IT analyst firm Gartner recently issued its annual “Cool Vendors in Storage” report, showcasing a handful of innovative companies that are providing IT organizations with technologies to dramatically increase efficiencies and deliver measurable bottom-line benefits.

As a follow up to the report, Gartner Fellow Daryl Plummer is hosting a complimentary Webinar on May 20 – Cool Vendors 2010: Staying Cool in Economic Heat – to review the 2010 Cool Vendors, and discuss specifically how each company is poised to positively impact the IT market.

We were thrilled that Plaint was recognized among this elite group of innovators for our Enterprise Flash Drives, and I encourage you to check out the free Webinar.

The Webinar will be held twice on Thurs., May 20, and you can register online at the following links:

Register for 9 a.m. EDT/6 a.m. PDT session – https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/933461200
Register for Noon EDT / 9 a.m. PDT session – https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/530216081

Hope you enjoy!

Greg

We’ve been participating in Bell Micro’s SSD Seminar Series to help educate enterprise IT managers, OEMs, and storage and IT system developers on the significant performance, reliability and cost advantages of next-generation solid-state storage technology.

The seminars have been held in cities across North America (Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Bethesda, and Minneapolis), and the final one is scheduled for this Thursday, Dec. 3, in Milpitas, CA. Four SSD suppliers, including Pliant, will be presenting on the multiple benefits of adding SSDs to the storage infrastructure.

Not surprisingly, there’s quite a bit of expectation and discussion at the seminars that SSDs can deliver significantly higher I/O performance than hard drives. However, what’s surprising to me, having done five of the six seminars, is that people are already talking about “performance droop in SSD over time.” One of the vendors even stated, “fresh-out-of-box performance is different than steady-state performance.”

Now, I will spare you the discussion on how garbage collection affects SSD performance over time, as there are already plenty of articles on this subject. What is most troublesome is that performance droop should not occur at all. Solid state drives are supposed to alleviate performance bottlenecks, not introduce new ones. As such, a properly designed SSD controller should and must have sufficient horsepower so that a critical function like garbage collection will not impact I/O performance.

While we’re on the subject of performance, let’s talk about scalable performance.

Advanced interfaces, such as Fibre Channel (FC) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), provide access to two ports. For years, the secondary port has been relegated to sitting idle, used only when the primary port failed.

That’s a shame…and a waste, in my opinion.

Both the FC and SAS interfaces allow performance to scale when both ports are actively used. Given the fact that solid state drives are not physically constrained by a single read/write head, one should expect to scale performance by reading and writing to both ports at the same time!

The below charts illustrate the point:

You paid for both ports already. Why not actually use both?

If you would like to learn more about “scalable performance” and how you can best implement enterprise SSD storage in your IT infrastructure, I invite you to join me and the Bell Micro team at the seminar this Thursday. It will be held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Milpitas, CA.

You can find more detailed info here:  http://www.bellmicro.com/ssd/seminar.asp.

I look forward to seeing you there!

C.T. Chu

Now, here’s someone who really understands the benefits and value of using Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) in enterprise IT data centers:  Mark Peters.

Mark covers data center storage and systems for Enterprise Strategy Group.  He was recently interviewed for a SearchStorage.com “FAQ Guide” podcast about the growth in enterprise solid state technology.  (Read the full transcript here)

In the interview, Mark addresses the questions he hears most often from storage administrators about solid state technology, and I have to say that his views are spot-on — particularly regarding the benefits and value of solid state, and the market/business drivers that are making the technology increasingly attractive.

A few of the key points Mark makes are:

1)  I/O performance benefits

“Generically, whatever is most important to a business or enterprise or organization in terms of getting throughput and I/O handled, wherever you need speed, wherever you need a great deal of performance in terms of throughput, then solid state will be great.”

2)  Energy efficiency

“Given that we’re in such challenging economic times, that makes solid state more interesting.  Obviously with my focus on the data center I look at the green aspect of computing as well, and it’s hard to overlook solid state from that perspective.”

3)  Cost-efficiency

“Even in terms of today’s pricing, cost per I/O or the I/O per watt for solid state are already very compelling.”

It’s nice to see Mark (and other industry experts) start to recognize the important and growing role EFDs will play in the future.

Amyl Ahola

PS.  Mark also has a blog with more great info on a variety data center storage issues:  Mark My Words.  I suggest checking it out if you haven’t already.

In a previous blog, I suggested that performance, reliability, IOPS per watt, and IOPS per $ are key storage metrics for enterprises. However, satisfying demanding enterprise needs goes far beyond the attainment of just these metrics. I/O-intensive enterprise IT applications require IOPS and bandwidth levels to be predictable and sustainable across a variety of workload requirements.

Predictable performance has traditionally been a challenge for SSDs in enterprise applications because workloads are random and indeterminate. This means that predictability requires consistent performance, independent of whether reading or writing data, as enterprise applications typically vary the read-to-write ratio between 60/40 and 90/10.  Ensuring that predictable performance is maintained while the workload changes is another example of how an Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) offers differentiation from traditional SSDs. 

A performance comparison (IOmeter-based) between a well-publicized ‘enterprise’ SSD and the new Pliant EFD illustrates this difference.  From the chart, you can see how the ‘enterprise’ SSD(I) performance drops by over 80% as the read/write ratio changes. The Pliant EFD maintains its performance across the range from 100% reads to a 50/50 read/write ratio. This is because the Pliant EFD can read and write simultaneously to the drive and therefore offer substantially better and predictable performance for these demanding applications. Traditional SSDs and HDDs can only perform one read or write at a time. 

The bottom line: EFDs enable enterprises to achieve higher I/O performance, maintain performance predictability with changing workloads, offer higher levels of service quality, and dynamically address changing business requirements without adding additional hardware.   

I’m curious to hear what you think, so please feel free to comment.

Amyl

I was recently going through some storage Web sites and came across a press release from 1961 about a new file I remember seeing when I first worked in the storage industry.  It was an announcement from Bryant about a new “High-Speed Parallel-Access Disk File.”  It was a disk drive with nearly 80 MBs that weighed 1700 lbs and sold for over $100,000.  And, this was back when 100 grand was real money.

The release got me thinking about the history of the storage industry and all the major milestones and breakthroughs over the past four decades.  All I can say, is WOW, we’ve come a very long way!  When you look at the capacity that can be stored on a device today, with over 10,000 times the capacity in less than one thousandth of the space, it’s really remarkable what this industry has accomplished.

Which brings me to the point of this post:  today, we launched a new – and I think pretty exciting – storage company, Pliant Technology (more on us later), and this blog.  I plan to use this blog as our outlet to share the experiences storage veterans and myself have  gathered over the past 40+ years (has it been that long?) in the storage industry, and provide our take on industry news, current trends and the latest technologies that are making waves.

My particular passion is analyzing where storage technology needs to go from here –particularly how it needs to evolve to higher levels of performance and efficiency to keep up with the advances of other enterprise technologies, while at the same time contributing to the WW Green effort by providing solutions enabling dramatic reductions in data center power consumption.

My goal here is to provide information that interests, challenges and even bothers you.  I’ve been in this business a long time and have seen many changes, and I’ve had the good fortune to work with some of the best in the business.  My plan is to bring all of this and more out on this blog.

I hope you’ll take the time to stop by to read, comment and even criticize on the blog.  If something strikes a chord – good or bad – I’d love to hear from you. 

Amyl Ahola