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cloud-SSD
Post by Tony Perry McDaniles with Enterprise Cloud Providers
and Techs
Enterprise workloads such as relational databases and
email applications that demand consistent, high-performance storage systems might soon make their way to the cloud if Boulder,
Colo.-based startup SolidFire can sell cloud providers on its all-solid-state appliances designed to improve the speed of cloud storage.
Beginning on Aug. 1, the Atlanta-based company, which raised $11 million in February, is offering cloud providers early access to its SSD appliances
that it says will drastically reduce providers’ storage footprints while significantly boosting performance. Hopefully,
SolidFire is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to using flash memory to open the door for new cloud services.
The idea of an
flash-fueled future helped drive Fusion-io’s successful IPO just last week. However, whereas Fusion-io’s server components seek to cache data for web applications, SolidFire
and its more-established (and
richer) competition Violin
Memory are targeting primary
data storage for traditional
enterprise applications.
Even for enterprise-focused cloud providers such as Virtustream, Terremark and Bluelock, storage performance remains an issue even after security, compliance
and other architectural concerns have been addressed. SSDs promise significant performance advantages over
hard-disk-drives, and SolidFire is hoping that cloud providers will buy its appliances to address primary storage for
performance-sensitive applications, such as databases and e-mail programs, that those providers are designed to run.
But enterprise
applications are just the starting point for what Flash could mean for cloud computing.
Not only could appliances
like SolidFire’s boost the overall performance of clouds by reducing the overhead associated with storing and delivering
virtual machines, but they also could power new services around analytics, high-performance computing and other data-intensive
workloads.
Any application needing to read and serve lots of data with creating a bottleneck for today’s
high-powered computing processors could stand to benefit from SSDs.
SolidFire
readies SSD storage systems for cloud providers
Enterprise workloads such as relational databases and email applications
that demand consistent, high-performance storage systems might soon make their way to the cloud if Boulder, Colo.-based startup
SolidFire can sell cloud providers on its all-solid-state appliances
designed to improve the speed of cloud storage.
Beginning on Aug. 1, the Atlanta-based company, which raised $11 million in February, is offering cloud providers early
access to its SSD appliances that it says will drastically reduce providers’ storage footprints while significantly
boosting performance. Hopefully, SolidFire is just a drop in the bucket when it comes to using flash memory to open the door
for new cloud services.
The idea of an flash-fueled future helped drive Fusion-io’s successful IPO just last week. However, whereas Fusion-io’s
server components seek to cache data for web applications, SolidFire and its more-established (and richer) competition Violin Memory are targeting primary data storage for traditional enterprise applications. Even for enterprise-focused cloud providers such as Virtustream, Terremark and
Bluelock, storage performance remains an issue even after security, compliance and other architectural concerns have been
addressed.
SSDs promise significant performance advantages over hard-disk-drives, and SolidFire
is hoping that cloud providers will buy its appliances to address primary storage for performance-sensitive applications,
such as databases and e-mail programs, that those providers are designed to run.
But enterprise applications are just
the starting point for what Flash could mean for cloud computing. Not only could appliances like SolidFire’s boost the
overall performance of clouds by reducing the overhead associated with storing and delivering virtual machines,
but they also could power new services around analytics, high-performance computing and other data-intensive workloads. Any
application needing to read and serve lots of data with creating a bottleneck for today’s high-powered computing processors
could stand to benefit from SSDs.
SolidFire’s appliances are built entirely using SSDs and utilize SolidFire’s own compression, deduplication and thin-provisioning
software, part of its Element operating system. The result is a system that maximizes capacity utilization — the company
claims 85 percent utilization rates — in addition to inherently improving performance and using less energy.
Each appliance consists of 10 drives in a 1U form factor, storing approximately 12TB and delivering 50,000 IOPS. SolidFire
says they scale linearly to 100 nodes over a 10 Gigabit Ethernet backbone, delivering storage clusters capable of storing
approximately 1 petabyte and performance of 5 million IOPS.
As we’ll discuss at Structure 2011 this week, and as New Enterprise
Associates’ (a SolidFire investor) Peter Sonsini told me last week, new infrastructure-level innovations such as flash-based primary storage will power new types of cloud services
going forward.
However, for some time, at least, a big hurdle to their effectiveness will be slow upload speeds
that make migrating large amounts of data to the cloud a less-than-appealing proposition.
But more applications
are making their way to the clouds, and SSD storage will only boost that rate. Likewise, applications such as Facebook, Twitter
and Foursquare are already producing large volumes of useful, web-based data.
When all that data meets all those
SSDs, who knows what new capabilities will emerge.
With the maximum evolution of cloud computing in ten years, the question will not be whether or not we need local storage, but how much we need local storage, and speed that
he should have. Basically, it will be a war between HDs , SSD and the cloud.
The
local store will have a much less important in 2020 than it has today. Today we store the majority of our files on local hard
drives, and it is there that we install our applications. In ten years the importance of applications and storage in the cloud
will grow considerably. This factor alone will redefine the storage market for PCs more than any technological development.
