such as patterned media and heat assisted magnetic recording.  It appears likely that we may see areal density growth slowing from 40-50% annually today to 20% or possibly even less over the next few years.  Today the HDD industry is shipping 2 TB 3.5-inch HDDs and 1 TB 2.5-inch HDDs and will likely ship 3 TB or larger (3.5-inch) drives in the second half of 2010.  If the areal density of HDDs increased only 20% annually from 2010 through 2015 this would give us 7.5 TB 3.5-inch HDDs and over 3 TB 2.5-inch HDDs.  Although a slow down is likely during a technology transition phase it is likely going to slow down gradually from today’s roughly 40% annual areal density growth rate.  So let’s say we have one more year of 40% growth (2010-2011), one year of 30% growth (2011-2012) and then 20% growth for the three remaining years to 2010.  With a 3 TB capacity in 2010 that would give us a 9.4TB capacity in 2010.  There is enough uncertainty in these numbers that the actual capacity could be between 8 and 11 TB so let’s say the maximum storage capacity in 2010 for 3.5-inch drives is 10 TB.  Likewise because of the geometry differences the maximum 2.5-inch storage capacity would be about 5 TB.   If the HDD industry stays true to its history, these 10TB HDDs will cost $50, giving a price per terabyte of $5.  Meanwhile, NAND flash terabyte prices will have declined to $50-100, preventing SSDs from displacing HDDs at least through 2015!

SSSI and SSS TWG: The SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) recently noted the transition in leadership from founding Chair Phil Mills of IBM.  Phil Mills, Secretary of the SNIA Board of Directors, drove formation of the SSSI in late 2008 and was instrumental in developing the Initiative's organizational mission and objectives as well as forming the associated SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Working Group.  Due in large part to Phil's Herculean efforts, the SSSI was successful in attaining critical mass by recruiting 26 founding members - a number that continued to grow to the current membership of 34 SSSI member companies, along with 56 SSS TWG member companies. SSSI Mission: The founding mission statement of the SSSI articulated a dedication to "foster the growth and success of the solid state storage market for client and enterprise applications... that encompasses marketing outreach, education, collaboration with SSS industry standards bodies, development of SNIA SSS Specifications and Standards (such as the SSS TWG), and a close following of advancements in non-volatile memory for solid state mass storage." Progress to Date: Taking stock of the SSSI at this transition point, it is clear that the SSSI has been very successful in effecting these goals.  The SSSI has active committees for Marketing, Business Development, Education, Technical Development and SSS Total Cost of Ownership.  In conjunction with the work in the SSS TWG, the SSSI has made great strides in all areas.  Deliverables achieved to date include establishment of the SSSI as THE authoritative voice on Solid State Storage Performance, collaboration and cooperation with other Standards groups and Trade Associations (JEDEC, SSDA, and others), completion of several key white papers and tutorials on many aspects of solid state storage, industry noted presentations and presence at trade shows and events, completion of a TCO calculator for SSS, on-going investigations in emerging areas of SSS technologies (such as "drive pairing" and "storage tiering") and imminent release of the SSS TWG Performance Test Specification for Public Technical Review - the industry's first SSS Performance Specification whose goal is to help standardize the nomenclature, metrics, methodologies, tests and reporting of SSS performance. Looking Forward: Phil leaves the Initiative at at time of great market activity and leaves in place a capable team to carry the SSSI forward.  The SSSI Governing Board has appointed Paul Wassenberg of Marvell as the acting SSSI Chair.  Paul has been the chair of the TechDev sub committee and allows for a seamless transition with Paul's extensive interaction with Education, Busdev, and the SSS TWG.  Paul and Marvell are also one of the founding companies of the SSSI and has been instrumental in getting the Initiative to where it is and will be key in moving us forward. Come Join Us: The SSSI continues to evangelize Solid State Storage and will have numerous opportunities to contribute to standardization of the SSS industry and widespread adoption and deployment of SSS mass storage. Thank You Phil: The entire SSSI wants to thank Phil for his dedication, leadership and vision and hopes to take the SSSI to the next level.  In that vein, the Initiative actively seeks to expand its membership and to address topics of interest to the SSS community and the Initiative's membership.  People and companies that have an interest in participating in this exciting industry are invited to visit the SSSI at http://www.snia.org/forums/sssi

