Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

ssd

Startup News Flash part 13

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Edition 13 of the Startup News Flash already. This week is VMware Partner Exchange 2014 so I expected some announcements to be made. There were a couple of announcements the last week(s) which I felt were worth highlighting. There is one that is not really a startup, but I figured should at least be included in the article and that is the fact that Scale.IO and SuperMicro / LSI / Mellanox / VMware showed an appliance at PEX that was optimized for View deployments. I found it an interesting move, and appealing solution. Chris Mellor wrote an article about it here for the Register.

DataGravity announced their Partner Early Access Program this week. They haven’t revealed what they are building, but judging by the quotes in the announcement publication they are aiming to bring a simple cost-effictive solution to enable analysis of unstructured data. Definitely interesting, and something I will look more closer in to at some point in time.

Atlantis ILIO USX was announced this week. I already mentioned it in my VSAN update. Atlantis ILIO USX is an in-memory storage solution. They added the ability to pool and optimize any class of storage including SAN, NAS, RAM or any type of DAS (SSD, Flash, SAS, SATA) to create a hybrid solution. A change of direction for Atlantis as there primary focus was caching so far, but it makes a lot of sense to me especially as they already have many of the data services for their caching platform.

PernixData announced their Beta program for FVP 1.5. They added support for vSphere 5.5, the vSphere Web Client and also in this version allow you to use a different VMkernel interface other than the vMotion interface which their product uses by default. If you want to know more, Chris Wahl wrote a nice article on his experience with FVP 1.5.

Tintri announced it has closed a $75 million Series E funding round led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture, Menlo Ventures and NEA. Good to see Tintri getting another boost, and will be interesting to see how they move forward. I have been following them from the very start and have always been impressed with the ease of the solution they have built.

Operational simplicity through Flash

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A couple of weeks back I had to honor to be one of the panel members at the opening of the Pure Storage office in the Benelux. The topic of course was flash, and the primary discussion around the benefits. The next day I tweeted a quote of one of the answers I gave during the session which was picked up by Frank Denneman in one of his articles, this is the quote:

https://twitter.com/DuncanYB/status/425920926325411840

David Owen responded to my tweet saying that many performance acceleration platforms introduce an additional layer of complexity, and Frank followed up on that in his article. However this is not what my quote was referring to. First of all, I don’t agree with David that many performance acceleration solutions increase operational complexity. However, I do agree that they don’t always make life a whole lot easier either.

I guess it is fair to say that performance acceleration solutions (hyper-visor based SSD caching) are not designed to replace your storage architecture or to simplify it. They are designed to enhance it, to boost the performance. During the Pure Storage panel sessions I was talking about how flash changed the world of storage, or better said is changing the world of storage. When you purchased a storage array in the two decades it would come with days worth of consultancy. Two days typically being the minimum and in some cases a week or even more. (Depending on the size, and the different functionality used etc.) And that was just the install / configure part. It also required the administrators to be trained, in some cases (not uncommon) multiple five-day courses. This says something about the complexity of these systems.

The complexity however was not introduced by storage vendors just because they wanted to sell extra consultancy hours. It was simply the result of how the systems were architected. This by itself being the result of a major big constraint: magnetic disks. But the world is changing, primarily because a new type of storage was introduced; Flash!

Flash allowed storage companies to re-think their architecture, probably fair to state that the this was kickstarted by the startups out there who took flash and saw this as their opportunity to innovate. Innovationg by removing complixity. Removing (front-end) complexity by flattening their architecture.

Complex constructs to improve performance are no longer required as (depending on which type you use) a single flash disk delivers more than a 1000 magnetic disks typically do. Even when it comes to resiliency, most new storage systems introduced different types of solutions to mitigate (disk) failures. No longer is a 5-day training course required to manage your storage systems. No longer do you need weeks of consultancy just to install/configure your storage environment. In essence, flash removed a lot of the burden that was placed on customers. That is the huge benefit of flash, and that is what I was referring to with my tweet.

One thing left to say: Go Flash!

Startup News Flash part 12

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First edition of the 2014 of the Startup News Flash. I expect this year to be full of announcements, new rounds of funding, new products, new features and new companies. There are various startups planning to come out of stealth this year and all play in the storage / flash space, so make sure to follow this series!

On Tuesday the 14th of January Nutanix announced a new round of funding. Series D financing is co-led by Riverwood Capital and SAP Ventures, and the total amount is $101 million. The company has now raised a total of $172.2 million in four rounds of funding and has been valuated close to $ 1 billion. Yes, that is huge. Probably one of the most successful startups of the last couple of years. Congrats to everyone involved!

