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Post by Barry Harris with Bay City IT Group..... Intel Brings out new SSD for the data center...
Intel has announced a new SSD that it is aiming at the data center. The new SSD is designed to be reliable, fast, and power efficient. The new drive is called the 710 Series
and it uses 25nm MLC NAND flash memory and will be offered in three capacities. The SSD will come in 100GB, 200GB, and 300GB
capacities.
The special high Endurance Technology in the NAND chosen provides SLC endurance with the
value of MLC NAND inside the SSD. Intel says
that its SSD 710 series MLC NAND is almost on par with the MLC NAND but costs less. The write endurance for the SSD is almost
1.1 petabytes.
The SSD is for I/O starved applications and has a 4K random write performance of up to 2700 IOPS.
The
SSD is also designed with security features like enhanced dataloss protection and the SSD has surplus
NAND flash inside for system protection in case a NAND die fails. The SSD also has 128-bit AES encryption to protect the data.
Prices for the SSDs start at $649 for the 100GB SSD, the 200GB is $1,289, and the 300GB is $1,929 based on 100 unit quantities
It is undeniable
that solid state drives, or SSDs, have at long last arrived.
In short, an SSD is a nonvolatile
random access memory (NVRAM)
device with a conventional disk interface.
Contrary to popular belief, SSDs aren't new. The first SSD was created by StorageTek in
1978. Until 1995, most SSDs were actually PC-sized devices with row after row of RAM sticks, a big internal battery and a
SCSI interface.
These SSDs, now differentiated as "RAM disks" (not to be confused with RAM disks created
in main memory), were extremely fast but insanely expensive, and both memory and batteries were sources of frequent and costly
failures. I
n 1995, M-Systems introduced the first Flash-based SSD. Since then, Flash memory, thanks to high demand
from today's variety of personal gadgets, has only gotten better, faster and cheaper, and has increased in both reliability
and ca
Technically
there is very little to know about modern Flash SSDs before getting started, except that they come in two varieties: single-level
cell (SLC) and multi-level cell (MLC). SLC-based Flash is extremely fast but has lower capacity and is more expensive. MLC
is not as fast as SLC but has higher capacity and is less expensive.
When you buy an SSD, first determine which
type of device it is. Besides that, it will act like any hard drive. In the past there were concerns about Flash cells going
bad over time, which would eventually render the drive useless, but these problems have largely been overcome.
Because SSDs produce
no noise, offer fast access, use less power and are unaffected by vibration (see how vibration affects disk latency in the
YouTube video below), it is considered ideal for laptop use. W
ho wouldn't love faster wake-up times, more battery
life and drop survival?
But
how do SSDs fit into data centers?
Let's examine three methods in which SSDs are incorporated
into the data center.
SSD Method 1: Faster disk
In this scenario, SSDs are treated
as nothing more than really fast disks. You might replace15K RPM SAS drives with new SSDs in the same way that many replaced
10K RPM drives with 15K.
While you will indeed have a fast disk, the cost is very high and thus best reserved for
limited applications, such as databases.
SSD Method 2: Tier 1 disk
In this
scenario, a hierarchical storage manager (HSM) uses SSD for top-tier data,15K or 10K RPM for second-tier and 7,200 RPM disk for third.
HSM in
short, is software that controls the flow of data across multiple tiers, providing different speed and capacity trade-offs.
Tier 1 may consist of a couple hundred gigabytes of fast SSD, and tier 3 may consist of many 1TB 7,200 RPM drives. The software
"sloshes" data between the tiers based on frequency of use so that the data you most often require is always on
the fastest disk.
The primary advantage of HSM is that algorithms handle all the hard work of deciding what should be on which disks.
Historically,
HSM has primarily been used to utilize the high capacities of fast tape, such as LTO4, as the last data tier, however due
to the availability of low-cost 1TB drives this is becoming less common.
Examples of HSM software include CommVault DataMigrator,
VERITAS Enterprise Vault, Sun Microsystems SAMFS/QFS and Quantum StorNext.
SSD Method 3: Hybrid pool
Sun's FISHworks team created the most interesting
solution for putting SSD to work, known as the Hybrid Pool. Filesystems, which uses DRAM for caching (file system cache) and
disk for storage. One way to improve file system performance is simply to add more DRAM main memory. However, that is an expensive
option.
SSD is faster than hard drives but slower than DRAM, but it's also cheaper than DRAM and more expensive
than hard drives. Therefore, it logically falls directly between memory and disk, creating unique new possibilities.
Solaris ZFS was extended in two ways to capitalize
on this. First, a second-level caching capability was added to the file system cache (L2ARC). This means that rather than
flushing old data when you've filled up your file system cache, it can be relocated to SSD drives, extending the amount of
file system cache with a slower but much more affordable device.
Second, using fast SLC SSDs we can commit writes
faster than we can to hard drives, acting like traditional write-back caches.
Let me elaborate on this second point. The success of
most enterprise storage arrays has been due to their use of NVRAM to cache synchronous writes. These are writes that are flagged
(O_DSYNC) as needing to be immediately put on stable storage prior to acknowledgement.
This is why NFS performance
is often slow, and why solutions such as NetApp Filers all have NVRAMs onboard. ZFS can now use SSDs for this purpose rather
than expensive PCI board solutions, which are more expensive than SSDs and have much smaller capacities. For example, only
the very largest NetApp Filers have more than 1GB of NVRAM.
What the future of SSD holds
The hybrid method seems to be catching on quickly. Even NetApp introduced the Level 2 caching concept by the name "FlexCache."
The clear benefit of the hybrid concept is reduced administrative intervention. The file system generally knows what you need
and SSD can supply it the additional resources to meet demand.
Even so, for large databases where access needs to be
highly uniform regardless of usage patterns, building volumes directly on SSD may be the best way to go.......
Facebook’s appetite for solid state storage has made it the largest
customer for Fusion-io, which this week announced plans for an initial public offering. The social network
is using Fusion-io ‘s NAND Flash memory products in its new data centers in Oregon and North Carolina, and Facebook’s purchases as it equips those facilities have eclipsed
Fusion-io’s sales to its leading OEM partners, IBM and HP.
In an SEC filing associated with its IPO plans, Fusion-io said Facebook “accounted for a substantial portion of revenue” during the six months ended December 31.
”
We expect revenue from sales to Facebook and one other end-user to account for a substantial portion of revenue for the three
months ending March 31, 2011, but that revenue from sales to Facebook and the other end-user will decline significantly
for the three months ending June 30, 2011 as they complete their planned deployments. As a result, our quarterly revenue
and operating results are likely to fluctuate in the future and will be difficult to estimate,” the company said in
its filing.
Facebook’s use of solid-state drives align with the company’s relentless focus on performance and speed
in optimizing its data center infrastructure to support more than 600 million global users.
SSD Flash storage
offers performance gains compared to hard disk drives, and Fusion-io has been an innovation leader in the space, benefiting
from strong buzz from users.
Fusion’s software solutions are
built on the ioMemory Virtual Storage Layer (VSL), a new, flash-optimized OS subsystem that allows ioMemory to interact with
the CPU and system memory as a new tier of memory, and yet emulates a block-based storage device to applications......
