Solid state performance without the cost?

By Ralph Jennings

A quarter of new laptops and half of new desktop PCs will adopt an emerging data storage method by 2016, pairing flash memory with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) for better overall performance, according to two storage experts. Flash paired with HDDs will also cost users less than rival solid state drives (SSDs), they said.

Although the quieter, faster, more shock-absorbent SSDs are replacing HDDs in new computers, their relatively high cost will keep HDDs in most PCs over the years ahead, said Tom Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates, and Jim Handy, an analyst with Objective Analysis.

The analysts predict 53 percent of PCs and 25 percent of laptops will have paired flash and HDDs by 2016.

NAND flash memory, the main storage chips inside iPhones, iPads and SSDs, can offer a welcome layer of caching and buffering between HDDs and higher performance DRAM memory, Coughlin and Handy explained in a report published by the Storage Networking Industry Association, a group of 400 member companies.

The use of flash will become more critical because of a growing “performance gap” between DRAM and rotating storage such as hard disk drives, they said. Extra caching would take pressure off the hard disk drive to provide temporary data storage. The pairing could also cut system power consumption.

“Rather than displacing HDDs, flash memory will allow customers to keep their low cost HDD storage while enjoying performance enhancements that approach those of a pure SSD-based computer,” the report said. “The required modicum of flash memory will be inexpensive enough to afford users these benefits without requiring a significant price premium.”

“Paired Storage,” a name given by the association to the flash chip/HDD scheme, is already being used in data centres and high performance computing operations.

and flash on the computer motherboard. Only Seagate makes hybrid hard disk drives now, but the analysts expect most HDD makers to follow soon.

They also predict the innovation will bring about a new kind of tablet, the hottest consumer product of the year. The new device, the “fat tablet” will combine flash memory with hard disk drives as today’s tablets lack power to give businesses and other users what they need, the analysts said. Forty percent of the total tablet market will be “fat” by 2016, the two experts forecast.

Flash technology for its part is improving. Earlier this month a flash working group announced a new interface specification that could accelerate data transfers from storage products such as SSDs.

New memory module is said to alleviate the need of a traditional backup power pack

By Lucas Mearian

Viking Technology have launched the ArxCis-NVTM DRAM memory module, which the company said can automatically detect I/O interrupts and back-up data to NAND flash prior to an outage.

The company’s next-generation ArxCis embedded memory module combines DRAM, NAND flash and super capacitor technologies.

When a power failure or I/O interrupt is detected, the DRAM automatically backs up up its data to the NAND flash memory, alleviating the need for external batteries in high availability enterprise server environments, the company said.

The DDR3 DRAM module comes in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB capacities.

The ArxCis module is aimed at several markets, including RAID storage appliances and a host of server based applications, such as RAID storage cache backup, OLTP database acceleration, enterprise cloud computing, virtualised server environments, and SAN I/O bottleneck management.

The ArxCis memory module includes integrated power management circuitry that charges the power pack directly via a dual in-line memory module (DIMM) interface. The module’s super-capacitor battery pack lasts up to seven years, according to Adrian Proctor, vice president of marketing at Viking.

Because it uses DRAM, the module has up to 12.6GB/sec throughput, while the NAND flash backup provides non-volatile memory.

“Storage has conspicuously lagged behind CPU and processor performance. We now have storage that can sit right next to the CPU and hum along at appropriate speeds,” Proctor said. “These new modules eliminate the need for battery backup units, and deliver a more stable, maintenance-free, and cost-effective solution than has historically been deployed.”

Proctor said traditional battery backup units are often not properly maintained, and their disposal is difficult because of toxic chemicals.

In the event of power failure, or a host trigger, the ArxCis memory module will automatically perform a save operation, transferring all DRAM data to its flash memory, he said.

A copy of all DRAM data (including error correction codes) resides within the integrated NAND flash. A data restore operation is triggered automatically when the host server or array is again powered on or it can be restored based on a host-initiated software command, Proctor said..

“The system is interfacing with the DRAM module. In the event of any failure, we have a place to back it up rather than the traditional method where systems hold up hole mother board and transfer data to a spinning drive or SSD,” Proctor said. Each memory module has about twice the NAND flash capacity as the DRAM.

The ArxCis module is 5.25in x 1.18in wide and about .30in thick.

Pricing for a low-end 2GB module starts in the $300 range, according to Proctor.

