Today we announced that the SanDisk FlashSoft software has been validated by NetApp for use with NetApp’s OnTAP enterprise storage and data management solutions. We’re very excited about this announcement, because we’ve worked closely with NetApp over a long period of time to ensure complete interoperability between our products. The NetApp team is excited about working with us because FlashSoft offers their customers a solution that seamlessly improves performance for the broadest set of user applications and operating system environments.

Server-side solid-state caching is a real game-changer in the storage industry, but no matter how great an innovation it represents, there’s little benefit without the assurance of data integrity and compatibility with existing storage systems and operations. From the beginning, FlashSoft software was designed to work with our customers’ preferred server platforms, storage infrastructure and solid-state devices. In our collaboration with NetApp, we’ve gone through rigorous testing to demonstrate that NetApp customers can confidently use FlashSoft software to deliver the performance benefits of a server-side solid-state cache without any disruption to their storage infrastructure.

This year we’ll be working directly with NetApp sales and technical staff, as well as channel partners and customers, to demonstrate the benefits of FlashSoft in NetApp storage environments with servers running Linux, Windows Server, and VMware vSphere. We’ll be hitting the road to visit cities across the country in the NetApp Partner Academy program during May and June, and we’ll be back in Las Vegas for NetApp Insight in October.

If you’re considering solid-state caching in the server for use in your NetApp storage environment, you will want to learn more about FlashSoft.

Tom

Evaluator Group analyst Leah Schoeb recently published a report entitled, “FlashSoft Software from SanDisk: Accelerating Virtual Infrastructures,” which offers an in-depth analysis of the software.  She discusses the challenges behind increasing virtual machine density without sacrificing high performance, and how FlashSoft can address these challenges. Schoeb outlines how FlashSoft handles I/O, the advantages it provides to vSphere and includes test results on tier one application performance and increased VM density.

You can download the full report here. Check it out when you have the chance.

Rich

I attended the NEVTUG 7^th Annual Winter Warmer. First, a shout out to Chris and Dawn Harney for always putting together a great event.

Some great questions were asked during our breakout session, “Storage Performance in a VMware World – How to Architect and Design” including:

1) How does FlashSoft™ handle VMware VAAI (vSphere® APIs for array integration)?

2) What is the impact to FlashSoft regarding the following VAAI SCSI commands:

a. Write Same for bulk zeroing a range of blocks?

b. Extended Write (xcopy) for replicating a range of blocks?

c. Compare & Write for atomic block update?

Questions like these are the reason I love attending the Winter Warmer! Attendees are deep into VMware, its features and functions, and are interested in learning more.

Here’s the answer:

VAAI stands for vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration.It is designed to be used by VMFS on the underlying LUN, if the array exposing the LUN supports VAAI. It improves the performance of certain operations between VMFS and the array by offloading the operations to the array instead of VMFS, reducing overhead on the server memory and CPU.

Since FlashSoft runs within ESXi as a kernel module, it sits above VMFS as a file level filter. All the VAAI related operations happen further downstream behind VMFS. FlashSoft does not have any impact on VAAI, nor does VAAI have any impact on how we cache individual VMDK files.

If you just read the above and said “Huh?” Let me break it down.

1. FlashSoft runs in the server, not in the array, and is completely transparent to the storage array. VAAI is designed to be used by a storage array so it has no impact on FlashSoft and vice versa.
2. FlashSoft is specifically architected as an ESXi kernel module, and functions as part of the hypervisor. As such it does not interfere with any of the features and functionality of the hypervisor. You can use FlashSoft without compromising any of the other features in the hypervisor such as vMotion®, HA, DRS, SRM, etc. Of course, this also means FlashSoft works with any VMware-supported operating system in the VM.
3. VAAI works mainly during initialization of storage or when zeroing out or copying/cloning VMDKs. VAAI functions are typically performed during non-steady state when application I/O is not yet active for these particular LUNS. FlashSoft is typically used when the system is in steady-state and applications/virtual machines are active.

So when would you use VAAI and when would you use FlashSoft?

