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NetApp aims to make ONTAP Kubernetes-native

By
Chris Mellor
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The infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows hundreds of thousands of stars in the Milky Way galaxy

An internal effort to containerise NetApp’s ONTAP is leading to a cloud-native version of the operating system.

NetApp’s Project Astra is focused on developing application data lifecycle management for Kubernetes-orchestrated containerised applications that run on-premises and in the public clouds.

Eric Han
Eric Han

NetApp’s Project Astra lead Eric Han this week outlined progress to date via a blog post.

He said Astra’s early-access users had a common interest in wanting to run a full set of workloads in Kubernetes where the right storage is always selected, the performance is managed, application data is protected, and where the Kubernetes environment spanned on-premises and the public clouds.

The first stage of the early-access program involved Project Astra managing data for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters with storage from the Google Cloud Volumes Service. Astra looked at unified app-data management with backup and portability, and then added logging of storage and other events, with an intent to look at persistent workloads.

NetApp is now extending Astra to handle Kubernetes Custom Resources and Operators (operators are the interface code that automate Kubernetes operations). Custom Resources are extensions of Kubernetes’ API. Han said a firm lesson is that Astra needs to work with application ISVs who are writing extensions in the form of Operators.

He also writes: “We are working to accelerate our next release into Azure to support AKS and Kubernetes in AWS with EKS.”

Then he drops a quiet bombshell: “In AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, the Cloud Volume Service (CVS) provides storage to virtual machines. So, as part of that evolution, the Project Astra team has been redesigning the NetApp storage operating system, ONTAP, to be Kubernetes-native.”

Cloud (Kubernetes)-native ONTAP

A Kubernetes-native ONTAP is intended specifically to run in a Kubernetes-orchestrated environment – a strict subset of the cloud-native environment – and so is able to use all of Kubernetes’ features.

We note that Kubernetes-native ONTAP could in theory run on any Kubernetes cluster, whether on-premises or in the public clouds.

Han blogs: “This containerised ONTAP now powers some of the key regions in the public cloud, where customers see a VM volume that happens to be backed by a microservice architecture.”

He asserts: “Users really want a common set of tools that work for stateless and stateful applications, for built-in Kubernetes objects and extensions, and that run seamlessly in clouds and on-premises.”

We can expect a public preview of Project Astra in the next few weeks or months.

Comment

Much, maybe most, of NetApp’s business comes from selling its own hardware, running ONTAP software, being deployed on premises and paid for with perpetual licenses and support contracts. But by making ONTAP Kubernetes-native the lock-in to NetApp hardware is removed.

If the various ONTAP data services were also turned into Kubernetes-native software NetApp’s customers could in theory run their complete NetApp environments on commodity hardware and in the public clouds, presumably on a subscription basis. It’s the cloud way.

MinIO tilts at AWS with object storage subscription service

By
Chris Mellor
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Footsteps on beach

Cloud-native object storage supplier MinIO has launched a subscription service – like Amazon but for private clouds.

Jonathan Symonds

“The MinIO Subscription Network experience looks and feels like it would on the public cloud,” MiniIO CMO Jonathan Symonds said in a blog.

The commercial license brings enhanced support with direct-to-engineering support, one hour SLA, access to a ‘Panic Button’, performance and optimisation audits and diagnostic health assessments of customer deployments. 

Enrico Signoretti, senior data storage analyst at GigaOM, provided an announcement quote: “MinIO has already established the object storage standards for performance and Kubernetes. By adding the Subscription Network experience to their recent features they seek to compete directly with AWS and the other public cloud providers.”

Seagate CIO Ravi Naik also chipped in: “The MinIO team continues to raise the bar on engineering excellence and willingness to work alongside customers to solve any issues. The simplicity of Subscription Network pricing and ease of use gives CIOs cost predictability and Tier I support.” 

Details

The license provides capacity-based pricing and monthly billing, unlimited customer seats for support calls, unlimited issues, annual architecture and performance reviews, up to five-year support on a particular release, guaranteed SLAs and security advisory notices.

There are two pricing tiers – Standard and Enterprise, which customers select based upon their SLA and legal requirements. Standard Tier is priced at $.01 per GB per month and Enterprise Tier at $.02 per GB per month. Pricing is month to month.

Capacity minimums start at 25TB and 100TB respectively. There is also a price ceiling, with no charges above 10PB for Standard and 5PB for Enterprise.

