Storage

Flash=Compute Storage, stuff you are processing

Disk=Data Storage, stuff you have processed or might want to process soon

Tape=Data Hoard, stuff you can’t bare to get rid because you might need it but realistically, you only need <10% but you don't know which 10%.

IBM’s purchase of TMS was not the biggest surprise, especially for anyone who has been involved with IBM’s HPC team. It’s a good move for both companies and gives IBM a good solid flash-based storage team. It does add yet another storage array product to IBM’s ever growing portfolio and positioning outside of the HPC world is going to be fun; IBM have multiple competing arrays but arguably the TMS range does not overlap with any.

And so the move to flash continues or more likely a move to a 2-tier storage future; with active data sitting in a flash-tier and resting data sitting on a SATA/SAS bulk storage tier. But with all these competing products and different vendors, the storage management and implementation head-aches could be massive.

Now, we could move to hybrid arrays where both flash and traditional rotational storage live in the same array. The array itself can auto-tune what sits where, moving data according to temperature; we’ve seen this in the various auto-tiering technologies from EMC, IBM and HDS for example.

We could move to a world where the flash in an array simply works as an extended cache tier, augmenting the DRAM cache; speeding up reads, think NetApp’s approach.

Both of these implementations allow existing storage architectures to be enhanced with flash and hence both are pretty popular with the existing vendors and customers. Nothing much changes and things feel very much Business As Usual but faster.

Then there are the new players on the block with their flash-only arrays; architected to make the most out of flash. These tend to have really screaming performance but can you afford to replace all of your storage with flash technology? If you can’t, you need to think a lot harder about how best to utilise these; for example if the data you are storing has any form of longevity and needs to be kept, you will need to come up ways of moving this data between tiers of storage which almost certainly come from different vendors. Experience suggests that this sort of tiering is very hard to-do and applications need to be designed with this in mind.

And then there vendors who believe that you should implement flash as close to the server as possible. This is the approach of Fusion-IO and the like; in many ways this could be very attractive, certainly if you can use it as a cache-tier but if you have very large server farms, this could be expensive and yet again, you could run into design headaches where positioning workloads starts to get much harder. There are also potential issues with clustering, failure modes and the like. But it could allow you to leverage your existing storage estate and sweat the asset.

This introduction of a new tier of storage has re-opened the ILM/HSM box; the glue which moves data between different tiers of storage is going to be incredibly important and this more than the actual hardware could well define the future of flash in the Enterprise and beyond.

We are seeing a rapidly evolving hardware market but the technologies could manifestly increase the complexity of the storage environment. This might be good news for the storage administrators who look at the increasingly simplified administration tools that all of these arrays ship with but to enable the dynamic environments that Business requires, the integration layer is going to have to start appearing.

And as IBM’s acquisition of TMS shows, acquiring hardware platforms and expertise seems to be the current focus…even if every array you purchased was IBM branded, data movement between the arrays would be hard; start adding other vendors into the mix and your problems are going to be interesting.

A week or so ago, I spent an hour talking to Avere about their NAS products; this was not really long enough to do any kind of deep dive but what I heard, I liked. It could just be marketing fluff but what they are trying to do is clever and potentially very useful for a variety of reasons.

People love their NetApp filer, they just don’t like their next dozen. Filer proliferation and if I am being fair, it’s not just NetApp but all traditional NAS devices, is a major problem. Data mobility and name-space consolidation; making use of capacity that you’ve bought; these are all problems.

Avere hope to allow you to use all that capacity you’ve got in your filers and to allow you to easily move data in your filers around between them, from EMC to NetApp to white-box NFS to a Blue-Arc and perhaps into a Cloud service.

Firstly, they accelerate by putting a ‘Edge-filer’ in front of your traditional NAS; this could be filled with SSD or spinning rust. This provides a cache-tier which allows hot data to be stored on more performant ‘disk’; for their benchmarking, they use whitebox servers full of disk and front them with their devices. This demonstrates that they can take commodity disk and accelerate it into something gives the big-boys something to think about. This allows you get over some of the problems that the large SATA drive are causing with the rapid decline in I/O per terabyte.

Secondly, almost a side-effect of their Edge-filer; you get a more consolidated name-space; I hesitate to say Global Name Space…your core filers export their file-systems to Avere’s edge-filers which then export the file-systems to the wider-server infrastructure.

This allows NAS sprawl to be hidden from the users but it does obviously come with some limitations caused by the core-filer limitations; for example, if your core-filer only supports a 16Tb file-system, your export is going to be limited to that and you will need to monitor this carefully.

But where I really see a use for the Avere technology is in front of Scale-Out NAS devices allowing the efficient use of cheaper SATA technologies to provide capacity whilst preserving performance. So it is no surprise to me to that Avere are making some real in-roads into the worlds of media and rendering.

Avere are an interesting proposition and what I find especially interesting is that in many ways they don’t compete with NetApp, EMC et al but provide a complementary product which allows end-users to make better use of their investment.

Still, I suspect that the big-boys might not like this; they don’t really want you to be too efficient…