VAAI moves server processes to the array, reducing overhead on compute resources like CPU and memory. So VAAI makes sense for workloads that are compute or memory-intensive. VAAI would also be helpful in non-steady-state operations, e.g. after a Storage vMotion to more quickly initiate the array LUN the storage was moved to. On the other hand, FlashSoft is best suited for workloads that are primarily I/O constrained – that is, when the ESXi host CPU utilization is low because the server is waiting for data from storage. FlashSoft enables solid-state devices in the server to be used as a read cache to satisfy most read I/O requests. Write requests are passed-through to primary storage which is typically an array.

Using FlashSoft in conjunction with VAAI may make the most sense of all, since the whole point of a virtualized infrastructure is to bring all available resources to bear when and where needed.

If you would like to know more about VAAI, here is a good place to start: vStorage APIs for Array Integration FAQ

For more information on FlashSoft visit www.sandisk.com/flashsoft-connect.

Victoria

At Dell World last month, I had the opportunity to chat again with the folks from Truth in IT. Host, W. Curtis Preston and I discussed the rapid change in the mindset of enterprise organizations when it comes to the adoption of flash as a cache in the server – moving from a possible application to an inevitable application – to take full advantage of the potential that flash offers in reducing I/O latency.  We also talked about the benefits associated with implementing FlashSoft™ for VMware® vSphere® software in the data center to intelligently accelerate I/O to use cache most effectively.

The complete interview is available here.  Check it out when you have the chance.

Rich

In 2012, SanDisk demonstrated its commitment to the enterprise market in various ways. SanDisk’s acquisition of FlashSoft and Schooner Information Technology, coupled with its 2011 acquisition of Pliant Technology, allowed the company to quickly offer a strong portfolio of flash-optimized hardware and software solutions for the enterprise.  In fact, SanDisk launched two new enterprise product lines in 2012 –  Lightning® PCIe Solid State Accelerators (SSAs) and FlashSoft™ 3.0 for VMware vSphere.

2012 was an incredibly productive year, and SanDisk culminates its success with participation at Dell World and HP Discover, widely attended by some of most influential enterprise and IT-focused managers, businesses and media.   These events provided SanDisk with the opportunity to be the first to demonstrate prototypes of SSDs with the new NVM Express and SCSI Express PCIe interfaces, and show the power and breadth of our FlashSoft product line.

At Dell World, SanDisk showcased its range of enterprise hardware and software solutions qualified to meet Dell’s strict standards, including SanDisk’s SAS enterprise SSDs and FlashSoft software. SanDisk’s next-generation Small Form Factor NVMe SSD was demonstrated within Dell’s booth, underscoring SanDisk’s technology leadership in the enterprise storage market. In addition, SanDisk participated in live streaming interviews at the Dell News Desk, featuring discussion of its enterprise SSDs and FlashSoft software. The company also contributed a guest blog post on the Dell World Online site entitled, “Understanding the Implications of New Connectivity Standards.”

Rich Petersen discusses performance and efficiency in virtualized environments.

Mike James discusses the implications of emerging industry standards like NVMe in data centers.

Image courtesy of StorageReview.com

Prior to Dell World, SanDisk displayed its robust portfolio of enterprise solutions at HP Discover, and exhibited a working demo of two Small Form Factor SSD prototypes connected via SCSI Express to an HP Express Bay server. SanDisk is also currently the only SSD vendor able to support a working SCSI Express SSD prototype. SanDisk SAS SSDs also appeared in the ProLiant Gen 8 demo where they produced 8x greater results than in the previous Gen 7 system.

As managing the daily flood of new data and content becomes more complex moving into 2013, SanDisk will continue to innovate and provide our customers and partners with leading edge, next-generation solutions that bring performance and efficiency benefits of flash-based storage to the enterprise.

Thanks to everyone for such a wonderful 2012. We look forward to another exciting year in 2013.

Patricia

As I previously mentioned the SanDisk FlashSoft team participated in NetApp Insight in Las Vegas a few weeks ago and I can’t say enough what a great experience it was to talk with NetApp® technical sales folks and learn about their customers’ challenges and how we can work together to solve I/O problems. In fact, Tom Matson, Global Channel Sales Manager for FlashSoft software, participated in a video interview in which he commented on the partnership and shared the ways we are working closely with NetApp to link our products together.

