Objective Analysis has just published a new study with a somewhat surprising finding - that PCs get a bigger performance improvement by adding a dollar's worth of NAND flash than by adding a dollar's worth of DRAM. This finding is the result of a series of nearly 300 benchmarks in which the company tested PCs with a variety of DRAM and NAND flash sizes running industry-standard benchmarks: PCMark, SYSmark, HDxPRT, and others. In a nutshell the benchmarks showed that dollar-for-dollar NAND yields a greater performance improvement to a PC than does DRAM.  Once PC users and OEMs discover this phenomenon there should be a mass-migration of PC architectures to systems with paired storage (there's a SNIA Webcast on this), perhaps in hybrid HDDs, and this will present difficulties to DRAM makers whose biggest market is the PC. Oddly enough, the study shows that the HDD is likely to remain in PCs for a while to come, since well-designed DRAM-Flash-HDD configurations perform nearly as fast as DRAM-SSD systems with prices and capacities that are similar to those of a conventional DRAM-HDD system.  Future PC users are likely to opt for adding NAND flash, rather than DRAM, to their systems when they upgrade. The report is available for purchase at http://Objective-Analysis.com/Reports.html#DRAM-NAND. Comments and questions are more than welcome.

A Message from

SNIA Links: Webcasts Certification Tutorials e-Courses Standards Events News Membership About Follow SNIA: Linkedin Twitter Facebook SNIA Blogs: Cloud Storage Ethernet Storage Solid State Storage Cloud Storage Initiative Upcoming Activities Get Involved Now! A limited number of these activities are open to all, or Join SNIA and the CSI to participate in any of these activities July Cloud Plugfest The purpose of the Cloud Plugfest is for vendors to bring their implementations of CDMI and OCCI to test, identify, and fix bugs in a collaborative setting with the goal of providing a forum in which companies can develop interoperable products. The Cloud Plugfest starts on Tuesday July 12 and runs thru Thursday July 14, 2011 at the SNIA Technology Center in Colorado Springs, CO.  The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) is underwriting the costs of the event, therefore there is no participation fee. More Information SNIA Cloud Burst Event There are a multitude of events dedicated to cloud computing, but where can you go to find out specifically about cloud storage? The 2011 SNIA Cloud Burst Summit educates and offers insight into this fast–growing market segment. Come hear from industry luminaries, see live demonstrations, and talk to technology vendors about how to get started with cloud storage. More information Cloud Lab Plugfest at SDC Plugfests have always been an important part of the Storage Developers Conference and this year will be the first Cloud Lab Plugfest event held over multiple days to test the interoperability of CDMI, OVF and OCCI implementations. To get involved, please contact: arnold@snia.org Cloud Pavilion at SNW Every SNW, one of highlights is the Cloud Pavilion where attendees can see public and private cloud offerings and discuss solutions. Space is limited, so get involved early to ensure your spot. To get involved, please contact: lisa.mercurio@snia.org CONTACT US: Contact us by clicking the following link http://www.snia.org/about/contact_us www.snia.org | © 2011 Storage Networking Industry Association

A Message from

SNIA Links: Webcasts Certification Tutorials e-Courses Standards Events News Membership About Follow SNIA: Linkedin Twitter Facebook SNIA Blogs: Cloud Storage Ethernet Storage Solid State Storage Cloud Storage Initiative Upcoming Activities Get Involved Now! A limited number of these activities are open to all, or Join SNIA and the CSI to participate in any of these activities July Cloud Plugfest The purpose of the Cloud Plugfest is for vendors to bring their implementations of CDMI and OCCI to test, identify, and fix bugs in a collaborative setting with the goal of providing a forum in which companies can develop interoperable products. The Cloud Plugfest starts on Tuesday July 12 and runs thru Thursday July 14, 2011 at the SNIA Technology Center in Colorado Springs, CO.  The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) is underwriting the costs of the event, therefore there is no participation fee. More Information SNIA Cloud Burst Event There are a multitude of events dedicated to cloud computing, but where can you go to find out specifically about cloud storage? The 2011 SNIA Cloud Burst Summit educates and offers insight into this fast–growing market segment. Come hear from industry luminaries, see live demonstrations, and talk to technology vendors about how to get started with cloud storage. More information Cloud Lab Plugfest at SDC Plugfests have always been an important part of the Storage Developers Conference and this year will be the first Cloud Lab Plugfest event held over multiple days to test the interoperability of CDMI, OVF and OCCI implementations. To get involved, please contact: arnold@snia.org Cloud Pavilion at SNW Every SNW, one of highlights is the Cloud Pavilion where attendees can see public and private cloud offerings and discuss solutions. Space is limited, so get involved early to ensure your spot. To get involved, please contact: lisa.mercurio@snia.org CONTACT US: Contact us by clicking the following link http://www.snia.org/about/contact_us www.snia.org | © 2011 Storage Networking Industry Association

