Nigel Wakefield reviewed storage predictions he made in 2008 and options for storage array evolution over the next 5 years. His 2008 predictions about FC and IP convergence and modular array design were partially accurate. Option 1 was all-SSD arrays for performance. Option 2 was sub-lun tiering between SSD, SAS, FC and NL drives. Option 3 was hybrid drives or large cache frontend arrays. Participants voted on which future array they preferred. The presentation included a Q&A section.

1. Welcome
30 Minute Session with Nigel Wakefield Review Storage predictions from 2008 and Storage
Array Evolution options next 5yrs
Profile Nigel Wakefield
• Nigel Wakefield 25yrs experience in Storage Industry.
• Worked for Intel/Orange/Goldman Sachs
• Familiar with major vendors EMC/HDS/HP/NetApp
• Chairman of EMC User Group UK 5yr period
• Founder of LinkedIn Independent Storage Management Forum
Agenda
• Intro
• Review my storage predictions from 2008 vs... actual technology evolution 2012
• Consider storage array evolution for the next 5yrs
Option1 SSD Solid State Memory Arrays – memory costs vs.... benefits
Option2 Sub Lun Tiering technology FAST2 / Adaptive Optimisation / Smart Pools
Option3 Hybrid Drives are they an option in the Enterprise Arrays Market or Cache frontend
arrays
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2. Summary
Join Nigel Wakefield and review storage predictions from 2008 vs.. storage technology changes. How
accurate can a storage insider predict technology changes. New products released vs.. what storage
market actually wants.
Review Storage Evolution for the next 5yrs.
• Option1 SSD Solid State Memory Arrays – memory costs vs.... Benefits
• SSD Costs and Environment Benefits
• Application Performance and Design
• Storage Migration performance
• SNAPS and Clones
• Option2 Sub Lun Tiering technology FAST2 / Adaptive Optimisation / Smart Pools
• Performance Monitoring
• Activity Schedules
• Application Cycles of IO Activity
• Option3 Hybrid Drives are they an option in the Enterprise Arrays Market or Heavy Cache frontend
arrays
• Hybrid Drives Performance
• Array I/O Accelerator Options Fibre Channel Performance on SATA drives
Discuss external influences cost of memory and large fines being imposed on memory company for price
fixing or will advance sub lun tiering functionality solve storage performance and capacity issue. Could new
technology evolve where hybrid drives or cache frontend heavy arrays become the normal solution. Plus
business news around SSD start-up looking to take the big boys on or get purchased. Which SSD start-up
will be the new 3PAR.
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3. Review Predictions 2008
Review my predictions from 2008 published on my Linked in profile.
(Bit of laugh really to see how accurate we can forecast technology
evolution).
Predictions for the future Date 2008/09/03 .(5yr forecast)
1)FC and IP will converge in next 5 years (whether its a good idea or
not technically) Businesses will only want to run 1x Network.
(0% Accurate – take up of CNA cards very slow)
2)All storage will be modular in design - Large Arrays will not exist. All
hardware will be commodity items. (Based on SSD modules) problems
will be capacity footprint rather than IOPS and yield currently.
(50% Accurate – most arrays modular in design )
3)Advanced features will be appliances i.e. Replication via blade in
switch's sending duplicate frames to another DID address.
(80% Accurate – definite move away from Array based replication)
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4. Storage History Last 10yrs
2002 – 137 GB addressing space barrier broken
2003 – Serial ATA introduced
2003 – IBM sells disk drive division to Hitachi
2005 – First 500 GB hard drive shipping (Hitachi GST)
2005 – Serial ATA 3Gbit/s standardized
2005 – Seagate introduces Tunnel MagnetoResistive Read Sensor (TMR) and Thermal
Spacing Control
2005 – Introduction of faster SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)
2005 – First Perpendicular recording HDD shipped: Toshiba 1.8-inch 40/80 GB[15]
2006 – First 750 GB hard drive (Seagate)
2006 – First 200 GB 2.5" hard drive utilizing Perpendicular recording (Toshiba)
2006 – Fujitsu develops heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) that could one day
achieve one terabit per square inch densities.[16]
2007 – First 1 terabyte(~0.9095 TiB)[17] hard drive[18] (Hitachi GST)
2008 – First 1.5 terabyte(~ 1.3642 TiB)[19] hard drive[20] (Seagate)
2009 – First 2.0 terabyte hard drive[21] (Western Digital)
2010 – First 3.0 terabyte hard drive[22][23] (Seagate, Western Digital)
2010 – First Hard Drive Manufactured by using the Advanced Format of 4 KiB a block
instead of 512 bytes a block[24]
2011 – First 4.0 terabyte hard drive[25] (Seagate)
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5. Manufacture History
1967: Hitachi enters the HDD business.
1967: Toshiba enters the HDD business.
1979: Seagate Technology[29] founded.
1988: Western Digital, then a well-known controller designer, enters the HDD business by
acquiring Tandon Corporation's disk manufacturing division.[30]
1988: Samsung enters the worldwide HDD market, previously having manufactured
Comport disk drives for the Korean market.[31]
1989: Seagate Technology purchases Control Data's HDD business.
1990: Maxtor purchases MiniScribe out of bankruptcy, making it the core of its low-end
HDDs.
1994: Quantum purchases DEC's storage division, giving it a high-end disk range to go with
its more consumer-oriented ProDrive range.
1996: Seagate acquires Conner Peripherals in a merger.