MinIO said its new Panic Button brings to bear the company’s entire engineering organisation within minutes – 24/7/365. Standard customers get one per year. Enterprise customers get an unlimited number.

MinIO’s software is open source, using the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3 license. This requires that full source code is made available to any network user of the AGPL-licensed work. MinIO’s commercial license provides exceptions to this obligation, protecting its customers’ own code.

According to MinIO, enterprises require commercial licenses where AGPL v3 is present, but subscribers still enjoy the benefits associated with open source – namely freedom from lock-in and freedom to inspect the source.

Portworx rolls out container storage update, boasts of sales momentum

By
Chris Mellor
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Portworx, the container storage startup, has updated its software with more automation, backup and restore features, and performance improvements.

Portworx CTO and cofounder Gou Rao said in the launch announcement yesterday: “Enterprises fuelling their data transformation initiatives with Kubernetes cannot rely on traditional storage that fails to keep up with the scale and dynamism of Kubernetes environments, or cloud-native solutions that have yet to be proven at a global scale.”

Florian Buchmeier, DevOps engineer at Audi Business Innovation, provided a canned quote: “Portworx provides an enterprise-class alternative to the network-attached storage commonly available on the cloud but at one third the price and substantially higher performance.”

Portworx update

Portworx Enterprise 2.6 provides:

  • Node capacity rebalancing to avoid any one node getting over-burdened.
  • Portworx storage cluster continues to operate during temporary etcd outages – etcd is a key value store used as Kubernetes’ backing store for all cluster data.
  • Support for k3S Kubernetes edge application distribution with hundreds and thousands of endpoints.
  • Kubernetes application pods can now access proxy volumes – external data sources (e.g. NFS shares) from Portworx Volumes.

Portworx PX-Backup 1.1 adds the ability to selectively restore individual resource types from a backup instead of the entire application. It supports custom or generic Customer Resources Definitions, through which users add their own objects to the Kubernetes cluster and use them like native Kubernetes objects.

Application CPU, memory and storage qotas can be applied at the namespace level, ensuring restored applications are placed on clusters with sufficient resources. V1.1 enables admins to create policies to backup Kubernetes cluster namespaces or applications using wildcards for namespaces that get created later. Admins also get more metrics like number of protected namespaces, size of backups and alert status for backups and restores.

PX-Autopilot for Capacity Management 1.3 adds GKE pool management support, auto pool rebalance, and GitOps-based approval workflow. These help admins reduce cloud storage spend.

Portworx has also been certified for use with the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP).

Portworx Enterprise 2.6 will be generally available on August 24. PX-Autopilot 1.3 will be generally available on August 31. PX-Backup 1.1 is available in Tech Preview from today.

Money talk

Portworx claims revenues in its second 2020 quarter were a record, without specifying numbers, and followed on from its previous record-setting first quarter.

The company said it is winning some big-ticket orders, without specifying names. One customer is running Portworx software in a production environment with more than 1,500 nodes and 90 Kubernetes clusters. The company thinks this is unmatched in the industry.

Twenty-six customers have bought $250,000 or more worth of licenses. It completed a $1m-plus license sale in Q2 and two customers have bought $300,000-plus purchases to add backup and restore, disaster recovery, and Kubernetes-granular storage to their OpenShift environment. If Red Hat Open Shift customers are adding Portworx to their deployments a partnership would perhaps benefit both companies.

SK hynix touts its first NVMe consumer SSD: Good spec, good price

By
Chris Mellor
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SK hynix has entered the consumer NVMe SSD market with a gumstick format Gold P31 drive intended for designers, content creators and PC gamers.

The P31 looks to be a decently-priced, decently fast and decently long-lived drive. It is selling today on Amazon for $74.99 (500GB) and $134.99 (1TB) .

The P31 uses 128-layer 3D NAND, which makes its the first 100-plus layer consumer SSD. Its M.2 2280 card can hold 500GB or 1TB of flash and comes with a fast SLC cache to accelerate the slow TLC (3bits/cell) flash.

This is SK hynix’s second consumer SSD, following the 2.5-inch format S31 SATA-3 drive which launched last November. The S31 uses sk Hynix’s own 72-layer TLC 3D NAND and delivers 560/525 MB/sec sequential read/write bandwidth. It is sold in 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities.