Aside from giving some background on the partnership and how the products work together, Tom also shared a thought that is worth calling out – one of the many reasons SanDisk is such an ideal partner for NetApp is our shared philosophy for openness. Meaning, the customer can plug in whatever flash device makes sense to them while still taking advantage of both NetApp and SanDisk solutions to solve I/O challenges.

Together, we provide a game-changing solution for customers. This includes 3 – 5x* performance improvement and about 3x** density improvement. Plus, we’re able to support any operating system in the guest that VMware® currently supports, important for customers running many of the Linux distributions and older versions of Windows. This is due to the way our product is architected and, in turn, how it works so seamlessly with NetApp storage. Whether you are looking for solutions for VDI deployments, virtualizing enterprise data center applications, or accelerating stand-alone database servers, FlashSoft with NetApp can help you achieve your goals without disrupting your existing storage infrastructure.

You can view the full video interview here to learn more about how SanDisk is not only an extension of NetApp but a storage technology partner as well.

Victoria

Trademark, copyright and performance data information, and other technical claims are detailed in the SanDisk Legal Disclaimer page.

The FlashSoft team was at VMworld Europe last week in Barcelona. I don’t want to make you jealous, but if you missed the event, you missed a great opportunity to mix with more than 7,000 virtualization professionals like yourself, in Barcelona, in some beautiful Mediterranean weather. But I digress.

I had an interview with W. Curtis Preston of Truth In IT, during the conversation, we coined a new expression: “storage of record.” I have been meeting customers and partners who describe the same dilemma: how do you improve the performance of a storage system that you can’t touch?

As we talk about in the interview, business requirements like regulatory and standards compliance, and technical requirements like backup are increasingly built into the storage infrastructure, making the storage “untouchable”. OK, not always untouchable, but it’s always a very nervous, “sweaty-palms” touch — with lot of constraints and lots of interested parties.

Riffing on the idea of a “system of record” – a familiar concept in information management – we talked abouthow a lot of IT professionals know that flash can improve storage performance, but they can’t touch their organizations’ storage systems, because the entire storage infrastructure has become a kind of system of record. And it’s not just IT that relies on this “storage of record”, it’s Operations, it’s Legal, it’s Finance.

That’s where FlashSoft software can help. Because FlashSoft implements a flash-based cache in the server, it accelerates I/O between server and storage, enabling faster, more scalable storage performance without touching the SAN or any storage systems. Without changing your “storage of record”.

See my interview here, and let us know if you’ve got a “storage of record” problem.

Peter Crosby
Product Manager for SanDisk

Last week the SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions team was at Oracle OpenWorld, and I had the opportunity to appear on the live webcast called The Cube, hosted by SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier, and Wikibon analyst Dave Vellante. We had a great chat about SanDisk’s enterprise business and the future of flash and virtualization.

The full transcript is below. It’s a bit long for a blog post, but if you’d rather read the interview than watch/listen, here it is:

John:
OK, wer’e back live here in San Francisco. This is SiliconANGLE.tv, SiliconANGLE.com. The Cube is our flagship program. We go out to events and abstract the signal from the noise. I’m John Furier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com and I’m joined by my co-host…

Dave:
I’m Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. And we’re joined by Rich Petersen, who is the director of software marketing at SanDisk. Welcome to The Cube.

Rich:
Thanks very much.

Dave:
And we were talking off-camera… You were recently acquired by SanDisk. You came from FlashSoft.

Rich:
That’s correct.

Dave:
We’re going to talk about that. John, flash is obviously taking the market by storm. We’ve written about it a lot on Wikibon, and SiliconANGLE…

John:
We’ve covered the Flash Memory Summit. We’ve been deep on flash and solid-state. Dave, this is just a big innovation. Every technology revolution has a new enabler, a destructive enabler and… and spinning disk has not been one of them. So, we’ve been covering that. My question is, tell us what’s going on with you guys now. SanDisk, obviously everyone knows about the brand, anyone that’s ever taken a picture, or seen some of the cool tech that you have, and there’s a variety of other enterprise solutions. So take us through some of what’s not known and what you guys are doing it within SanDisk.