Apple recently announced Trim support for all SSD-capable Macs.  What is Trim? The SSSI Glossary defines the Trim command as “A method by which the host operating system may inform a NAND Flash-based SSS device about which blocks of data are no longer in use and can be erased. Such blocks may then be written without having to erase them first, enhancing SSS device write performance.” A drive’s internal Garbage Collection performs a similar task as Trim by erasing blocks that have been previously marked for deletion.  However, because of the way that many operating systems work, there will be some blocks that can be repurposed of which only the OS is aware; Trim addresses this issue. For Trim to be functional, both the SSD and the OS must support it.  Most SSDs of recent vintage support Trim, but check the features list to be sure. In addition to the Apple OS, anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Microsoft Windows 7 supports Trim.  And an increasing number of Linux versions support Trim, plus FreeBSD and OpenSolaris.  Wikipedia has a more detailed list.

The SNIA SSSI site has a new page entitled Solid State Storage Standards Explained.   It provides an overview of standards on drivers, interfaces, connectors, form factors, security, and testing that must be considered when designing or evaluating an SSD.  There are links to each standards site to get further details.  The page will be updated regularly and inputs are welcome.  Questions and comments may be sent to asksssi@snia.org.

Update:  A recording of this webcast is available here. Presenter: Tom Coughlin, SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative and President, Coughlin Associates Abstract: This session presents a brief overview of the solid state technologies which are being integrated into enterprise storage systems today, including technologies, benefits, and price/performance. It describes where they fit into today’s typical enterprise storage architectures today, with descriptions of specific use cases. Finally, the session speculates briefly on what the future will bring.

This week, the SSSI formally released the Enterprise Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification.   The SSS PTS provides standard test methodology for measuring the performance of Enterprise-class SSDs, so that the performance of products from different manufacturers may be fairly compared.  The press release can be found here.  The Enterprise SSS PTS may be downloaded from here. A Client (single user) SSS PTS is planned to be released in Q3 2011.

“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”
Douglas Adams (1952-2001, English humorist, writer and dramatist)

While there have been many advances and improvements to NFS over the last decade, some IT organizations have elected to continue with NFSv3 – like potatoes, it’s the staple filesystem protocol that just about any UNIX administrator understands.

Although adequate for many purposes and a familiar and well understood protocol, choosing and continuing to deploy NFSv3 has become increasingly difficult to justify in a modern datacenter. For example, NFSv3 makes promiscuous use of ports, something that is unsuitable for a variety of security reasons for use over a wide area network (WAN); plus increased server & client bandwidth demands and improved functionality of Network Attached Storage (NAS) arrays have outstripped NFSv3’s ability to deliver high throughput.
NFSv4 and the minor versions that follow it are designed to address many of the issues that NFSv3 poses. NFSv4 also includes features intended to enable its use in global wide area networks (WANs), and to improve the performance and resilience of NAS (Network Attached Storage):

• Firewall-friendly single port operations
• Internationalization support
• Replication and migration facilities
• Mandatory use of strong RPC security flavors that depend on cryptography, with support of access control that is compatible with both UNIX® and Windows®
• Use of character strings instead of integers to represent user and group identifiers
• Advanced and aggressive cache management features with delegations
• (with NFSv4.1 pNFS, or parallel NFS) Trunking

In April 2003, the Network File System (NFS) version 4 Protocol was ratified as an Internet standard, described in RFC-3530, which superseded NFS Version 3 (NFSv3, specified in RFC-1813). Since the ratification of NFSv4, further advances have been made to the standard, notably NFSv4.1 (as described in RFC-5661, ratified in January 2010) that included several new features such as parallel NFS (pNFS). And further work is currently underway in the IETF for NFSv4.2.