Company puts the focus on embedded management in its core corporate hardware along with a data warehouse appliance

By Shane Schick

Dell took shots at rival HP and made a further effort to reposition itself beyond its roots as a PC manufacturer with the release of its 12th generation blade, rack and tower PowerEdge servers along with native 10 Gigabit Ethernet support across its servers, storage and networking products.

The company gathered media, analysts and a few marquee customers here to discuss how it is building upon its traditional hardware stack either developing or acquiring software capabilities around cloud computing, workload management, system management appliances, element management, managed security and consulting.

Michael Dell noted that in the last two years, Dell has brought 12 companies, which has been a way to accelerate its evolution from a direct seller of desktops. This includes networking company Force10, Kace and, last week, backup and recovery firm AppAssure. In that time, Dell has more than doubled the size of the enterprise, services and data centre units, which now represents about half the company’s profits.

“We’ve been on a mission to transform our business and it’s absolutely working,” he said.

HP Proliant Gen8

Key features in Dell’s PowerEdge 12G servers include the second generation of the company’s embedded system management tools, which are designed to help IT departments more easily deploy, monitor and manage the lifecycle of enterprise infrastructure. Michael Dell mentioned “another company not far from here, with a few less letters in its name than we have,” which released its own server refresh recently. This was a reference to HP, which launched an updated HP Proliant x86 Gen8 server line that boasted significant automation.

“They talked about 150 so-called innovations. We were kind of looking over the list of so-called innovations, and some of them looked really familiar,” Dell said. “A huge number of those were already in our eleventh generation servers in 2009, and some were from a few generations before.”

While HP’s Proliant now have embedded lifecycle management, for example, Dell pointed out that his company has been doing this for three years inside PowerEdge. Three and a half million Dell servers delivered with this capability today, and the second generation will provide major advantages for customers, according to the CEO. “The pace of innovation is a little different for some companies than others,” he said.

HPC

Potential early adopters of the Dell PowerEdge 12G line include the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas in Austin. TAC’s big projects include Stampede, a 20 petaflop high-performance computing system it plans to launch within the next 11 months.

“We are evaluating and are very excited about the architectural improvements,” said Jay Boisseau, TAC’s director, estimating that the infrastructure could potentially offer two times the performance on TAC’s scientific applications. “That’s huge for us. For our researchers that means not only applications that run twice as fast, but being able to quickly solve problems that are twice as large.”

Other Dell PowerEdge 12G features include Dell Express Flash, a hot-swappable PCIe solid state disks that connect directly to the machine. This means a boost of more than 10 times more transactions across Microsoft SQL Server than HDD storage, according to Dell, and 28 times quicker queries on Oracle databases through the Dell CachCade data accelerator.

Big Data

Besides the hardware, Dell waded into the burgeoning market for “Big Data” products and services with the Dell QuickStart data warehouse appliance,aimed at mid-market customers which will work with the 12G PowerEdge servers and offer data integration through Dell Boomi.

Praveen Asthana, Dell’s vice-president of enterprise solutions and strategy, said customers will be able to start getting insight from QuickStart within 30 minutes of setup.

“Infrastructure is important, but you have to talk about applications. That’s what your customers are talking about all the time,” he said. “We have always been strong in file and print, HPC applications. But increasingly we are moving into higher-order, more mission-critical areas: database, BI.”

While Dell is working on several products that will work with Hadoop, not all Big Data projects will be based on a platform of that magnitude, Asthana said. “We don’t think about Big Data, we think about big insights. You can get a lot of insight for a small amount of data,” he said.

Other Dell products launched yesterday include EqualLogic PS6110 Series and PS4110 Series storage arrays and vStart, a set of pre-built infrastructure to help customers set up a private cloud environment.

New memory module is said to alleviate the need of a traditional backup power pack

By Lucas Mearian

Viking Technology have launched the ArxCis-NVTM DRAM memory module, which the company said can automatically detect I/O interrupts and back-up data to NAND flash prior to an outage.

The company’s next-generation ArxCis embedded memory module combines DRAM, NAND flash and super capacitor technologies.

When a power failure or I/O interrupt is detected, the DRAM automatically backs up up its data to the NAND flash memory, alleviating the need for external batteries in high availability enterprise server environments, the company said.

The DDR3 DRAM module comes in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB capacities.