Rich:
That’s a great question. SanDisk is well known as a leader – a pioneering leader – in flash technology. What a lot of people don’t know about SanDisk is that it also has a very active, vibrant enterprise business, oriented around flash technology, both as a developer of hardware solutions and also software solutions that leverage enterprise flash in order to reduce I/O latency. And this reduction in I/O latency is one of the key enablers for increased performance and scalability for databases, enterprise applications, and virtualization environments.

Dave:
So it’s happening pretty fast. It started with consumer devices, and now it’s moving into the enterprise. We are here at Oracle OpenWorld, and Oracle is talking flash. What’s your angle on that? Oracle’s putting flash in a lot of different places. What does that mean to you guys? Obviously that’s good news because it rises the tide, but at the same time Oracle’s getting more vertically integrated with flash. So talk about where you fit.

Rich:
That’s an excellent question, because one thing that’s important to understand is that there many different ways to apply flash technology to the task of reducing I/O latency. In some cases the optimal approach is to approach the front end of the database itself. In other cases implementations of flash in storage architectures provide great benefits. Our particular approach is to enable the flash to act as a cache within the I/O data path of the operating system itself. So whether you’re running an Oracle database on Linux, or something on Windows Server or even in a VM, you can accelerate the performance and scalability of the application by reducing latency through the use of flash technology as a server-attached cache. So that’s where we fit in the stack.

Dave:
Okay, and and the point of management – is that you guys doing that management, you’re relying on the host to do that?

Rich:
Yes, and yes. Essentially the FlashSoft software appears to the operating system as a driver the in the I/O path between server and storage. So essentially, we’re transparent upward to the databases and applications, and we’re also transparent downward to the storage infrastructure. This is extremely valuable to customers that want to deliver the benefits of enterprise flash but they don’t want to re-architect their databases, and they don’t want to re-architect the storage investment that they’ve already made.

Dave:
So you talk in SCSI protocol for example…

Rich:
Sure, we will talk with any underlying storage, and we can attach – or talk to – the flash device via any attach interface, whether it’s SATA, SAS, PCIe even NVMe. We’re very transparent within the operating system, both to the storage protocol as well as to the interface to the SSD.

Dave:
Okay. So where do you see this whole space going? Will all active data sit on flash? Is it going to be more aggressive than that? Will flash replace spinning disk like it has in a lot of these devices? What’s your vision?

Rich:
I’m still waiting for spinning disks to replace tape completely, so I think we’ve got a few more years of spinning disks in the enterprise.

Dave:
Well, it is finally happening. It’s 2012, almost 2013, and it’s finally happening.

Rich:
But truthfully, with the massive growth in data that enterprises are having to handle, spinning disks will be with us for a while. But one of the most important drivers for this adoption of flash is the fact that we need to get access to larger amounts of data much more quickly, whether we’re talking about big data analytics, mobile applications… All of these new applications are placing demands on storage infrastructures that we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago, and flash technology can step up and deliver large volumes of data to those application requirements, with the performance that that we need to do business.

John:
Rich, what has flash done in your opinion to the architecture of the enterprise, within the data center and within cloud in particular, and two, how does that impact of some of the big legacy stuff like big SANs? Obviously, flash can sit in a lot of different places: closer to the processors, on the network… now we have software-defined networking… all these great emerging trends. Obviously flash is this ingredient that’s very cool – it sits in different spots. How does that change the architecture?

Rich:
It’s changing it in a number of interesting ways. I think if you want to look at the development of enterprise flash in the enterprise, there are two ways to look at it. One is the capacity and the performance steadily increasing just in terms of the hardware, but then additionally we should consider the fact that we’re getting better and better at putting flash where delivers the greatest benefit. So initially it was implemented as a tier in a storage system. Following that, we’ve come up with innovative technologies that put it on the SAN. What we’re doing now with technologies like FlashSoft is we’ve found a way to put the flash right next to the CPU, where it can deliver the data fastest, and that’s really changed what servers are going to be looking like over the next several years. We’re going to start thinking of servers in terms of “how large a flash-based cache can I put into this hardware?” and “how can I best leverage it with my existing storage?” One of the things that we emphasize is the ability to leverage existing storage investments because these are systems that aren’t that old, they are very expensive, and there’s a lot of policy and process that’s baked into their implementation. So we want to be as non-disruptive as possible while being as innovative as possible.