Tintri announced a rather aggressive program. The Register reported it here, and it is all about replacing NetApp systems with Tintri systems. In short: “The “Virtualize More with 50% Less” Program offers 50% storage capacity and rack space savings versus currently installed NetApp FAS storage to support deployed virtualization workloads”. I guess it is clear what kind of customers they are going after and who their primary competition is. Of course there is a list of requirements and constraints which the Register already outlined nicely. If you are looking to replace your current NetApp storage infrastructure I guess this could be a nice offer, or a nice way to get more discount.. Either way, you win.

SSD and PCIe flash devices are king these days, but SanDisk is looking to change that with the announcement of the availability of the ULLtraDIMM. The ULLtraDIMM is a combination of Diablo’s DDR3 tranlation protocol and SanDisk’s flash and controllers on top of a nice DIMM. Indeed, it doesn’t get closer to your CPU then straight on your memory bus. By the looks of it IBM is one of the first vendors to offer it, as they  recently announced that the eXFlash DIMM is an option for its System x3850 and x3950 X6 servers providing up to 12.8TB of flash capacity2. Early benchmarks showed write latency around 5-10 microsecond! I bet half the blogosphere just raised their hands to give this a go in their labs!

 

How about an All Flash Virtual SAN?

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Yeah that title got your attention right… For now it is just me writing about it and nothing has been announced or promised. At VMworld I believe it was Intel who demonstrated the possibilities in this space, an All Flash Virtual SAN. A couple of weeks back during my holiday someone pointed me to a couple of articles which were around SSD endurance. Typically these types of articles deal with the upper-end of the spectrum and as such are irrelevant to most of us, and some of the articles I have read in the past around endurance were disappointing to be honest.

TechReport.com however decided to look at consumer grade SSDs. We are talking about SSDs like the Intel 335, Samsung 840 series, Kingston Hyper-X and the Corsair Neutron. All of the SSDs used had a capacity of around 250GB and are priced anywhere between $175 and $275. Now if you look at the guarantees given in terms of endurance, we are talking about anything ranging from “20GB of writes per day for the length of its three-year warranty” for the Intel (22TB in total) to three-year and 192TB in total for the Kingston, and anything in between for the other SSDs.

Tech Report had set their first checkpoint at 22TB. After running through a series of tests, which are described in the article, they compare the results between the various SSDs after 22TB writes. Great to see that all SSDs did what they are supposed to do and promised. All of them passed the 22TB mark without any issues. They had another checkpoint at the 200TB mark, which showed the first signs of weakness. As expected the lower end SSDs dropped out first. The next checkpoint was set at the 300TB mark, they also added an unpowered retention test to see how well they retain data when unplugged. So far impressive results, and a blog series I will follow with interest. The articles clearly show that from an endurance perspective the SSDs perform a lot better than most had assumed in the past years. It is fair to say that the consumer grade SSDs are up to the challenge.

Considering the low price points of these flash devices, I can see how an All Flash Virtual SAN solution would be possible leveraging these consumer grade SSDs as the capacity tier (reads) and using enterprise grade SSDs to provide write performance (write buffer). Hopefully we will start to see the capacity increase even further of these types of devices, today some of them go up to 500GB others up to 800GB, wouldn’t it be nice to have a 1TB (or more) version?

Anyway, I am excited and definitely planning on running some test with an all flash Virtual SAN solution in the future… What about you?

** 500TB blog update! **
** 600TB blog update! **
** 1PB blog update! **
** 2PB blog update **
** Conclusion **

Startup News Flash part 11

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Last Startup News Flash of the year, part 11… It is relatively short this time, I am guessing everyone is wrapping up before the holiday season really starts. I know I am!

I want to congratulate Nimble on their very successful IPO. They introduced their stock at the price of $21.00 per share and are now at $ 35.00 after just a couple of days of trading. Not sure why, but for whatever reason I haven’t written about Nimble yet in-depth, personally I’ve been impressed by what they offer. If you look at the cost of their solution and hold it against quality and features they offer I am sure you will be impressed as well, definitely one of those companies I would be talking to when looking to invest in a new storage system! Once again, congrats to all involved on the successful IPO.

Infinio just announced a new round of funding. 12 million for Series B is not bad if you ask me. Investors include: Bessemer Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Osage University Partners (a partner of Columbia University, home of Infinio’s roots). After having recently announced GA of their 1.0 product I guess it is full speed ahead with this new injection. Congrats and looking forward to the upcoming releases.

That was it for this year with regards to startups news , hopefully back next year with more Startup News!