Last week I attended the annual Massive Storage System Technologies 2010 Symposium in Tahoe. Most of the audience was from the National Labs, NASA, and Supercomputing centers. The discussions were mostly focused on the next exascale generation of storage and I was invited to present the pNFS as one of the major future technologies that will address the scalability issues related to the high I/O throughput requirements of HPC and SC. My presentation was very well received and many participants were not new to the pNFS and NFSv4.1. During the discussions after the presentation I asked the audience if anybody used already pNFS and I got some 4 votes. But when I asked who is considering using pNFS in the near future I got some 80 hands (out of 140 in the room). More interesting about the interest in pNFS was the fact that one of the storage managers of CERN presented unsolicited his latest use of pNFS by CERN scientists. It was the first time a user not close to the pNFS community presented to the researcher the use of pNFS. Additional discussion was related to the reasons why NFSv4.1 will not have the same faith of NFSv4.0 which was supposed to bring new features to the NFSv3 and didn't become a replacement of NFSv3. I just want to mention that this HPC community was always "hating" NFSv3 but they couldn't live without it. The next question was what took us so long to get the NFSv4.1 and pNFS out of the door. Of course my answer was that we ensured that NFSv4.1 will have enough value added so it will not have the same faith as NFSv4.0. I am not sure that I was very convincing so perhaps we can try to organize a panel at SNIA to try to address this issue.

 

Accelerating Cloud Adoption via Standards & Collaboration

Date: May 25, 2010, 4:00pm EST / 1:00pm PST

Duration: 60 minutes

Register:http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/20535

Abstract:
Gartner identified Cloud Computing as the top technology for 2010, yet the number of enterprises choosing to adopt the cloud is not as high as anticipated. Implementation of cloud infrastructure is a strategic IT decision that involves careful evaluation and promises long term benefits, while application deployment has been more readily adopted in the short term. The experts at this summit will highlight best practices for managing cloud infrastructure, discuss how to distribute workloads in the cloud and give you an overview of what services are available in the market today.

This event will be moderated by Mark Carlson of the SNIA Technical Council, DMTF Board of Directors, Sun Microsystems and Cloud-Standards.org

About the Panelists Val Bernovici is Chairman of the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative and works in the Office of the CTO at NetApp Winston Bumpus is president of DMTF and Director of Standards at VMware Craig Lee is President of Open Grid Forum and Senior Scientist in the Computer Systems Research Department of The Aerospace Corporation Jon Siegel is Vice President of Technology Transfer at Object Management Group and formerly worked in the Computer Science Research Department at Shell Development Company

 

Sign up for this FREE webcast!

View the full Cloud Computing Summit lineup featuring Frost & Sullivan, Burton Group, Akamai, Zynga, VMware, and more.

As the “cloud” becomes a common platform, web applications still live in a “stovepipe” world. It’s not a question of “should we move to the cloud?” It’s a question of once some, or most, or all of our web applications live in the cloud, how do we handle the problems of scalability, security, identity, storage, integration and interoperability?

What was the problem of “enterprise application integration” in the late 90s, is now the cambrian explosion of web–based applications that will demand similar levels of integration. The problem, put simply, is how to “glue” all of these apps, data, people, work–flows, and networks together.

Glue is the only conference devoted solely to this new problem–set facing architects, developers and integrators. At Glue, we’ll explore the new technologies that are forming around web applications in a post–cloud world.