John:
So let’s talk about the customer problems that are being solved. There are problems to solve, business to be done, and as you mentioned, a lot of legacy investments. So what are the core problems that they’re solving? Are there some things that bubble to the top in almost every conversation?

Rich:
Oh, absolutely. I would say at the top of the heap is is virtualization. Today, most organizations have picked the low-hanging fruit in virtualization, and they’re moving with a roadmap to increase their virtualization, and yet they’re still looking at certain tier-one systems that they’re reluctant to consider virtualizing. Flash technology enables them to expand the scope of their thinking and look to virtualization in areas where previously they might not have imagined doing so. Secondarily, is what we see people doing in terms of databases, where they’re working with very, very large amounts of data. They’re looking at business analytics, they’re looking at OLTP implementations, where they’re really increasing their expectations for performance. They’re looking at batch jobs that can be brought down from thirty hours to under ten hours, sometimes five or six hours. They’re looking at response times dropping from seconds to milliseconds. That’s how flash is raising expectations for what applications can do within the enterprise today.

John:
Tell the folks out there: why SanDisk? There’s a lot of noise in the marketplace, a lot of different vendors. In the enterprise, SanDisk is not as well-known, relative to the awareness for its consumer brand, so why SanDisk? What are some of the reasons why people buy you guys and work with you?

Rich:
SanDisk is actually a very partner-oriented organization. We don’t have a dog in many of these fights. For example, to talk about the FlashSoft technology, even though SanDisk is a manufacturer of enterprise solid-state devices, our software technology is open to be used with solid-state technology from other vendors, whether you’re talking about LSI, Fusion-io or Virident. So it’s one way that you can see that as a large organization with a diversified portfolio, we’re able to partner with vendors of storage systems, partner with vendors of servers, and partner with other SSD team makers as well. We can say to the customer, “you truly are our top priority, and your procurement decisions are your procurement decisions.” We will support that, whether we’re talking about our hardware offerings or our software offerings.

John:
What’s the technology status these days? Obviously flash has continued to grow, price points are going to drop, in a continued evolution. Flash is still kind of expensive relative to… well it’s expensive, but in the scheme of things it can pay for itself depending on how you implement the architecture, which we have talked about in The Cube many times. But what’s next in the technology? What’s around the corner that’s going to continuously improve the capability?

Rich:
Obviously, capacities and performance characteristics are going to change. One of the things that I think a lot of people almost overlooked is the degree to which the longevity, the consistency, the reliability of these devices has improved radically. And this is an area where SanDisk has been a pioneering vendor on the hardware side. Really there’s a lot of under-the-surface improvements in enterprise flash technology that maybe don’t grab headlines in terms of “millions of IOPs,” but they really grab attention when the CIO is looking at the long-term value of his investment.

Dave:
I wonder if you could talk about the landscape a little bit. I think that the number of suppliers in the space is just exploding. You guys have been here from the beginning, you’re probably the largest supplier through the value chain. You’re a public company, very successful, with revenues in the multi-billions, and a market cap of ten billion. But you see a plethora of companies, many are very niche-oriented, focused solely on the enterprise. But you are a very diversified business. You’re in consumer, you’re in the iPhone, you’re in the enterprise… and FlashSoft brings another capability. What’s the overall strategy of the company, relative to these emerging companies that you see with great valuations, that are getting bought sometimes before they even have a product?

Rich:
SanDisk is a company that has a great deal of experience and a great deal of expertise in-house. So, for example, FlashSoft became a part of SanDisk in that very process. We were shipping a product with a good customer base, we had demonstrated some leadership in this technology area, and that’s where the folks at SanDisk were able to execute on an acquisition strategy that made sense for them and made sense for us as an organization, and in particular made sense for our customers. The number of business partners and customers of ours that said “we’re really glad to see you become a part of that organization because that’s somebody we can do business with…” They saw the depth of technical expertise, they saw the openness in terms of business strategy and they saw the leadership at the corporate level. So it really gave us a boost in terms of where we saw this technology going over the long term.