The P31 rockets along at 3,500/3,200 MB/sec and up to 570,000/600,000 random read IOPS rating. The device slows down when the SLC cache is full; 500,000/370,000 random read/write IOPS.

Latency is 45us write, 90us read and endurance is 1.5 million hours before failure and 0.4 drive writes per day over the five-year warranty. That means 750TB written for the 1TB model.

How does it stack up against the competition? Intel’s 665P has 1TB and 2TB capacities and is slower: up to 250,000 random read/write IOPS and 2,000MB/sec sequential read/write bandwidth.

Micron’s 2210 has 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacity points, and is slower too: up to 265,000/320,000 random read/write IOPS and 2,200/1,800 MB/sec sequential read/write bandwidth. IT supports 60TBW at the 1TB capacity point, so sk Hynix is better on that count.

The Micron 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB 2300 drive is faster – up to 430,000/500,000 random read/write IOPS with its SLC cache, and 3,300/2,700 MB/sec sequential readwrite bandwidth. It has the same 600TBW rating at a 1TB capacity point as the 2210.

Fungible Inc: Our DPU composes much smaller data centre bills

By
Chris Mellor
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Fungible, a California composable systems startup, claims its technology will save $67 out of every $100 of data centre total cost of ownership on network, compute and storage resources.

The company this week launched its first product, a data processing unit (DPU) that functions as a super-smart network interface card. Its ambitions are sky-high, namely to front-end every system resource with its DPU microprocessors, offloading security and storage functions from server CPUs.

Pradeep Sindhu, Fungible CEO, issued a boilerplate launch announcement: “The Fungible DPU is purpose built to address two of the biggest challenges in scale-out data centres – inefficient data interchange between nodes and inefficient execution of data-centric computations. examples being the computations performed in the network, storage, security and virtualisation data-paths.”

“These inefficiencies cause over-provisioning and underutilisation of resources, resulting in data centres that are significantly more expensive to build and operate. Eliminating these inefficiencies will also accelerate the proliferation of modern applications, such as AI and analytics.”

“The Fungible DPU addresses critical network bottlenecks in large scale data centers,” said Yi Qun Cai, VP of cloud networking infrastructure at Alibaba. “Its TrueFabric technology enables disaggregation and pooling of all data centre resources, delivering outstanding performance and latency characteristics at scale.”

Third socket

The Fungible DPU acts as a data centre fabric control and data plane to make data centres more efficient by lowering resource wait times and composing server infrastructures dynamically. Fungible claims its DPU acts as the ‘third socket’ in data centres, complementing the CPU and GPU, and delivering unprecedented benefits in performance per unit power and space. There are also reliability and security gains, according to the company.

Fungible says its DPU reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) for network resources 4 x, compute 2x and storage up to 5x, for an overall cost reduction of 3x.

As a composable systems supplier, Fungible will compete with Liqid, HPE Synergy, Dell EMC’s MX7000, and DriveScale. As a DPU supplier it competes with Nebulon and Pensando. The compute-on-storage and composable systems suppliers say they are focusing on separate data centre market problems. Not so, says Fungible. The company argues that this is all one big data-centric compute problem – and that it has the answer.

The technology

Compute-centred data centre traffic operations.

According to Fungible, today’s data centres use server CPUs as traffic cops but they are bad at inter-node, data-centric communications.

The Fungible DPU acts as the data centre traffic cop and has a high-speed, low-latency network, which it calls TrueFabric, that interconnects the DPU nodes. 

This fabric can scale from one to 8,000 racks.

Fungible DPU-centred data centre traffic operations.

The Fungible DPU is a microprocessor, programmable in C, with a specially designed instruction set and architecture making it super-efficient at dealing with the context-switching involved in handling inter-node operations.

These will have data and metadata traveling between data centre server CPUs, FPGAs, GPUs, NICs and NVMe SSDs.

Fungible TrueFabric graphic.

The DPU microprocessor has a massively multi-threaded design with tightly-coupled accelerators, an on-chip fabric and huge bandwidth – 4 PCIe buses each with 16 lanes, and 10 x 100Gbit/s Ethernet ports. This performs three to 100 times faster than an X86 processor at the decision support TPC-H benchmarks, Fungible says

There are two versions of the DPU. The 800Gbit/s F1 is for front-ending high-performance applications such as a storage target, analytics, an AI server or security appliance. The lower bandwidth 200Gbit/s S1 is for more general use such as bare metal server virtualization, node security, storage initiator, local instance storage and network function virtualization (NFV).