The ArxCis module is aimed at several markets, including RAID storage appliances and a host of server based applications, such as RAID storage cache backup, OLTP database acceleration, enterprise cloud computing, virtualised server environments, and SAN I/O bottleneck management.

The ArxCis memory module includes integrated power management circuitry that charges the power pack directly via a dual in-line memory module (DIMM) interface. The module’s super-capacitor battery pack lasts up to seven years, according to Adrian Proctor, vice president of marketing at Viking.

Because it uses DRAM, the module has up to 12.6GB/sec throughput, while the NAND flash backup provides non-volatile memory.

“Storage has conspicuously lagged behind CPU and processor performance. We now have storage that can sit right next to the CPU and hum along at appropriate speeds,” Proctor said. “These new modules eliminate the need for battery backup units, and deliver a more stable, maintenance-free, and cost-effective solution than has historically been deployed.”

Proctor said traditional battery backup units are often not properly maintained, and their disposal is difficult because of toxic chemicals.

In the event of power failure, or a host trigger, the ArxCis memory module will automatically perform a save operation, transferring all DRAM data to its flash memory, he said.

A copy of all DRAM data (including error correction codes) resides within the integrated NAND flash. A data restore operation is triggered automatically when the host server or array is again powered on or it can be restored based on a host-initiated software command, Proctor said..

“The system is interfacing with the DRAM module. In the event of any failure, we have a place to back it up rather than the traditional method where systems hold up hole mother board and transfer data to a spinning drive or SSD,” Proctor said. Each memory module has about twice the NAND flash capacity as the DRAM.

The ArxCis module is 5.25in x 1.18in wide and about .30in thick.

Pricing for a low-end 2GB module starts in the $300 range, according to Proctor.

IBM exec wants to turn flash upside down, to extend the capacity of DRAM

By Stephen Lawson

Device and storage vendors are gradually embracing flash SSDs (solid-state disks) as a complement to spinning disk drives, but one executive at this week’s Flash Memory Summit sees great potential in turning flash “upside down,” as a lower tier of cache behind DRAM.

NAND flash allows faster reading and writing of data than HDDs (hard disk drives) because it has no moving parts, and it also consumes less energy than the spinning disks. However, it costs more per gigabyte than HDDs and isn’t always needed, so in enterprises, flash SSDs are being implemented typically alongside disks as a higher, faster tier of storage for frequently accessed information. Research company IDC expects enterprise SSD sales to grow by an average of 165 percent annually until 2013.

Another promising use of flash is to extend the effective capacity of DRAM, said Andy Walls, the technical lead for SSDs in IBM’s Systems and Technology division. This technique turns flash “upside down” because it treats the technology as the bottom tier of capacity beneath memory instead of the top tier of storage above disks, Walls said in a keynote address Tuesday.

There are key advantages to this type of implementation, especially cost savings. DRAM costs about 12 times as much per gigabyte as flash, and that gap is growing, according to analyst Jim Handy of Objective Analysis.

Extending DRAM with flash could be a boon to enterprises that run memory-intensive applications, including most applications that use Java, IBM’s Walls said. Java applications can quickly consume the available memory in a server, he said. Any task that requires a lot of DRAM, such as logging database changes, could benefit, he said.

One place where flash might be useful is with in-memory databases, such as those that use IBM’s SolidDB relational in-memory database software, which stores an entire database in DRAM for high performance, Walls said.

The biggest challenge to adopting flash in this role is the lack of software that knows how to treat flash as a secondary form of memory, Walls said. A confessed hardware guy, Walls said he’s not leaving it up to application and operating system developers to change their code.

“My experience is that software doesn’t change. For a long time, I suggested we change the name of software to ‘impossibleware,’” Walls joked. The capability to use flash as memory in most cases will have to come from middleware, hypervisors or firmware, he said. That work is likely to be done within the next two years, Walls said in an interview at the conference.

While Walls emphasised enterprise data centres for this use of flash, Handy of Objective Analysis said he expects to see it appear in client devices as well. The main barrier there has been that PC operating systems are designed to treat memory and storage as separate things, and where SSDs have been used in PCs, they have been grouped in with the hard drive as storage.

However, with the cost benefits of flash versus DRAM, SSDs are likely to begin taking on a memory role, Handy said. While many observers have been playing up flash as a faster alternative to spinning disks, eventually it will be a greater threat to DRAM, Handy said.