IT/Datacenter & Super Computing - Page 8

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.

Computex 2014 They say necessity is the mother of all invention, and never was that more apparent than in the release of Tyans new FT68-B7910 server. The low pricing of many new SSDs, and the advent of TLC SSDs that are lowering prices even more dramatically, means we are likely to start witnessing more large scale deployments of flash into the server. Making this flash easily accessible is a challenge, many of the currnet high-density server designs load HDDs and SSD vertically in the rear of the chassis. TYAN has chosen a divergent approach and came up with a more efficient means of easily-accesible storage.

Here we can see an apparently normal 4U chassis with 32 2.5" drive bays. While this is an impressive amount of storage, removing the drive sleds illuminates the real innovation of this design.

At the rear of the drive channel we observe the SAS connectors offset in a dense alignment. These allow for two 7.5mm SSDs to be installed into each drive sled, effectively doubling he capacity of each 2.5" 15mm slot. Another advantage of this design is the ability to use standard 15mm HDDs as well. This opens the door for having several high-performance spinners and pairing theem with several bays of SSDs used for tiering and caching implementations. The great functionality behind the new Storage Spaces features in Windows Server 2012 could also deliver big advantages for this type of deployment.

Computex 2014 Tyan unveiled several of their latest servers specifically designed to address the HPC market. These servers leverage GPUs as co-processors to deliver astounding performance in a number of different chassis sizes.

This 4U high density platform utilizes a more traditional design but allows for 8 PCIe 3.0 slots to cram as many GPUs into a single chassis as possible. Dual onboard 10GbE also provides plenty of native communication throughput for most applications.

Moving to slimmer form factor we can see the two separate GPU bays in this slim 2U server chassis. The rear left and forward right compartments actually hold two GPUs each, which are mounted horizontally to provide the maximum amount of GPU power in a small space.

Computex 2014 Sandisk had the revolutionary new ULLtraDIMM on display in the Supermicro booth at Computex 2014. The key to enabling such a radically new take on storage technology is the rapid uptake of an ecosystem of partners to quickly expand into wide market acceptance. The emergence of new platforms that are readily available from partners such as Supermicro is a big step forward for the ULLtraDIMM initiative.

The MCS (Memory Channel Storage) system, provided by Diablo, allows the NAND-based ULLtraDIMM storage device to communicate over the memory channels. This eliminates much of the bus contention and inefficiencies of the PCIe bus. Providing a direct connection to the CPU via the memory slot delivers game-changing performance, but unfortunately isn't a plug-and-play solution. Here we can see 4 ULLtraDIMM's working inside the Supermicro SuperServer 6027AX-72RF-HFT3. This server has an enhanced BIOS that allows for full utilization of the standard DDR channels for system storage.

Of course we would like to see some benchmarks running on the device live, but this was merely a static demo. Sandisk is forwarding us preliminary performance results in several application workloads, so look for preliminary performance benchmarks here at TweakTown soon.

Computex 2014 Sandisk had the massive 4TB Optimus MAX SSD on display in their booth today, and we just had to take a look inside. The Sandisk Optimus still holds the performance crown for 6Gb/s SAS SSDs on the market, and the expansion to 4TB of capacity provides even more density.

Cramming 4TB of NAND goodness into a 2.5" 15mm form factor requires the use of several PCBs. Sandisk utilizes a ribbon-type connection between three PCBs, which then fold into each other to fit inside the chassis. Sandisk employs the same Marvell controller as previous Optimus SSDs, but the real secret sauce lies in their custom firmware, which enables Guardian Technology, a full suite of flash enhancements that extends NAND longevity.

The Optimus MAX uses a familiar 6Gb/s dual-port SAS connection, which allows speeds of up to 1 GB/s from one SSD.

As the economy continues to recover, and companies are hiring new workers, an increasing number of small and midsize businesses (SMBs) expect to see their spending habits also rise. Around 57 percent of businesses plan to make a tech purchase sometime in the next 12 months a 4 percent increase over the previous quarter, according to the NPD Group.

