IT/Datacenter & Super Computing News - Page 14

In what may eventually prove to be a very shrewd move, Panzura announced today that it will provide a free virtual appliance version of its cloud gateway. Further, they have partnered with Google so that customers users of the free gateway also get 2TB of free storage via the Google Cloud Platform for one year.

In reading through the press release and blog post on their website, Panzura is clearly looking to drive home the point that there is a stark difference between simply having cloud storage for one office versus actually setting up cloud storage so that it is both high performant AND collaborative across locations. As they point out, the real value add in the Panzura technology is the file locking capabilities for distributed enterprises that have multiple locations. While the gateway may be free, this file locking feature is not.

Call it coincidence or superior planning, but this Panzura announcement comes just one day after EMC announced the acquisition of TwinStrata, another player in the cloud gateway space. It will be interesting to see what effects the commoditization from Panzura combined with the immediate entry by the giant EMC will have on the remaining companies in this market (i.e. Avere Systems, CTERA).

On a very busy press day for the company, EMC announced several news items spanning across several product lines. Changes include broadening the configuration options for XtremIO and Isilon, a more open and hybrid approach to deploying VMAX, updates for ViPR, and a new Hadoop big data analytics solution.

XtremIO gets a refresh with both a new entry-level configuration of 5TB, as well as a larger scale-out cluster capable of expanding to six 20TB X-Bricks. More interesting than just the configuration expansion, XtremIO is now adding inline compression to its intelligent data handling feature set. Combined with existing snapshot and deduplication, EMC claims the product now supports petabytes of data.

On the VMAX front, EMC announced VMAX3, an open enterprise platform to bridge standard enterprise storage with cloud storage. As part of this release, EMC also announced the acquisition of TwinStrata, Inc., developer of the CloudArray management software. The new offering is engineered to give storage administrators an easy way to provision storage to either in-house storage arrays or out to public cloud storage, all based on workload requirements. According to a letter on the TwinStrata website from Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata, "Working together as part of EMC, we are looking to integrate CloudArray into the new VMAX3 enterprise data service platform to allow you to automatically tier workloads even more seamlessly for off-premise storage capacity expansion, data protection and disaster recovery."

One of the most important revelations from the Samsung Global SSD Summit 2014 in Seoul was the unveiling of the new 845DC PRO. The 845DC PRO is a V-NAND (3D NAND) SSD that is geared for the SMB and SOHO segment, though we fully expect it to find a home in more intense production environments as well.

The combination of the 6Gb/s SATA 845DC EVO and the 845DC PRO provide a considerable one-two punch for Samsung. These two offerings allow them to address the booming SATA value market with two distinct solutions, much like the M500 and M500DC pairing from Micron. The distinct differentiator is that the two Samsung offerings both offer disruptive new NAND technologies that are not currently offered by other manufacturers.

The 845DC PRO features Samsung's first generation 24-layer V-NAND. V-NAND is 3D NAND that achieves better density, performance, endurance, and power consumption, via vertical stacking of the NAND cells. This runs counter to the established norm of increasing density through NAND shrinks, and with good reason. Shrinks provide more density, but actually reduce endurance.

The 2014 Samsung Global SSD Summit 2014 in Seoul, South Korea, was somewhat of an SSD nirvana. Samsung touted their industry-first 3D NAND (V-NAND), the first 3bit MLC SSDs for the datacenter (the 845DC EVO), the world's first M.2 SSD for the datacenter, and to top it all off we were finally able to take a peek at Samsung's NVMe offerings.

Samsung has the distinct advantage of being the first to receive NVMe interoperability certification from UNH-IOL, but the OEM market has kept the drive hidden from the retail space.

We start with the SM1715 and its unique heat sink that encompasses the entire side of the drive. The SM1715 utilizes the standardized NVMe protocol. NVMe provides numerous advantages with its simplified driver stack, command set, and enhanced queue/pairing mechanisms. For an in-depth view of NVMe, reference our recently released Defining NVMe article.

Samsung is on a roll with V-NAND and 3bit MLC datacenter products making a huge splash at the 2014 Samsung Global SSD Summit in Seoul. The SM953, the world's first M.2 SSD designed for the datacenter, was yet another exciting Samsung-exclusive product on display in the product showcase.

The chains of legacy HDD form factors have been binding SSDs into large bulky cases that are not required for today's dense NAND. M.2 provides a new standardized form factor that limits the device to the size of the NAND, controller, PCB, and other components. This will allow for denser deployments and enable even smaller blade and microserver designs. Storage and performance density are paramount in the datacenter and SSDs provide the ultimate in both respects. It is encouraging to see these new designs finally making their way into the datacenter.

Other than the 1,800 MB /s sequential read performance, there is precious little information publicly available at this point. We do know that the SM953 comes in one capacity of 480GB. M.2 also has standardized designs that are longer, which will allow for even more NAND per device. The inclusion of V-NAND, with its enhanced density, will also provide much more capacity in these 'gumstick' devices. There is no mention of the NAND employed on the SM953.

The 2014 Samsung SSD Global Summit took place last week in Seoul. With tight schedules, long international flights, and a holiday weekend as well, our detailed analysis will begin rolling today. Chris will dive in on coverage on the consumer side, and also post video of the entire Global Summit presentation. I will be weighing in on some of the datacenter storage solutions provided by Samsung.

