David Floyer, CTO of Wikibon, made this presentation at the June 2014 Meetup of the Silicon Valley Database Meets SSD Meetup. See: http://www.meetup.com/db-speed-sv/files/

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[[The Wikibon Project]]
Monster Trends in Enterprise Tech
The Flash Disruption, &
what it Means for Database &
Business
David Floyer
CTO & Co-founder,
The Wikibon Project
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2. © Wikibon 2008© Wikibon 2014 www.wikibon.org
Key Trends
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IoT
Fog Computing
Flash

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Key Trends
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IoT
Fog Computing
Flash

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• CIO's should expect that high value, revenue-producing
applications will be most affected by these changes. As such
there is an opportunity to improve the amount of data that can
be processed within a transaction by 1,000X. This means
organizations will be able to dramatically enhance the quality,
performance, and end-user experience of their most important
IT application assets.
• Vendors have seen a steady migration of storage function
away from the processor for the past two decades, creating a
multi-billion dollar storage software market. Function will
increasingly migrate back toward the processor creating a
dislocation that is both an opportunity and threat to
established array vendor software franchises.
The Flash Attack
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How Flash Helps Existing Apps
• Speeds them up: milliseconds to
microseconds
• Wikibon Case Study: Revere * (200 person)
• Before: Only Call Center in Prime-time
• After: All departments could operated in Prime-
time
• Business benefit: 20% growth with no additional
people, $1 Million to the bottom line
• Cost: 1 Flash card
• ROI: almost infinite, with <3 month break-even
* Reference: http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Case_Study:_The_Hunting_of_the_RARC
Flash Memory Summit 2013
Santa Clara, CA 5

6. © Wikibon 2008© Wikibon 2009 | Confidential www.wikibon.orgwww.wikibon.org© Wikibon 2014
• Customers can add to current architectures & protocols (e.g. Bolt on
SSDs and flash for read IOs) but unless you have a “write to flash
first” architecture with a single master copy which primarily resides
in flash – you’ll never be able to scale.
• Without a “write to flash first” architecture, the cost of software and
hardware at scale become prohibitive
• This ripples thru to OPEX because the amount of effort required at
scale to tune the system is expensive
• Traditional arrays today don’t scale well- i.e. Ones that use “Flash
Cache” (reads) and SSD (writes). The problem w/SSD is you have
to manually allocate the volume – too hard and too expensive
• All-Flash Arrays with De-duplication & Compression gives
competitive costs with tiered storage with lower OPEX costs - give
very consistent performance for database
• Application-led Open-source Server SAN - In general, the more
integration that can be done closer to the application…costs will be
lower, performance better and value higher
Hybrid & All-Flash Arrays
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Flash & Database
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Design & Architecture Problems
• DRAM non-persistent, Write-time to
acknowledgement key problem
• Elapsed Time milliseconds (20-200ms)
• Variance very high (for Databases)
• Limits Design for Transactional Applications
• 100DB calls/transaction
• Limits Scope of Analytic Systems (DRAM?)
• Modular Systems, difficult to deploy,
business fits to application
Flash Memory Summit 2013
Santa Clara, CA 8

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Atomic Storage
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• Atomic Storage reduces
latency from milliseconds
to microseconds
• Latency Variation as
important (or more
important) as Average
Latency for Databases
• SCSI overhead must be
tackled:
• PCIe primitives
• NVM on Memory Bus

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Workload Differentiation
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Technology Trends
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Flape – Flash & Tape
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A Word on Converged Infrastructure
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Wikibon recently interviewed Wikibon members who
have adopted converged infrastructure solutions in
Oracle environments. From these findings and other
research, Wikibon has calculated that IT executives
can expect savings of 40% to 50% in costs or
equivalent value by adopting an aggressive on-
premise IaaS with the minimum number of SKUs, even
after taking into account the higher costs of highly
converged solutions. In a detailed analysis of Oracle
DBA productivity Wikibon shows that by adopting best
practices in Oracle environments, database admin
(DBA) productivity is improved by 50%.

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Converged Infrastructure

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Converged Applications

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Converged Application Business Case
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Server SAN

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• Flash on Memory (NVDRAM)
– Early days
• Other NVM Technologies
– PCM, Memristor – 5-years out
• Flash will drive New Applications solving
New Business Opportunities
Futures
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