Meanwhile, tech companies are pushing PCs, tablets, and laptops in the SMB sector, at a time when vendors are offering extremely competitive pricing. Companies purchasing PCs are finding a great buyer's market, in which PCs are affordable - and last longer - as OEMs continue to struggle to entice many customers to upgrade.

Here is what Stephen Baker, NPD VP of industry analysis, said in a statement: "Small and medium businesses of all sizes expressed their intent to increase spending in both the short and long-term. As is typical, a businesses' normal tendency is to limit spending in the short term, yet be more optimistic about their spending plans over a 12-month period. With continued robust sales growth in NPD's Distributor and Commercial channel tracking services where we saw revenue increase 9 percent in the first quarter, it is clear that intention and action are not always in sync."

Pure Storage, an all-flash enterprise storage company based in Mountain View, Ca, introduced both a new entry-level and high-capacity array to its portfolio, in addition to announcing June availability for its next generation software, Purity 4.0. The new software features FlashRecover - a set of fully integrated replication, snapshot and policy management services.

The new FA-405 and FA-450 arrays bookend the existing offering - the FA-420 - adding an entry-level price point as well as a higher capacity. The FA-405, dubbed "Small and Mighty", has two high availability controllers and supports up to 40TB of capacity. The new FA-450, playfully named "Consolidation King", raises the maximum capacity up to 250TB. Both of the new products are generally available now through channel partners.

Purity 4.0, available in June 2014, expands on disaster recovery and data protection by providing native and fully integrated replication, snapshot and a policy management service. These new features are aimed at data center customers looking to get the best possible capacity/performance to cost ratios. Key new features of Purity 4.0 include:

EMC World 2014 begins today in Las Vegas with a flurry of announcements from the storage giant. The most interesting announcement today is EMC's quickly expanding entrance into the software-defined storage market with the release of the EMC ECS (Elastic Cloud Storage) Appliance. For a company that has very deep roots in selling big iron, this is another strong indicator that EMC is taking the SDS market very seriously.

The ECS Appliance allows customers to create hyper-scale cloud capabilities and capacities in either private or hybrid cloud environments. The new solution combines the best features of public and private clouds at a price point between 9%-28% lower total cost of ownership (in object storage implementations) than leading public cloud offerings from Amazon or Google. The appliance is a modular, scale-out solution built on commodity hardware with up to 2.9 petabytes in a single rack, but can be clustered to exabytes.

EMC is basing many of their announcements, including the ECS Appliance, around the term "3rd Platform". This term refers to the convergence of technologies such as smartphones and mobile devices, cloud computing, social media, big data analytics, and similar technologies that are redefining workloads in modern data centers. These new applications present unique challenges in regards to security, availability, and scale. Software-defined storage solutions built on commodity hardware, such as the EMC ECS Appliance, are built to provide a solution that addresses all the technical challenges associated with the 3rd platform, but at a price point and flexibility never before offered by EMC.

EMC Corporation just announced a new addition to the VNXe product line, an entry-level VNXe3200 storage array that starts out under $12,000. Available in Q2 of 2014, the new VNXe3200 is touted to be three times the performance of the previous VNXe models. It is designed to take advantage of new flash technology via the EMC FAST (Fully-Automated Storage Tiering) software which makes it well suited for virtual applications. Each VNXe has a maximum capacity of 200TB and is capable of both NAS and SAN. Several pre-configured bundles are available on the EMC online store and the entry-level bundle appears to be configured for 3.6TB of raw capacity.

The new VNXe features include:

In addition to the new VNXe product, EMC also announced an upcoming security feature enhancement for the VNXe family, Data-At-Rest-Encryption for VNX (VNX D@RE). Using controller-based encryption, it is designed to help customers eliminate data access from unauthorized drive removal and supports any drive type, speed and capacity. The new encryption feature is expected to be available on the new VNX Series as a non-disruptive software upgrade in the third quarter of 2014.