Dave:
A lot of people talk about something else on the horizon other than flash. You know, they say that if we had to choose a technology for the enterprise, we wouldn’t have chosen flash, because you have to go through so many gymnastics to make sure that you don’t don’t lose data. At the same time, the compelling part about NAND is that it’s in all these consumer devices and the price dropped dramatically. What is SanDisk’s outlook on that from your point of view?

Rich:
Frankly, having non-volatile memory that can be resident in the server is a very important innovation, because it really gets storage capabilities ahead of the latency that’s inherent in any storage area network. By bringing storage to the server with non-volatile memory technology, I think we’ve pioneered the first step in a new kind of architecture, an architecture that is better for virtual machine environments, it’s better for large-scale database implementations and I think we’re going to see both server and storage vendors aggressively supporting this innovation. So I’m a very strong proponent of non-volatile, flash memory in the server. I think that’s really the future.

Dave:
I think we would generally agree with that. At least for all active data, it just makes sense to put it on flash. And the cost from a transaction standpoint is actually lower than on spinning disk. But what about flash going away in favor of some future technology like memresistors or something like that? Can those technologies compete with the massive volumes of the consumer business, or is flash here to stay for the foreseeable future?

Rich:
Well, I’m going to beg the question, I’m afraid, because I’m a software guy.

Dave:
So you don’t care.

Rich:
In a way. But there’s always going to be something faster. There’s always going to be another tier that’s faster than the previous tier, and there’s always going to be a requirement for the intelligence to understand where the data is best served. From our perspective that’s just a very bright future.

Dave:
So to follow up with a software question, it seems like a big software innovation is being able to actually access and act upon the metadata.

Rich:
That’s right.

Dave:
Talk about that a little bit. Who controls that metadata and how does that shift and what does that mean for your business?

Rich:
That’s that’s an important question and it’s one of the issues that again, when I talk about innovations that are below the surface – that’s one of them. Because metadata management is really something that, if done poorly, can overload systems so you’re basically going to be stealing from Peter to pay Paul. In order to accelerate your storage I/O, you may be stealing resources away from system memory and in-memory caching capabilities.

Dave:
Pushing the bottleneck around.

Rich:
Exactly. So it’s extremely important when you’re looking at a storage technology, you have to make sure that metadata management is implemented appropriately. That’s one of the things that the data scientists on the FlashSoft team have made a particular point of focus. Our footprint, if you will, in the server is extremely light. If you don’t mind some data points…

Dave:
Please.

Rich:
In our current VMware product, the maximum size of the SSD-based cache can be 2TB, and that 2TB cache can be managed with 140MB of system memory. So it’s a very light metadata footprint in order to manage an extremely large cache of data. There are some special architectural developments that we put in place and order to be able to do that, but I think when you look ahead into the future, as data grows obviously metadata is going to grow as well. And the question is, are we developing technologies that implement metadata management for maximum efficiency? Because that’s really one of the subtle differences that will come to the fore when you’re talking about the pros and cons of different approaches to solving this issue of I/O latency.

Dave:
Well if you get it right, the performance impact is going to be enormous. Talking about VMware, recently VMware put Pat Gelsinger in charge. He brings a hardware background – a systems background really. He has a lot of experience with his former company EMC. David Floyer, whom you know, wrote that where they’re probably headed is basically to try to control the entire stack in the metadata in particular, saying “OK, we own the protocols you gotta play with us.” How do you see that as a software supplier? Where do you compete long-term? Do you just say “OK, we will participate in whatever protocols we have to interact with, and add value through our efficiency in our algorithms”? What’s the long-term prognosis for you guys in that regard?

Rich:
That’s that’s a difficult question to answer directly, because I don’t have a crystal ball. Our relationship with VMware has been a very strong one. We’ve been a VMware partner from the beginning, and one of the things that has has impressed us the most is when you look at VMware’s partner ecosystem, it is very robust. And I think it’s very robust not by accident, but by a dedicated effort to support its partners and to involve them in the innovations that it brings to to its customers. I obviously can’t comment or speculate in any way as to what decisions Pat Gelsinger may make, but as a company I think VMware got to the to the point where it is through strong partnerships with storage vendors, server vendors, software developers; and encouraging innovation in its ecosystem. So I’m not skeptical – I’m much more optimistic.