The general users store multimedia files mainly video files in the spacious hard drives available today, as professionals (engineers and designers)
store large data files. The multimedia (audio and video) tends to increase more and more quality and space requirements for storage tend to grow together.
The files used by specialists require not only space but also security. Let's consider the two usage models.
Ten years ago, everybody was satisfied
with MP3s of 128 Kb / s DivX movies today, this level of quality is unacceptable. MP3s up to 384 Kb / s can now be played via the Internet, but the files using FLAC or other
lossless audio formats like him can not. It will take many years to make this possible.
The same goes for video.
The video in HD 720p can hardly be passed today. It is clear
that in 2020 you can pass directly through the Internet video in HD (50 GB per movie), but as the media is evolving rapidly and today we already have 3D stereo and video, is more
than possible that in a ten years the video files require more storage space. Thus, the physical media and hard drives will still be used by consumers. Still, the cloud storage
you need for sharing photos, videos and other data types that
want to share.
Files
stored locally enable professionals to have fast and
efficient access to them. 600 MB manipulate photos online is torture, even with high speed internet. It is clear that in 2020
we will need even more space.
Only locally store
sensitive corporate documents is not totally dependable, and makes little sense to keep all secret documents in the cloud.
Thus, confidential files and other files for small and medium will migrate from local storage devices to the cloud. The product information, most of them are in the cloud.
Without
the need to locally store documents, product information, corporate e-mail and other files, the demand for storage on corporate PCs will remain similar to what we have today, or have
an intangible growth. The big work stations will require large local storage systems, but most corporate PCs will not need local storage devices too large.
Many consumers will still need much local storage. To get the lowest possible cost per gigabyte, they
will continue to use hard drives, but many will adopt SSDs to get the best performance. Therefore, SSDs and HDDs should continue
co-existing systems use predominantly domestic. Almost
all consumers will use some sort of cloud storage to share or keep a file of various types of data.....
The professionals will also require local storage systems for large, and as the price per gigabyte of SSDs
will fall much in 2020, the local storage devices more popular among professionals will be SSDs. The hard drives will be used for archival purposes, and cloud storage will be
used for sharing...
Business users will need to store many of their data locally because of security requirements that make the most suitable storage in the cloud.
It is likely that all future business laptops come with SSDs, not hard
drives....
In certain situations, different needs will overlap, but there will be solutions to meet every kind of demand.
Although the prices of SSDs to come
down rapidly in recent years, the demands of the benefits offered by them only increase. We believe that the SSDs will be
used in 50% of PCs sold in 2020 (the emerging markets will continue to use hard drives for various reasons).
Perhaps
these SSDs are not used as primary storage for media, but they will be installed to provide better performance. The hard drives
will continue storing the vast majority of information, but will have to coexist
with flash storage. In fact, it is likely that hybrid storage devices, with media spin and enough space in flash, arise in
the coming years.
NEW
DEVELOPMENTS IN SSD AND THE CLOUD:
Intel Corporation has announced its latest solid-state
drive (SSD), the Intel Solid-State Drive 710 Series -- a purpose-built Multi-Level Cell (MLC) data center SSD and replacement
for the Intel X25-E Extreme SSD.
As
noted by Intel in its news release, while the Intel X25-E was based on more expensive but highly reliable Single-Level Cell
(SLC) NAND flash memory, the Intel SSD 710 uses compute-quality Intel 25-nanomenter (nm) MLC NAND flash memory with Intel
High Endurance Technology (HET) to deliver the endurance and performance necessary for data center, financial services, embedded,
Internet portal, search engine and other demanding storage and server applications, but at a greater value.
"The Intel SSD 710 delivers nearly
the same endurance as SLC-based NAND SSDs, yet utilizes the higher capacity and more cost-effective MLC NAND. It achieves
write endurance out-of-the-box of up to 1.1 Petabytes (PB) and comes in 100-Gigabyte (GB), 200GB and 300GB capacities. Targeted
for I/O-starved applications, the Intel SSD 710 achieves a 4K random write performance of up to 2,700 input/output operations
per second (IOPS) and 4K random read performance of up to 38,500 IOPS across the full span of the drive, making this a suitable
replacement to an SLC SSD or multiple enterprise-grade hard disk drives (HDD).
In addition to performance, the Intel SSD 710 can replace many power-consuming
HDDs with a single SSD to help reduce data center energy costs.
"The Intel SSD 710 also includes
increased reliability and security features. These include enhanced power-loss data protection to reduce potential data loss
during a power failure; added data security with surplus NAND flash memory to provide system protection should a NAND die
fail; Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with 128-bit pre-configured encryption technology to protect the data from an external
threat or internal system issues and Temperature Monitoring and Logging containing an internal temperature sensor that can
be monitored using two self-monitoring analysis and report technology (SMART) attributes to prevent downtime."