SNIA’s own Mark Carlson will be presenting on CDMI at Gluecon, and you can check out the rest of the Gluecon agenda here: http://www.gluecon.com/2010/Glue2010_Agenda.htm

If you’re interested in attending Gluecon, use the code, “snia1” to receive 10% off of the registration. If you’re interested in sponsoring Gluecon, please contact Eric Norlin at enorlin@mac.com.

  by: Gary Gumanow EXTENDING NETWORK STANDARDS 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), standardized by the IEEE in 2004, delivers ten times the bandwidth of previously available networking technologies, and its availability has prompted the development of new standards for the data center, delivering on the promise of a single networking fabric or technology to connect storage, the LAN, and Inter-Processing Communication, or IPC. These new IEEE standards go by several names: "Converged Enhanced Ethernet," "Data Center Ethernet," and the industry-standard term "Data Center Bridging," or DCB. In this series of blogpostings we provide an overview of the reasons DCB is being developed and how it can improve networking in the data center for applications, servers, and storage. ETHERNET RELIES ON TCP FOR "LOSSLESS" COMMUNICATIONS Many IT managers deploy their networks to be "lossless" by over-provisioning bandwidth so all network applications can operate at their desired bandwidths. However, networks are dynamic organisms, change over time, and most likely have changed once rolled out. IT managers don't plan for their networks to drop packets from inception and therefore having inherent mechanisms to recover from them are a necessity. While Ethernet is generally a reliable technology, data packets can be dropped in transmission due to network congestion, traffic load balancing, over-subscription, and loads on servers and switches. Dropped packets don't cause big problems, but they can result in performance variations for applications. Protocols, such as TCP (TCP/IP), run on top of Ethernet to ensure seamless communications. TCP will take note if packets are dropped during communication, and if so, those packets are re-sent, but if not, confirmation of a completed transmission is returned. With this "handshake," TCP delivers "lossless" communications. TCP also provides a dynamic flow control mechanism, called windowing, which essentially elasticizes the two ends of a buffered connection based on the capabilities of those endpoints. Finally, TCP provides routing capabilities so that communications work seamlessly across routed and different networks. In a converged Ethernet environment, storage network technologies that do not have a built-in recovery mechanism like TCP, require safeguards against dropped packets. Enter Data Center Bridging, the most recent set of IEEE standards that provide this enhancement to Ethernet. The next blogpost in this series will focus on some of the benefits of DCB and what makes it so compelling for storage in today's data centers. If DCB provides the benefit to your SAN as promised, what percentage improvement in performance would you need to see in order to implement a change to the infrastructure for DCB? Are you seeing issues today with performance and TCP retransmits?

IT as a Service (ITaaS), or cloud services (clouds), was one of the "buzz" topics at SNW this Spring. And industry groups, such as SNIA's Cloud Storage Initiative, are beginning to address the standards, policies, and marketing messages that help define what is ITaaS or clouds. Whatever the definition, "cloud" technologies appear ahead of attempts to describe them. In fact, many customers are deploying cloud solutions today. A few obvious examples include online email and CRM solutions that have been available for several years. Enabling these cloud offerings are technologies that are very complimentary, namely virtualization in its various forms, and Ethernet or IP networks. For this article, I'll put in a specific plug for iSCSI. iSCSI plays well in the Cloud I have described what I think are the top five requirements for cloud deployments and how well iSCSI addresses them in an article published in SNS Europe magazine February 2010. You can read the article online here. I'll describe these five requirements briefly: Cost, Performance, Security, Scalability, and Data Mobility. Cost: As a cloud service provider, the cost of goods for your services is essentially your IT infrastructure. Keeping these costs low represents a competitive advantage. One of the ways to reduce cost is to move to higher volume, and therefore lower cost components. Ethernet offers the economies of scale to deliver the lowest cost networking infrastructure both in terms of capital and operating expense associated with its extensive deployment across all industries as well as simplified management. Performance: Your cloud environment needs to scale in performance to meet the demands of a growing customer base. Ethernet offers a variety of means and price points to address performance. Gigabit Ethernet with addition of port bonding or teaming offers simple and cost effective scalability, sufficient for most business applications. 10 Gigabit Ethernet is now being deployed more readily since price points have dropped below the $500 per port range. We'll soon see 10 Gigabit ports standard on server motherboards, which will offer significant increases in network bandwidth with fewer ports and cables to contend with. Security: Because Ethernet was developed as a general purpose network, efforts were made to support data security in mixed traffic environments. The TCP/IP stack includes security protocols, such as CHAP and IPSec, to address these requirements. These security protocols extend to storage traffic as well. Scalability: Scalability can be described in many ways. I have already referred to performance scalability. But, scalability also refers to geography. IP networks span the globe and offer the capabilities needed to address IT services of customers in diverse geographies, which is at the heart of Cloud services. Inherent abilities to route data traffic offer some additional advantages for storage. Data Mobility: One of the features of IP networks that I believe is particularly well suited for clouds is virtual IP addressing. IP addresses can move from physical port to physical port, allowing you to migrate the network connectivity easily as you migrate other virtual objects, such as virtual servers. As a result, IP based storage protocols, such as iSCSI, are particularly well suited in highly virtualized cloud environments. IP Networks for the Data Center As the evolution of the data center continues to deliver dynamic and highly virtualized services, we will see that Ethernet storage networks, including iSCSI, will deliver the value required to make cloud service providers successful. IP networks offer the economics, performance, security, scalability, and mobility required for the current generation and next generation data center. And for more on this topic, check out this webinar http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/23778.

