Are you in the 1%? The 1% of sysadmins who need specialized flash? Last week at Tech Field Day during VMworld, I met Violin Memory. A company that has been a pioneer in flash storage, but now struggles because, I believe, it has lost some of its credibility due to the lack of a decent feature set. I'm thinking of data services, integration with hypervisors and OSs, and so on. They are …
"This is also true if you need the highest possible capacity and power efficiency. You can't pack half a petabyte of flash in 3U with commodity hardware".
Actually you can. Check out the SanDisk Infiniflash. 512TB in 3U. Yes, I know it still relies on SAS (8 connections) but that density is possible. It will go to 1 PB in 3U when increased densities become available either in TLC flash or 3D NAND.
I think most people would not consider that Sandisk product "commodity" hardware(myself included). When I think of commodity when it comes to flash it means 2.5" form factor drives.
Looking for the form factor of the sandisk product I see this picture:
http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/03/infiniflash-card-100571264-primary.idge.png
which leads me to believe it is not compatible with probably any other system out there, maybe it is at or near commodity pricing I don't know but doesn't seem like commodity hardware.
Just doing a quick search on what others think commodity hardware is the results seem to match my expectations.
Well, i think the article point the obvious and many of us have stated this years (yes, years) before. SSD is not the same as hardware-based, FPGA, non-customized NAND appliances...
The points made are not truly accurate. And, quite blatantly wrong, btw. Please fix.
1. NAND is not more durable than disk. It just happens that when you have lots of it (SSD or NAND chips) the time it takes of rewriting over the same cell are diminished, hence wearing out is PE cycles become less of a problem. Yet, that doesn't make an AFA/SSA any more reliable than a standard dual-controller mid-range array.
2. Capacity is not a problem of the past. It is the problem. AFA/SSA might get to 1/GB, but not without compression, de duplication and thing provisioning. As much as we want to say Flash is the answer, it is still long ways to go to absorb the PB of capacity that currently live on Hybrid NAS and Block arrays. And let's not forget that reliability is still in question.
3. NAND is no better predictable than disk. As a matter of fact, it is it's very mature that makes it more volatile and risky, hence the massive investment in coding data protection to make sure that the data doesn't flip when voltage changes, or christalized contamination hits a NAND cell, etc. I've seen unpredictable failure ratios on Flash that above and beyond those that I have seen on disk.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
