SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark smashed by storage newbie

Re: Eh?

I actually switched recently to USB2.0 from NVMe and FC. It ends up, NVMe was horrifyingly slow with maximum throughput of 1.98GB/sec on a PCIex2 interconnect. Also, dedup became a massive bottleneck as the number of devices increased.

This is ok for thinks like 8k video editing and it’s lovely for low latency. I would highly recommend a system like this for movie production when people are working in 8k 4:4:4 uncompressed. But no one would ever be stupid enough to edit in 8K uncompressed. You’d want to use a lossless codec with scalable and possibly temporal compression such as H.265 or J2K encapsulated in MXF. This means that the machine you’re editing on can make uuid requests for frames at a given resolution and color depth that can actually be edited in real time without hardware DSPs. Then, the project can be sent to render and real-time no longer matters.

You would never ever ever want to use a file server as a frame server as it doesn’t understand video. You want a frame server that actually speaks video. It saves MILLIONS!!!

In any case, when managing business data, images, etc, using map/reduce with Banana Pi and 256GB commodity SSD drives, I have cut my transaction processing times from using massive storage systems like this by a lot. The reason is that I now have massively scalable storage. All my requests are intelligently routed and hot data is processed from in-memory. With 2GB per node and 128 nodes, that means about 96GB of hot data. The hottest data is replicated across all node and all locations. For all other data, there’s a minimum of 3 copies maintained at all times on least two sites. We can also process stripes for large blobs and we have several 12TB spinning disk nodes per site.

So, we have performance that would make this system weep at how slow they are. But if you need high performance, unstructured, random access data this system is almost certainly king. It’s great for legacy technologies like virtual machines and raw video editing. It can also be useful for storage of scientific data sets for supercomputers. A great example would be for storing data sets from the LHC.

If you’re a business running anything other than high frequency trading systems, if a storage system like this sounds attractive, you’re not managing your data but instead just over provisioning in hopes that if you spend enough millions, you can avoid actually managing your data.

Re: Eh?

We just goto Samsung and buy the NAND chips ourselves and stuff them onto custom motherboards we print ourselves that have BGA (Ball Grid Array) chip inserts built-in kinda like what they did in the old days (1980's) which had individual plug-in ram sockets. If a NAND chip goes bad we can EASILY replace it just by plugging in a new one!

Using the cheaper 64 gigabyte chips, we put 1024 chips per board and a custom fibre optic dense-wave multiplexing communications chip on it for 64+ Terabytes of high speed drive space for our 4k/8k/16k resolution video-oriented GPU-based supercomputing applications. We dip 16 such boards in a glass-lined rackbox filled with dialectric circulating cooling fluid for the ultimate in NAND chip service life-extending protection! At 16 boards at 64 terabytes each, that's over a petabyte per rack (and we have 16 of them!) of SUPERFAST aggregated speed of over a Terabyte Per Second per board or 16 Terabytes per second per rack AND a parallel group throughput of 256 Terabytes per second when the 16 racks are RAIDED together.

Of course it gets kinda STUPID EXPENSIVE ....BUT.... the performance is definitely there!

and by using the cooling fluid we have VASTLY extended the service life of the NAND chip

writes and reads before the cells begin deteriorating which means we can use the cheaper

NAND chips because it SEEMS the heat of constant reads/writes DOES in fact impact

overall SSD FLASH drive memory cell wear issue and by COOLING the chips you nearly

double or triple the wear life of the cheaper chips into enterprise-class SSD drive territory!

That saves us a BIG BUNDLE of money by being able to use the cheaper chips!