The MySQL Conference, a gathering of programmers who share database strategies, was held in the Santa Clara Convention Center this week.  One hot topic was SSDs. My favorite session was hosted by Fusion-io.  They rounded up four satisfied customers who discussed how Fusion-io SSDs had benefited them. Craigslist, found that in their systems the RAID card was their highest point of failure.  That doesn't help much, when the whole point of a RAID system is to prevent failures!  Although the company is only halfway through their first SSD deployment, they are recognizing 2/3 power reductions while their tests are running surprisingly faster than they had with RAID systems.  SSDs are allowing them to move to two incidences of MySQL on a single server with two IOdrives on each server.  Their bottleneck has moved from storage to the software. Cloudmark, a net security firm that blocks Spam for over 1 billion in-boxes, started with a system that consumed 48U of servers and storage, and their needs ballooned to the point that they were worried they couldn't keep pace.  By adding SSDs they were able to actually reduce their systems to 17U, losing 180 drives along the way.  Their processor CPUs are now operating at maximum capacity, something they have never seen before.  Cloudmark's present system runs 22Us of systems with 22 IOdrives operating in a RAID configuration that is significantly cheaper than a SAN.  The SAN costs $500K.  They have been able to replace this with two servers, each with an IOdrive, for about $20K all told. Answers.com: The 18th-rated Internet site in the US and 31st worldwide, is a staunch user of HP hardware.  When HP announced their support of the IOdrive, Answers.com bought a couple and found that they could avoid the purchase of four additional servers by buying a 320GB Fusion-io drive for the price of about two servers.  When they compared performance against their SAS-based systems Answers.com was astounded to get a ten times improvement in complex queries from 350 to 3,500 per second.  Restoring the system from backup dropped from over 6 hours to 12½ minutes!  CPU loading dropped from 30% to 18%.  The company's old topology had five data centers with four servers per data center.  Today a single server per data center does the trick.  Their tests indicate that they could reduce the number of servers to 1/9th the original number, but conservative policies prevent them from trying this.  The current configuration has been in place for one year, and the company still has more processing power than they need. Percona is an important MySQL consulting firm, helping clients through system analysis, coding, and even training.  Percona ran extensive tests on Fusion-io and Intel mainstream SSDs in comparison with enterprise HDDs and even HDD RAID systems.  The conclusion was that the Fusion-io IOdrives were a hands-down winner in database applications. All in all these four users present an extremely compelling case for SSDs in general, and Fusion-io drives in particular (although we should keep in mind that Fusion-io selected the speakers for this panel.)  With the results these firms experienced it's clear that now is the time for all data center managers to stand up and pay attention!