Dave:
So said another way, you don’t see VMware or EMC – its owner – sub-optimizing the performance of its long-term vision to maybe prop up VFCache or something like that; rather you think the ecosystem will generate a lot more value for obviously the industry but also VMware itself.

Rich:
Very much so. I think VFCache brought to fore the requirement for server-resident, non-volatile memory, specifically for the purpose of improving the performance and scalability of virtualization environments. So when a large vendor like EMC brings a technology like that to its customers and says “this is how we see the future,” to some degree that raises the awareness among the customers of EMC’s products – of all products – to the importance of bringing non-volatile memory into the server. Prior to that announcement there were a great number of skeptics about bringing what was considered a storage technology to the server tier. So to some degree it’s done us a service.

John:
So we’re getting close on time, but I want you to comment on what we have been following as the hottest trend since VMware bought Nicira: software-defined networking, or network virtualization, or software-led infrastructure, or software-defined datacenter – whatever name the marketing guys are going to try to put on this mega-trend – it’s pretty relevant. We’re talking about software now at the network layer, let loose virtualization magic in there… This is only going to help proliferate more cache. So what’s your take on this? One, the direction, the state of the technology, and its path?

Rich:
If I could speculate slightly…

John:
Go ahead.

Rich:
I would say that one of the things to keep in mind is that caching technology observes the I/O behavior in a server and storage system. And in doing so we always think of, well what does it do with that information? Well, it simply uses that information to assign hot data to the appropriate tier of the stack, if you will. But what else might we do with that information, in terms of optimizing the way our data centers operate?

John:
Routes? State information?

Rich:
Exactly, there are many different things we might do.

John:
There are opportunities all over the place.

Rich:
There are incredible opportunities, because I think over the long term, this flash-based caching technology is thought of only in terms of what can it do for performance and scalability, but keep in mind it is generating a lot of information that we may be able to do something useful with.

John:
You mention the word “policy.” People think about political policy, and policy-based networking and policy-based storage – everything’s policy-based that requires decision making with dynamic information. Software is the case. We are obviously bullish on software-defined networking, the software-defined datacenter, all the above. So I agree. I think it’s a great opportunity. Thanks for coming on The Cube. I really appreciate it.

This is Oracle OpenWorld. We are here live here from The Cube, our flagship program, abstracting the signal from the noise. Rich, thanks so much. We’ll be right back with our next guest after this short break.

Rich

This week members from the SanDisk FlashSoft team are at the Intel Developer Forum, along with other members of the SanDisk Enterprise Storage Solutions group. The hardware team has been doing innovative work with NVMe, and is demonstrating the potential for NVMe flash devices with a very cool prototype.

But you might be asking, what’s that got to do with the FlashSoft software?

In the rapidly evolving world of server-tier caching solutions, many early innovations coupled the caching software to a specific flash hardware device or standard. The FlashSoft product design explicitly avoided doing this, because our engineering team knew that enterprise flash technology was developing quickly, with new physical architectures like eMLC and new interface standards like NVMe. Thinking about the future potential of our technology, we chose a completely hardware-neutral software design that would require minimal system overhead.

From the first FlashSoft software release two years ago, to our most recently announced release for VMware vSphere®, one thing that has never changed is the message that FlashSoft software can use any enterprise flash device – SATA, SAS or PCIe – from any vendor – as a cache in the server. In fact, we recently announced our business collaboration with Virident to underscore that message for our mutual customers.

One thing is changing now. Instead of just saying “SATA, SAS, or PCIe”, we’ll be adding NVMe to the interfaces for which we validate our software.

If your server-tier caching technology is anchored to a specific vendor’s flash hardware, controller, or interface, you might want to ask about NVMe. It’s not the only future development that might affect your caching roadmap, but it is one of the most important.

And if you’re at IDF this week, stop by and meet the SanDisk team – hardware and software. Because both sides of our team have a lot to share with you about NVMe.

Rich