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Both are customisable via C-programming and no change to application software is needed for DPU adoption. And both are available now to Fungible design partners wanting to build hyper-disaggregated systems.

UCSF ransomware attack: University had data protection but it wasn’t used on affected systems

By
Chris Mellor
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The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) paid $1.14m in bitcoin (116.4 bitcoin) to ransomware attackers in June to recover encrypted files, despite having at least one deal in place providing it with data protection. However, Blocks & Files understands the University did not apply the vendor’s product to the affected systems’ files.

UCSF changed its data protection from Commvault to Rubrik in August 2019, according to an announcement by Susanna Chau of its Data Centre Services unit. Part of the reason was improved security. Chau said at the time that Rubrik’s Atlas file system is immutable and not accessible over the network, preventing ransomware attacks from getting to it.

On June 1 ransomware attackers encrypted files within “a limited number of servers within the School of Medicine” IT environment. B&F understands the Rubrik solution was not in place on the servers in question at the time of the attack. It is not known if the university had other mitigation in place; if it did, this clearly failed.

UCSF was able to limit the NetWalker ransomware attack as it was occurring by quarantining the compromised servers, thus isolating them from the main network. At the time, the University described the criminal targeting of those specific systems as “opportunistic”.

Clearly, the School of Medicine data was important, and UCSF soon began negotiations with the criminals. After haggling them down from an initial $3m demand, the UCSF IT crew received a decryption key and recovered the files towards the end of June.

A June 26 UCSF statement said: “The data that was encrypted is important to some of the academic work we pursue as a university serving the public good. We, therefore, made the difficult decision to pay some portion of the ransom, approximately $1.14 million, to the individuals behind the malware attack in exchange for a tool to unlock the encrypted data and the return of the data they obtained.”

UCSF Parnassus Heights campus

By paying the ransom, UCSF confirmed that its data protection arrangements for these servers was inadequate. The encrypted file contents self evidently could not be restored from any backups, if they existed.

Neither UCSF nor Rubrik would provide official statements and we don’t know what, if any, data protection measures were in place for the affected servers.

Our understanding after talking to sources close to the situation is that the encrypted file systems were not protected by the Rubrik software. Meanwhile, UCSF appears to be a satisfied Rubrik customer and continues to use its technology.

UCSF is a research university exclusively focused on health and has schools dedicated to Medicine, Pharmacy, Dentistry and Nursing. The School of Medicine has 2,719 full-time faculty staff across seven sites in San Francisco and a branch in Fresno in the San Joaquin valley.

WD and Seagate in 18TB disk drive drag race

By
Chris Mellor
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Western Digital was late to market with 16TB Ultrastar nearline disk drives, gifting Seagate an opportunity for its 16TB Exos drives. The arch-rivals are now in a race to see who can ramp 18TB drive manufacturing faster and ship the most drives to customers this year.

Enterprise nearline drives with 10TB or more capacity are the biggest disk drive category by revenue. They are used by businesses to store the ever- growing volume of unstructured data from their operations.

In response to data volumes, Seagate, WD and their smaller rival Toshiba, are constantly developing higher capacity drives to retain and gain market share.

The nearline capacity sweet spot in mid-2018 was 14TB, as represented by the 14TB Seagate Exos and the 14TB WD Ultrastar.

Seagate’s 16TB market opportunity

In June 2019 Seagate announced it was shipping a 16TB Exos drive. And in November the company boasted of the fastest product ramp in its history for this type of drive.

WD announced the Ultrastar HC550 16TB and 18TB nearline drives in September 2019, using its ePMR technology, but units became generally available only last month – some 11 months after Seagate’s 16TB Exos. The delay meant WD lost significant shipment capacity market share.

In May 2020, WD’s first quarter 2020 results prompted Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers to suggest to CEO David Goeckler: “It looks like you definitely kind of underperformed some of your peers on nearline” – i.e., Seagate and Toshiba. Goeckler did not deny it.

This month, Rakers estimated Seagate shipped 79.5 EB of nearline capacity drives in the second 2020 calendar quarter, ahead of WD’s 76 EB, and maintaining its 16TB ship share advantage.

18TB race

in an effort to catch up, WD said this month it will boost 18TB drive production to one million units in the fourth 2020 quarter, amounting to 18EB of capacity.

