back to article Infinidat techie: Let me tell you a thing or two about ruler-format SSDs

We spoke to several people about Intel ruler and Samsung mini-ruler SSDs and thought we'd have some fun getting a point of view from Infinidat. Our expectation was that, as INFINIDAT uses disk for capacity storage and says you don't need all-flash arrays for performance, we might not even get a reply. We were wrong, and we …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How is this interview / post has anything to do with Object storage ?

    Infinidat makes primarily SAN storage.

    How is the title & content have anything to do we "Object storage" excluding that one question on Samsung drive ?

  2. Jan 0 Silver badge

    Blast radius?

    As someone who knows more about explosives than flash (but not much), what does this jargon mean?

    1. David Roberts
      Holmes

      Re: Blast radius?

      From https://forums.juniper.net/t5/Data-Center-Technologists/How-Big-is-the-Blast-Radius-in-Your-Data-Center/ba-p/229119

      "One thing that's very clear is that the size of the switch directly impacts how wide spread the failure is; this is referred to as the blast radius. When somethings breaks, how bad is it felt?"

      It was quite hard to find amongst all the explosive device information.

  3. BA
    Joke

    @Blast Radius

    I think it describes the size of the hole in your bank balance when you become an early adopter.

    Adapting your systems and software to take full advantage of extra capacity/performance will sting a little.

  4. NVMe or bust

    With all due respect - why ask a company that focuses on HDD/SSD arrayon their view of SSD packaging?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Errrm, is it because, as you clearly state in your question, it uses SSDs?

  5. SnapperHead

    More dinosaurs

    Moshe is famous for holding onto the past. The more the future moves, the harder he grips the past. Sure, Dinosaurs had a good run, but the only place you can see them is in museums... Where disk is headed.

    1. J. Cook Silver badge
      Trollface

      Re: More dinosaurs

      I keep hearing that about tape, too; Except that I just got a quote from our vendor for a 20 pack of LTO5 tapes that was under a thousand bucks, and if I'm willing to wait for our decrepit library to fill all twenty tapes (~4-5 days under optimal circumstances) that gives me between 30 and 60 TB of storage that can survive a fall off my desk. AND it's cheaper than the equivalent amount in flash, too.

      Troll icon for obvious reasons. :D

    2. Alistair

      Re: More dinosaurs

      @Snapper:

      Your 100Gb of dutifully collected internet memes will store quite well on your lightning fast flash drive for as long as it is worth powering up. (And just for S&G, unplug that drive for 18 months and see whats there afterward)

      Some of us have real storage *requirements* to meet.

      Currently reviewing ..... 240Pb .... of DB backup storage.

      We'll keep a month on the (twin, geo separated) backup arrays, which although they have great honking flash caches, are ... . oh look. Spinning rust. And the rest of it goes (duplicated copies) on pairs of tapes. With the storage facilities 1100Km apart. Why? you think we're dinosaurs for doing that? No. Because real enterprises have to meet legal requirements. Legal requirements with consequences. Usually financial legal requirements. In two particular cases in my scope, executives can and *have* gone to jail for not having the data available to the courts.

      And corporate budgets are corporate budgets. Neither tape nor spinning rust are going anywhere for a *very* long time in many places.

      Also:

      Trevor -> birds, sharks, lizards, crabs, and the most abundant form of food on the planet, krill.

    3. mikeymac

      Re: More dinosaurs

      If you can get 99.99999% availability, and sub-millisecond response time from an array that is ~10% Flash, ~90% spinning disk, all while saving a bundle of loot, WHY WOULDN'T YA?

      Price it. POC it. Purchase it.

  6. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    "there are two aspects here – performance and functionality."

    Sounds like a guy who might actually know WTF he's talking about.

    SSD has got cheaper and no ever doubted it was fast compared to disk.

    But it's not as cheap as disk in the same that (at the right scale) tape is cheaper than disk.

    Remember the first SSD? No.

    Never heard of bubble memory ?

    It was going to change the world. Everything was going to going to use it at every level.

    Only it didn't.

    1. Charles 9

      Re: "there are two aspects here – performance and functionality."

      Because people quickly found serious technical limitations with bubble memory.

      * It couldn't run cold. You had to warm it up first, and keep it warm. Fact: A rather well-known Konami tune called Morning Music was made to provide a backdrop to this warm-up process for their Bubble System (yes, Konami tried their hand at using Bubble Memory during the mid 80's).

      * Reads were destructive. You actually had to write the data back in as you read it out or things got ugly (which meant if the power got cut off between the two processes...you were screwed.

      * It seemed quick at the time until advances in DRAM leapfrogged bubble memory.

      Now. Flash memory has its drawbacks but they're not nearly as severe as it was with bubble memory. The problem of cell life and longevity has been addressed pretty well with wear management technology, and its current use case precludes DRAM overtaking it; it'll require a different technological leap to defeat it; one likely to sweep up both flash and DRAM in one fell swoop. As noted, its big drawback is price parity, and its speed advantage currently only makes its cost premium worthwhile in limited areas. Here, we're still in WIP territory.

  7. ecofeco Silver badge

    About that photo

    That's the famous Chinese port explosion at Taijin.

    A VERY interesting bit of trivia about that port: it's very near one of China's supercomputing facilities, the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin. Close enough that it caused some minor structural damage to the building and they had to shut the computer down for some time.

  8. Trevor_Pott Gold badge

    Optional

    Dinosaurs remain among the most populous animals on the planet. Perhaps you've heard of their modern incarnation. They're called birds.

    And there are reportedly half a trillion of them out there.

    So next time, pick a better analogy. One, perhaps, that doesn't demonstrate you failed to evolve your thinking to incorporate scientific knowledge that is now decades old.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Optional

      Or more probably he works for a flash vendor and is telling everyone that while flash is 9-10x more expensive than disk drives, you should still store cold data on it.

      Someone should tell the building trade they're wasting their time with flat-bed trucks. They should have motorbikes; they're much faster.

    2. JohnMartin

      Re: Optional

      It's not what a dinosaur is, which is important, it's what a dinosaur means .. ask any 7 year old if a bird is a "real dinosaur"

      You could argue the same bird vs dinosaur thing a you can with mammal vs Synapsids which were megafauna that pre-dated the dinosaurs and were (mostly) wiped out in the Permian-Triassic extinction event ..which eventually gave rise to mammals. When people think of dinosaurs, the think of the big impressive versions of megafauna that rely on a stable ecosystem and which die out during extinction events,. I'd agree though that its the smaller ones that can get by on the smell of an oily rag and survive through the dominance of the next set of behemoths which are the ones you have to look out for, even if they don't look anything near as cool as a dimetrodon (which isn't a dinosaur).

  9. southen bastard

    (And just for S&G, unplug that drive for 18 months and see whats there afterward)

    is flash not so good for long term cold storage?

    Why?

    have several ssd's of data that have not been fired up for more than 12 months, are they f@#fed?

  10. Dave 13

    BS detector

    My B.S. detector caught fire while reading this article. "Too much storage capacity" (HDD or SDD) has a way of sorting itself out rather quickly, in my experience. What we *really* need it a compute-storage interface that's not disk based and not PCI based, running at memory bus speeds. CPU/memory/storage all want to sing the same tune at the same (or similar) speeds.

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