Extremely straight-forward presentation of the enterprise flash storage landscape circa late 2011 from a personal experience perspective.

1. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARYCONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY 1
Solid-state Storage in the
Datacenter: Past, Present, and Future
WhipTail 2012. All Rights Reserved.

2. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Who am I?
 VP & GM, Americas at WhipTail
 Benefit from joining very early
 Citrix & Symantec (VERITAS)
background
 Humbly attempt
to be student
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3. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
What this Presentation is NOT
 Sales-oriented
 Consumer market related
 Marketing-fluffed
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4. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
What this Presentation IS
 History of solid-state
 Types of solid-state
 Early adoption
 Current offerings
 How it’s panning out
 What the future holds
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For the enterprise…

5. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Why Are We Here Today?
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6. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Types of Solid-State Storage:
DRAM
History
 Invented 1978 at IBM
 $8.8mm/GB!
 Mainly memory
 Enterprise shared-
storage appliances hit
the market in the 90’s
Pros/Cons
 Pros
 Absolute fastest
 Cons
 Most expensive/GB
 Volatile
 Mainly offered via direct
attached storage (DAS)
architectures
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7. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Types of Solid-State Storage:
Flash
History
 Launched 1987 by
Toshiba
 Thumb drives circa
2000
 Apple iPhone 2007
 Now out-ships DRAM
8X
Pros/Cons
 Pros
 Cheaper
 Fast
 Non-volatile
 Capacity
 Cons
 All flash wears out
 Not bit-addressable =
writes slow
 Larger capacities =
worse endurance
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8. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Two Types of Flash
SLC (Single Level Cell)
 Pros
 Natively faster
 Natively more durable
 Cons
 10X more expensive
 Lower capacities
 Lower supply
 Wears out
MLC (Multi-Level Cell)
 Pros
 Larger capacities
 Cheaper
 Still fast
 Mass produced
 Cons
 1/10th the durability
 Natively slower
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9. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Why Consider SSD At All?
 CPU & memory no longer the
bottleneck
 HDD as fast as it’s going to get
 Moore’s Law
 Virtualization
 On-demand world
 Storage performance in spotlight
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10. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Performance Evolution from
Traditional Vendors
 Hard Disk Drive (HDD) tricks
 Cache
 Trays of SLC SSD
 SLC flash as cache
 Auto-tiering
 Evolutionary path mainly driven by
physical limitations of flash
 Ultimately all became “Hybrid Arrays”
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11. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Performance Evolution from
Start-Ups Leveraging SSD
 Server-side DAS
 “In-the-Middle” caching appliances
 Hybrid Arrays
 “Mix-of-the-above” solutions
 100% solid-state storage arrays
 This is your current landscape
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12. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Server Side DAS
Players
 SSD
 Hitachi, STEC, Toshiba,
Intel, Samsung,
SanDisk, OCZ, Apple,
etc.
 PCIe
 Fusion IO
 EMC (Project Lightning)
 Others
Pros/Cons
 Pros
 Performance closest to
workload
 Cons
 Expensive
 Management nightmare
 Single point of failure
 Consumes server
resources
 Performance island
 Wasted capacity
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13. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
“In-the-Middle” Caching
Appliances
Players
 Dataram
 Gridiron
 Avere
Pros/Cons
 Most incumbent arrays
now do this
 Putting small company
solution in front of
multi-million dollar
investment
 Helps reads only
 Expensive
 In-band
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14. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Hybrid Storage Arrays
Players
 Every major storage
player now a hybrid
 Nimble
 Xiotech
Pros/Cons
 Pros
 Leverage existing
investment
 Manage one array
 One source of support
 Cons
 Performance limited
 Expensive
 Not a “top speed”
solution – doesn’t close
performance gap
 One demanding workload
ruins it for everyone
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15. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
“Mix-of-the-Above”
Contraptions
Players
 Tintri
 Atlantis
Pros/Cons
 Pros
 ?
 Helps with IO problem
some?
 Cons
 Too much technology
 Blame storming
 Management nightmare
 Impacts everything
 More room on this
slide?
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16. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
100% SSS Arrays
Players
 DRAM/SLC Hybrid
 Violin
 Kaminario
 Texas Memory Systems
 All Flash
 WhipTail
 Nimbus
Pros/Cons
 Pros
 Top speed performance
(15X-30X Hybrid Arrays)
 Focus on closing gap
 Pioneering
 Cons
 Individually managed
 Fabric attached?
 HA/BC/DR?
 Write speed?
 Wear?
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80% of the IO resides on
10% of the capacity…

17. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
The New Standard for Flash Arrays:
Modular High Performance Storage
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WhipTail 2012. All Rights Reserved.
I
N
V
I
C
T
A
Silicon
Storage
Router
Silicon
Storage
Nodes
Min/Max Capacity 6TB - 72TB
Base Models
ISSA-6, ISSA-12, ISSA-24
6TB 12TB 24TB
Silicon Storage NAND Flash - MLC
Height 6RU-14RU
Silicon Storage
Router
Multi-Path Architecture
250,000 - 650,000 IOPS
4GB/s - 7GB/s R/W Bandwidth
200 Microseconds Latency
Power: 440W
Interfaces
4/8 Gb Fibre Channel
1/10 Gb Ethernet
40 Gb Infiniband
Protocols Fibre Channel, iSCSI, QDR
Silicon Storage
Nodes
Protected Write Cache
300GB or 600GB
Power: 180W each
Features
Capacity Pooling
RAID Protection and Hot Sparing
LUN Mirroring and LUN Striping

18. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Future of SSD
 SLC will go away (VHS & Beta)
 Server side SSD will continue
 DAS, SAN, NAS, and now…SSA
 Two tiers, no auto-tiering
 All “in-the-middle” and “mix-of-the-
above” solutions will dissipate and go
away
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19. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Caveat Emptor: “1 Billion
IOPS!”
 Don’t believe everything you read
 2012 #1 SPC-1 storage benchmark = 520k
IOPS, $3.8mm, 2k+ HDD
 Require an evaluation or third party
performance lab validation report
 Ask about block size,
 Ask about read/write
 Ask about Internal, DAS
fabric connectivity
 With parity?
 Match your requirements
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20. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Future of Use Cases
Past/Present
 VDI operating
Systems
 Limited Oracle, SAP,
SQL, Exchange
 OLTP
 Federal/DoD
supercomputer-type
stuff
Future
 Mainstream multi-
tenant platform use
 Virt. of Tier 1 apps
 ALL Tier 1 apps
 BI/OLAP
 HPC metadata, check-
pointing, out-of-core
 Portions of Big Data
 Batch
 Code development
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21. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
The “Star Trek” Future
 Phase-change memory - Samsung
 Memristors - HP
 Atomic storage – IBM
 Years (decades?) away from large
scale manufacturing
 Flash closes the datacenter
performance gap for now
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22. CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY
Questions?
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WhipTail 2012. All Rights Reserved.
Ryan Snell
rsnell@whiptail.com
312-833-3586
@ryguysnell
linkedin.com/in/ryansnell