2000: Maxtor acquires Quantum's HDD business; Quantum remains in the tape business.
2003: Hitachi acquires the majority of IBM's disk division, renaming it Hitachi Global
Storage Technologies (HGST).
2006: Seagate acquires Maxtor.
2009: Toshiba acquires Fujitsu's HDD division.[32]
2011: Western Digital proposes acquiring Hitachi's HDD division.[27]
2011: Seagate acquires Samsung's HDD division.[26]
2012: Western Digital acquires Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.[27]
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6. Seagate Announce 60TB HDD In Next Decade
Over the years, hard drive manufacturers have moved to perpendicular recording technology, which
allowed for much higher storage capacities on a traditional hard drive platter. Seagate is hard at work on
the future of hard drive storage technology that will usher in even higher capacities. Seagate has
announced that it has become the first hard drive manufacturer to reach a density of one terabit per square
inch on a platter.
Seagate's demonstration of the technology shows how the capacity of today's hard drives can be doubled
when the technology launches in commercially available products later this decade. The tech will lead to
3.5-inch HDD's with a capacity of up to 60 TB in the decade that follows.
The technology allowed Seagate to reach the huge storage density is called heat-assisted magnetic
recording or HAMR.
The perpendicular magnetic recording technology in all use currently debuted in 2006 and replaced
longitudinal recording technology that had been used since hard drives were invented. Perpendicular
magnetic recording is expected to reach the capacity limit of close to one terabyte per square inch in the
next few years.
“The growth of social media, search engines, cloud computing, rich media and other data-hungry
applications continues to stoke demand for ever greater storage capacity,” said Mark Re, SVP of Heads
and Media Research and Development at Seagate. “Hard drive innovations like HAMR will be a key
enabler of the development of even more data-intense applications in the future, extending the ways
businesses and consumers worldwide use, manage and store digital content.”
HAMR technology allows Seagate to achieve a linear bit density of around 2 million bits per inch, which
was once thought to be impossible. That allows the data density of over 1 trillion bits per square inch,
which is 55% higher than the areal density of 620 Gb per square inch available today. The first generation
HAMR HDD's are expected to have capacities of up to 6 TB in 3.5-inch form and up to 2 TB in 2.5-inch
form. The theoretical density limit for hard drives using this technology will be up to 60 TB for 3.5-inch
drives in up to 20 TB for 2.5-inch drives.
The big advance with HAMR technology was the switch in the coating used on discs inside hard drives
from a cobalt platinum alloy to iron platinum alloy. The stronger magnetic material helps stabilize data bits
in smaller sizes. It's nice to see research continues despite the HDD shortage the market is facing.
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7. Hard Drive Capacity over time
Trends show HDD Capacity over time and forecast trend line.
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8. SSD Costs vs.. HDD Costs $
While SSDs remain considerably more expensive than hard drives on
a per GB level, the flash-based storage devices are coming down in
prices much faster than HDDs have.
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9. Is Memory Over priced ?
2005 $300 million Fine / 2010 $404 million Fine
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10. Pure SSD Arrays
Application Performance
Spend 50% my time looking into Storage performance Issues – only 2% of
investigations results in storage changes 98% are poor application design
Must be based on New Array Architecture Design
New Array Design required to get interface performance and write speed
benefits vs.. legacy arrays with SSD which only give better READ performance
Consistent performance
Legacy Storage Array performance varies massively due to workload and
resource contention. Pure SSD Arrays will deliver constant performance
Clones & SNAP (Duplicates of Databases)
Single Database instance will be able to support multiple clone instances and
reduce massive storage waste. E.g. 15x version of same database real life
example.
Datacentre Storage vs. Traditional Storage
Enterprise Storage in Datacentres work 20x harder than traditional storage due
to THP Thin Provisioning and Virtualisation. This means response times will
degrade as more workload is put through smaller number of disks.
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11. SUB LUN Tiering Technology
Major Manufactures have produced sub tiering technology
EMC Fast2
HDS/XP Storage Arrays Smart Pools
HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimisation
Key Concepts
• Performance Monitoring
• Activity Schedules move data between Storage Tiers
• Portions of data reside on Appropriate Storage Tier
SSD/SAS/FC/NL Drives
• Application Cycles of IO Activity
Points of Concern
• Lack of Performance Monitoring tools at the sub lun level
• Estimates of SSD/SAS/FC/NL drives for capacity going
forward
• Do you tier for online day or batch schedules.
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12. Large Cache frontend arrays
Large Frontend cache arrays are evolution rather than
revolution. Most vendors are trying to supplement cache
in legacy array with memory cards i.e. NetApp PAM
cards and EMC FAST CACHE. This principle could be
extended in the next generation of arrays.
Benefits
• Increased Storage Controller Cache is simpler to
implement
Disadvantages
• With Drives sizes double every 2yr large cache ratio will
be hard to maintain
• Larger drives sizes without increased IOPS will increase
queuing at the disk interface
Another option is HDD with larger volume cache
integrated into the drives e.g. 4TB HDD with
40GB on-board Cache.
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13. Interested in Your Opinion
Please vote for Storage Array of the future
1. Pure Solid State Disks
2. SUB LUN Tiering solution Mixture of all
drive technology SSD/SAS/FC/NL
3. Large Cache Frontend Storage Arrays
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14. Industry News
EMC Buys XtremIO £430 Million. Company with SSD Array solution
not even publically available.
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15. Q&A Section
Question & Answers From Webcast
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