The high end applications for mission critical business are mostly powered by EMC. Other companies like 3PAR, NetApp and HP are biting into their market dominance. However, EMC has a bigger problem looming.
I have written about Solid State Drives(SSD) before but the Intel business class drives are the only ones that come close to being production ready due to random write speed. The other problems of price and capacity keep them out of reach for most companies. On the consumer side, the high end Seagate conventional drives beat most of the SSD drives on write performance.
The stepping stone
Tiered storage will probably be how SSD make their first appearance in production apps. Maybe SATA shelves for backups, SCSI or fiber channel drives for 80-90% of the data and SSD for the really hot data.
The game changer
FusionIO’s latest press release changed all of that. Imagine putting the capacity and performance of those 5 cabinets shown above in a shelf with 1% of the power requirements. Note: The TB+ capacity cards are coming Q2 2009. They currently support up 640GB. Here are some numbers on a 4 card setup:
Performance for multiple ioDrive Duos scales linearly, allowing any enterprise to scale performance to six gigabytes per-second (Gbytes/sec) of read bandwidth and over 500,000 read IOPS by using just four ioDrive Duos.
Here are single card numbers:
• Sustained read bandwidth: 1500 MB/sec (32k packet size) • Sustained write bandwidth: 1400 MB/sec (32k packet size) • Read IOPS: 186,000 (4k packet size) • Write IOPS: 167,000 (4k packet size) • Latency < 50 µsec
What is missing?
A chassis. Sure, you could put 4 or 6 of these in a server depending on how many slots you have but you are going to saturate the PCI bus before they are fully utilized. Before that happens, you will probably hit a CPU or memory bottleneck. The next logical step is a shelf that could handle 14-20 of these cards with plenty of fiber channel ports to hook up at least several servers. Will an 8GB fabric be fast enough? Until something like this happens, tiered storage is probably the way to go. I am sure they know this and are working on it. After all, The Woz joined the company.
Conclusion
I wish I could buy stock in this company.
I am in a what feels like a whirl wind tour of the globe so content may be light this week. Jetlagged in Denmark right now and should seriously be asleep. I have some interesting topics in the works but until then I have "suggested reading" at several places.
FriendFeed:
http://friendfeed.com/statisticsio
Google Reader Shared Items:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/09956560379006770135
Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1013730310&ref=profile
Google reader is probably the most SQL focused link. The others have google reader shares + stuff. If you are reading this, chances are you will find what I find cool at least slightly interesting as well.
Found this while reading the SSD article on intel's new laptop SSD. The game is going to change and it is going to change fast. Hell, I might go buy some intel stock!
A beach tip from a cousin in law that works at EMC. Here is the press release. I am not going to go into a lot of txt but this is the tipping point. Get ready for a wild ride. Soon 1GB network connections won't be enough! Related posts: SSD
I have been drooling over following Texas Memory Systems for a couples years and more recently, BitMicro.
I am not comparing the products that the companies sell because they are different products and the measurements are not the same. These bullets are mainly for drool factor and background for a post that I will refer you too.
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Texas Memory Systems:
RamSan-400 SSD SAN
The World's Fastest Storage®
First solid state disk with 4Gb Fibre Channel interfaces.
First solid state disk with 4x InfiniBand interfaces.
Over 400,000 random I/Os per second.
3000 MB/s random sustained external throughput.
Full array of hardware redundancy to ensure availability.
BitMicro:
E-Disk® Altima™ 4Gb Fibre Channel 3.5" Solid State Drive
Now these are numbers from the manufacturers. Lots of missing info like read\write numbers. Numbers for different sizes of reads and writes etc. However, did I say WOW?
I am making this post because I ran across a blog post by Mike Ault on a FriendFeed conversation.
Mike address's these SSD "lies"
1. Solid state drive technology is very expensive2. Solid state devices are best when directly attached to the internal bus architecture3. Solid state drives will only be niche players4. You can get the same IO rate from disks as from SSD
and he ends with this quote:
I am not afraid to say it: SSD technology is here, it is ready for prime time and it is only a matter of time before disks are relegated to second tier storage. Disks are dead, they just don’t know it yet.
We can only hope so :) I highly recommend reading the whole posts here.
I hope Microsoft is watching this technology. Sure, SQL will like a SSD SAN right now but I bet it could be heavily be optimized to run on SSD.
edit: link fixed
This stuff is really going to change SQL. Heck, it is going to change computing.
BiTMICRO to Deliver 3.5-inch 4Gbit Fibre Channel Flash Solid State Drive with up to 1.6 TB Capacity and Robust Storage Performance for High-Performance Computing Applications Latest 3.5-inch E-Disk Altima 4Gb FC solid state drive model promises to grab the attention of the military, scientific, industrial and enterprise markets by delivering unprecedented solid state drive performance with sustained rates of more than 230 MB/s, over 55,000 IOPS and with capacities of up to 1.6TB of pure non-volatile solid state storage
BiTMICRO to Deliver 3.5-inch 4Gbit Fibre Channel Flash Solid State Drive with up to 1.6 TB Capacity and Robust Storage Performance for High-Performance Computing Applications
Latest 3.5-inch E-Disk Altima 4Gb FC solid state drive model promises to grab the attention of the military, scientific, industrial and enterprise markets by delivering unprecedented solid state drive performance with sustained rates of more than 230 MB/s, over 55,000 IOPS and with capacities of up to 1.6TB of pure non-volatile solid state storage
Let's not even consider all of the theoretical changes in SQL Server that will need to be made once this hardware catches on. Let's imagine a RAID 0 array with 10 disks on SQL 2005. That is 2.2GB/s not to mention 16TB of storage in a very small area. Maybe even internal to the server. On top of that, I suspect that the power footprint is much smaller than the current 16TB solutions out there.
The full press release is here.