The majority of the Global Summit presentations focused on the innovative new V-NAND products from Samsung. V-NAND is 3D NAND that achieves better density, performance, endurance, and power consumption, via vertical stacking of the NAND cells. This runs counter to the established norm of increasing density through NAND shrinks, and with good reason. Shrinks provide more density, but actually reduce endurance. V-NAND provides a revolutionary path forward, and Samsung is the first to mass-produce and bring to market 3D NAND-based solutions.

Samsung christened V-NAND with a release of the world's first mass-produced 3D NAND SSD into the datacenter. The benefits of V-NAND align themselves almost perfectly with the common datacenter pain-points, such as power consumption, density, and endurance. The 6Gb/s SATA SV843 brings higher endurance, 3.6 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day), and enterprise-centric features such as power loss protection. The SV843 comes in 480 and 960GB capacities and random read/write performance up to 88K/14K IOPS. Sequential read/write is spec'd up to 530/430 MB/s.

SanDisk is adding one more acquisition to its flash play with the latest announcement to acquire Fusion-io. Over the past two years, SanDisk has been rounding out its flash portfolio by acquiring Pliant Technology, Smart Storage Systems, and Schooner, but this latest acquisition is nearly twice the value of all three of those combined.

While the Fusion-io stock price has been on a steady decline over the past few months, the company still possessed a significant portion of the enterprise flash based PCIe market. SanDisk is looking to capitalize on this strength of Fusion-io in combination with its own capabilities from a component manufacturing standpoint. According to Sanjay Mahrotra, SanDisk president and CEO, "Customers will benefit from the addition of Fusion-io's leading PCIe solutions to SanDisk's vertically integrated business model."

Beyond these PCIe cards though, Fusion-io additionally brings an external flash play to SanDisk, the ioControl Hybrid Storage Appliance, technology that originates from Fusion-io's acquisition of NexGen Storage just last year. While Mahrotra may highlight the PCIe business, the addition of external arrays, albeit only hybrid for the time being, puts SanDisk in the mix of EMC, Netapp, Nimble, and the many other flash array vendors vying for enterprise storage business. Not to mention, the Fusion-io technologies combined with the other recent acquisitions now puts SanDisk in every possible flash market - software, modules, cards, and external arrays.

Nimble Storage is expanding its reach into the SSD market by introducing an All-Flash Shelf and a more powerful hybrid-flash array, the CS700, to its portfolio. The combined new solution is capable of scaling up to 500,000 IOPS, 64 terabytes of flash, and a petabyte of capacity.

In conjunction with the introduction of these new products, Nimble is highlighting a set of features for the intelligent handling of data they are dubbing, "Adaptive Flash". This is a combination of the Nimble CASL (Cache-Accelerated Sequential Layout) architecture and the cloud based management software, InfoSight. The CASL technology includes dynamic flash-based read caching, inline compression, and snaphots. And with InfoSight, customers can monitor and manage their Nimble systems via a cloud-based platform.

The Nimble Storage architecture is built to allow for scaling out performance separate of scaling out capacity. To add additional capacity, customers can simply add additional storage shelves. As for increasing performance, by upgrading the compute or adding more SSD's.

With the HP Discover event scheduled to kick off tomorrow in Las Vegas, HP is getting an early start by announcing enhancements to its backup, recovery and archive (BURA) product family. The latest additions to the HP StoreOnce Backup solutions reduce the time required by administrators to manage the backup process by up to 75 percent by eliminating physical mapping of backup jobs to individual backup appliances. As an extension to the HP StoreOnce Backup portfolio, HP is calling this new solution the HP StoreOnce Federated Catalyst.

At the heart of this new feature set is the ability to aggregate multiple backup stores to a single pool of total backup capacity that can expand across multiple nodes. Depending on a customer's particular workload, this can scale up to more than 17PB assuming a 10:1 deduplication ratio. Also, via HP unique innovations such as adaptive bidding and adaptive routing, workloads are analyzed so that data is sent to the most optimal physical location. This includes more than just standard appliances, but also the ability to aggregate across hybrid cloud environments.

In addition, further enhancements to the HP StoreOnce Backup family include:

HP has announced a new set of feature enhancements for its all-flash HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 array along with the claim that this marks the end of spinning disk. The new features include hardware-accelerated, inline primary deduplication, thin cloning software, Express Indexing and support for a new 1.92TB commercial multi-level cell (cMLC) SSD. By coupling these new drives with HP's data compaction technologies, customers can now achieve a $2/GB price for an all-flash array solution.

At this price target, HP believes they are creating a major market shift to allow customers to move from traditional spinning disks to all SSD arrays, no matter what the workload. Up until this point, all-flash arrays have mostly been utilized for niche workloads requiring the highest possible performance. At these prices though, HP believes all-flash arrays can be the only storage tier necessary. In fact, according to Vish Mulchand, senior director, Product Management and Marketing, HP Storage, with this release, "HP is predicting the end of auto-tiered arrays".

Comparing a 7450 configured with 250TB of 1.92TB cMLC drives and the latest OS enhancements to a similar VMAX configuration, Mulchand says the 3PAR solution is three times less expensive, takes up 1/25th the Rackspace, and consumes eight times less power. For current owners of an HP 3PAR 7450 on a support contract hoping to get similar results, they can expect a free upgrade to the new OS in September 2014. The new 1.92TB drives will be available in July 2014 at a price of $14,315.