IBM Fellow Dr. Evangelos Eleftheriou presented the following slides at CeBIT 2014 to discuss the impact of Big Data on future storage technologies spanning from tape to phase change memory.

1. Big Data and the Future of Storage
Dr. Evangelos Eleftheriou
IBM Fellow

2. © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 2
Big Data: More than just volume
Volume
Terabytes to
exabytes of existing
data to store and
process
Velocity
Streaming data,
milliseconds to
seconds to respond
Variety
Structured,
unstructured, text &
multimedia
Veracity
Uncertainty from
inconsistency,
ambiguities, etc.

3. © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 3
Memory / Storage Stack
Significant advancements in
non-volatile memories blur
the boundaries between
storage and memory by being
low-cost, fast, and cost-
effective.
101
1
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
1010
CPU Operation (1ns)
Fetch data from the L2 Cache (10ns)
Fetch data from DRAM (60ns)
Read / Write SCM (100 – 2000 ns)
Read from a Flash device (20 μs)
Write to a Flash device (1 ms)
Read from / Write to disk (5 ms)
Read from / Write to tape (40 s)
Memory
SCM
Storage
Time(ns)
second
minute
hour
day
week
month
year
decade
century
SLOW
FAST

4. © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 4
IBM FlashSystem: The Tipping Point
• The first time Flash storage outperformed
hard disks in all aspects, including
capacity and performance density, cost
per I/O Operations Per Second (IOPS)
and energy efficiency!
"
• With IBM FlashSystem 820 we achieved
more than 6 million IOPS running an IBM
DB2 workload on IBM Power servers
• 19 kilowatts vs. 4.5 megawatts with high
capacity hard disks, 236x better
• Installed in less than 48 Hours, HDD
would require two years !

5. © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 5
IBM FlashSystem: The Tipping Point

6. © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 6
Storage infrastructure in the new era
High IOPS
Ultra-low Latency
Memory-speed
Data Processing
Infrastructure
Elasticity
Reduced time
for deployment
Bottomless
Capacity
Optimized TCO
Integrated global
infrastructure
Simplicity
Security
Reliability
Pay-as-you-go
Extreme Scalability
Block Interface Novel Interfaces
MicroLatency Storage Global File System
POSIX NFS CIFS Object
GPFS Active!
File Management
POSIX CIFS ObjectNFS
ObjectNFSPOSIX CIFS
GPFS
GPFS

7. © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 8
Tape Storage: Big Data Needs Tape
• Faster than Hard Disks at streaming!
!
• Reliability: read after three decades,
against five years for disks!
!
• Zero Power Consumption (when idle)!
!
• Security: 50 Petabytes on an HDD can
be deleted in minutes, tape would take
years!
!
• Cost: 1 GB of disk storage costs 10
cents, versus 4 cents for tape !
!
• The Next Target: the 100 TB cartridge
The Economist, Magnetic tape to the rescue. 30 Nov 2013

8. © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 9
Multi-cloud Storage Tool Kit (live demo in CeBIT booth)
• Can connect to one or
more clouds including:
IBM Softlayer, AWS, Azure,
Rackspace
(public, private, or hybrid) !
• Enterprise features,
including: encryption,
integrity, and resiliency,
it’s transparent to GPFS
and manages keys/
metadata!
• Drag-and-drop usability

9. © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation© 2014 International Business Machines Corporation !9

10. © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 10
A universal, non-volatile
memory technology superior to
Flash. PCM is very durable and
can endure at least 10 million
write cycles, compared to
current enterprise-class flash at
30,000 cycles or consumer-
class flash at 3,000 cycles.
Phase Change Memory (PCM)
DRAM Flash PCM
Multi-Level
PCM
Timeframe Invented in 1966 Invented in 1980s
Used in smartphones
– wide adoption
expected by 2016
2016
Speed
Density
Endurance
Retention
Scaling
Best in class
Good / Adequate
Average / Inadequate
Bad / Worst in class
➢ The qualification is relative and depends on the application!
➢ Racetrack memory is not included in this time horizon

11. © 2014 International Business Machines Corporation 11
Theseus Project: PCM-based
PCI-e Prototype Card
Hybrid Storage/Caching subsystem based on PCM
• Design and implementation of a high-
performance PCI-e card using PCM!
• Consistent ultra-low latency, high IOPS
even for very small operations!
• Integration of PCM and Flash for hybrid
use cases: !
• Caching!
• Tiering!
• Persistent Key/Value Store