Delegations with NFSv4

In NFSv3, clients have to function as if there is contention for the files they have opened, even though this is often not the case. As a result of this conservative approach to file locking, there are frequently many unneeded requests from the client to the server to find out whether an open file has been modified by some other client. Even worse, all write I/O in this scenario is required to be synchronous, further impacting client-side performance.
NFSv4 differs by allowing the server to delegate specific actions on a file to the client; this enables more aggressive client caching of data and the locks. A server temporarily cedes control of file updates and the locking state to a client via a delegation, and promises to notify the client if other clients are accessing the file. Once the client holds a delegation, it can perform operations on files with data has been cached locally, and thereby avoid network latency and optimize its use of I/O.

Trunking with pNFS

Many additional enhancements to NFSv4 are available with NFSv4.1, of which pNFS is a part. pNFS adds the capability to perform trunking at the NFS level by adding a session layer. The client establishes a session with an NFSv4.1 server, and can then create multiple TCP connections to the NFSv4.1 server, each potentially going over a different network interface on the client, and arriving on a different interface on the NFSv4.1 server. Now different requests sent over the same session identifier can go over different network paths, dramatically improving latency and increasing bandwidth.
Although client and server implementations of NFSv4.1 are available, they are in early stages of implementation and adoption. However, to take advantage of them in the future, it is important to plan now for the move to NFSv4 and beyond – and there are many servers and clients available now that support NFSv4. NFSv4 is a mature and stable protocol with many advantages in its own right over its predecessors NFSv3 and NFSv2.

Potatoes and Beyond

Now is the time to make the switchover; there really is no justification for not pursuing NFSv4 as the first NFS protocol version of choice. Although migrating from earlier versions of NFS requires some planning as there are significant differences between the two protocols, the benefits are impressive. To ensure a smooth migration to NFSv4 and beyond, the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum NFS Special Interest Group has recently published an overview white paper “Migrating to NFSv4”. This covers internationalization support, automatic mounting of NFSv4 filesystems on demand, TCP protocol support amongst other considerations.
NFSv4 and NFSv4.1 have been developed for a reason; and NFSv4.2 is on the horizon. Like the potato, NFSv3 is a staple of the network Filesystem world. But as Douglas Adams said; “It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.” NFSv4 fixes many of NFSv3’s deficiencies, and represents a major advance that brings improved availability, performance and security; all the check-list items beyond potatoes that today’s users of network attached storage demand.

Building your own standards-based private storage cloud.

Tuesday May24th, 1-5pm

Omni Interlocken Hotel,

Broomfield, CO

This year at Gluecon SNIA will be conducting a Hands on Lab workshop for Developers,

This session will take you deeper into cloud storage than you likely have ever been. First we will explore the standard cloud storage interface called CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface), including some of the rationale and design tradeoffs in its creation.

Learn about how to use the RESTful interface to move data into and out of a storage cloud using a common interface. Learn how CDMI enables data portability between clouds. Dig deep into features such as Data System Metadata (how you order services from the cloud), cloud-side operations, queues, query and more.

Then stick around as we load an open source Java implementation of CDMI onto your laptop to create your own private cloud. Explore the workings of the JAX-RS standard used in this implementation and the storage code working behind the scenes. Advanced users can even implement their own cloud storage features and expose them through the standard interface.

Building your own standards-based private storage cloud.

Tuesday May24th, 1-5pm

Omni Interlocken Hotel,

Broomfield, CO

This year at Gluecon SNIA will be conducting a Hands on Lab workshop for Developers,

This session will take you deeper into cloud storage than you likely have ever been. First we will explore the standard cloud storage interface called CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface), including some of the rationale and design tradeoffs in its creation.

Learn about how to use the RESTful interface to move data into and out of a storage cloud using a common interface. Learn how CDMI enables data portability between clouds. Dig deep into features such as Data System Metadata (how you order services from the cloud), cloud-side operations, queues, query and more.

Then stick around as we load an open source Java implementation of CDMI onto your laptop to create your own private cloud. Explore the workings of the JAX-RS standard used in this implementation and the storage code working behind the scenes. Advanced users can even implement their own cloud storage features and expose them through the standard interface.