Red Hat, Inc., a leading provider of open source software solutions, announced today that it will acquire Inktank, the developer of Ceph, a leading software-defined storage platform for object, file, and block storage that runs on off the shelf hardware. Inktank had secured several early adopter customers who have deployed their solution to run both public and private clouds including Cisco and Deutsche Telekom, as well as established a partnership with Dell to deliver the solution to a broader market.

The software-defined storage market is still a very nascent one, but it has quickly been gaining steam over the past two years. According to a recent IDC report, "Software-defined platforms will continue to grow faster than any other market segment in the file- and object-based storage market." To capitalize on this growth, Red Hat's acquisition of Inktank's Ceph platform is a perfect addition to their existing GlusterFS-based storage offering.

Inktank was founded only 2 years ago by Sage Weil, founder and CTO. Weil initially developed Ceph while at UC Santa Cruz and has built it out as a replacement for legacy storage systems to provide a unified solution for cloud computing environments. Since forming in 2012, Inktank has done an excellent job of developing the Ceph community and providing customers with expertise, processes, tools and support to build a viable cloud-scale solution.

Sandisk Corporation, a leading manufacturer of flash storage solutions, announced not one, but two new product lines today. Both are born out of their $307M acquisition of SMART Storage Systems last year. First, the Lightning Generation II 12Gb/s SAS SSDs built to address enterprise requirements of maximum uptime and intense throughput performance. And for customers more interested in high capacity, Sandisk has also announced the industry's first 4TB SSD, the Optimus MAX.

The new Lightning SSDs are two times the speed over previously available 6Gb/s SSDs, now providing the highest performance possible for web-scale data center application workloads. According to John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise storage solutions at Sandisk, "Business data needs are becoming so performance-intensive that even applications that are already using SSDs need an additional boost." To address these ever increasing performance requirements from enterprise customers, Sandisk's new Lightning drives are capable of delivering up to 190k/100K IOPS of random read/write performance and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1000/600 MB/s for write-intensive application workloads.

For customers that require less performance but the maximum capacity, Sandisk also announced the first 4TB SSD, the Optimus MAX. According to Scaramuzzo, enterprise IT customers are "looking for a way to transition their data centers from HDDs to NAND flash, but have been forced to decide between cost and performance. The Optimus MAX eliminates the need for compromises." The new 4TB drives are now on par with what is available in the HDD space, at least in the high performance enterprise drive market. In the past, companies have relied on 15K rpm SAS spinning disks for mission-critical applications because they provided relatively high performance at a low cost. Now, with high-density SSDs that have higher performance like the Optimus MAX, enterprises are free to replace slower HDDs without paying a huge premium.

This morning, Seagate Technology announced that it has begun shipping the world's fastest 6TB capacity 3.5-inch hard drive. The new Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD V4 features the fastest performance available for a "nearline" HDD, thanks to Seagate's utilization of an eighth-generation platform that allows the new HDD to deliver up to 25-percent more performance than competing 6TB drives.

"Unstructured data growth is doubling exponentially and will propel the digital universe to reach 16 Zettabytes of data by as early as 2017. This will cause cloud service providers to look for innovative ways to store more within an existing footprint while lowering operational costs," said Scott Horn, Seagate vice president of marketing. "Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the fastest 6TB enterprise capacity HDD based on our proven, reliable platform meeting this never-ending demand in both private and public cloud data centers."

Seagate says that they have designed this new drive with the enterprise storage market in mind, and it is ideal for 24X7 bulk data storage. The drive features a 12Gb/s SAS interface, or in a SATA 6Gb/s interface. The new 6TB drive also features multi-drive rotational vibration tolerance, and robust 7200-RPM performance, ramp load technology alongside a humidity sensor to allow it to deliver optimum performance even in the harshest environments. Seagate has purpose-built the drive for enterprise environments, and utilized it to the T10 and T13-compliant power management standards enabling customers to adjust systems for optimal energy usage resulting in up to 90 percent more energy savings.