But Seagate started shipping 18TB Exos drives to selected customers in June, with a manufacturing ramp beginning by year-end. It has not yet released any 18TB drive ship numbers, at time of writing.

A 20TB Seagate drive using its HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) should also start shipping before the end of the year. Blocks & Files expects WD to announce ship dates for its 20TB MAMR drive by then. The nearline capacity race goes on.

Western Digital’s ePMR is stopgap HDD technology

By
Chris Mellor
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Seagate began shipping 16TB Exos nearline drives in June last year, before Western Digital had even announced its own 16TB drive tech. It took another eleven months for WD to ship UltraStar HC550 16TB and 18TB drives. And the key to getting the drives out of the door was a hitherto unexplained technology called ePMR.

WD has now revealed some ePMR details in a short document, which was flagged up to us by analyst Tom Coughlin in a subscription mailing. We’ll explain why ePMR was necessary for WD and then take a closer look at the technology.

Today’s perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology is reaching the end of the technology road. Its ability to make bits smaller is compromised by bit value stability becoming unreliable as the areal density approaches 1TB/in².

For over a year WD has talked up its forthcoming microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) technology as a means to overcome this obstacle. MAMR uses microwaves to write data to a reformulated and more stable magnetic material that can pack smaller bits packed more closely. The technology provides a path to 40TB drives, according to WD.

However, WD did not use MAMR in the UtraStar HC550s, plumping instead for ePMR to increase the areal density of the drives. We infer that the company chose this stopgap because of MAMR issues, but we have no insider knowledge here.

Whatever the reason for implementation, ePMR enabled the 18TB UltraStar HC550 (1,022Gb/in²) to achieve 13 per cent areal density increase over WD’s 14TB HC530 drive (904GB/in²). WD is now in a race with Seagate to ramp up 18TB nearline disk drive production.

Bias current

This ePMR tech is briefly explained in a WD technical brief, Continuous Innovation for Highest Capacities and Lower TCO, which states the HC550 and HC650 “introduce the industry’s first Energy-Assisted Magnetic Recording (EAMR) technology.”

This is ePMR, which “applies an electrical current to the main pole of the write head throughout the write operation. This current generates an additional magnetic field which creates a preferred path for the magnetisation flip of media bits. This, in turn, produces a more consistent write signal, significantly reducing jitter.”

The need for such a bias current is that disk recording heads can provide an inconsistent magnetic field to bits because their write currents can be distorted – so-called “jitter”. This effect makes bit value signal recognition more difficult and worsens as bits decrease in size and are placed closer together. 

A WD chart shows the effect of the bias current being applied, with the write process becoming more consistent:

These HC550 and HC650 disk drives also use triple-hinged actuators to enable finer control of the read/write head’s placement on the disk platter.

Blocks & Files expects WD to announce full-scale MAMR drives with 20TB capacities and higher by the end of the year.

Your occasional storage digest with WekaIO, Scality and more

By
Chris Mellor
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This week’s storage news roundup features Weka going to Mars, Scality going to jail, and host of supporting stories.

WekaIO goes to Mars

NASA is using WekaIO to feed file data to four Nvidia GPUs for Mars lander descent simulations.

The lander arrives at Mars travelling at 12,000mph and slows its descent using retro-propulsion. This takes seven minutes from arrival to touch down. The Martian atmosphere is too thin for a parachute-slowed descent. NASA’s simulation examines how the rocket exhaust interacts with the Martian atmosphere in real time. 

The NASA Mars Lander simulation video

A NASA video tells us this involved 150TB of data and took a one week run on Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, with more than 27,000 Nvidia GPUs to produce the simulation dataset. This volumetric data contains about 1 billion data points, each with seven attributes.

The simulation can be played in realtime with help from WekaFS. The system stores the data set files on NVMe SSDs, with data fed in parallel at 160GB/sec to four GPUs via Nvidia’s GPU Direct, thus bypassing their host server CPU and DRAM. Without GPU Direct the bandwidth drops to just over 30GB/sec.

Scality goes to Irish jail

The Irish Prison Service (IPS) is using Scality RING storage to store videos from 5,000 video cameras spread across 12 jails and around 4,000 inmates. To conform with Irish data protection rules, the footage has to be stored for a minimum of four years and one day or until an incident is resolved.

Scality RING replaced an unnamed storage array which came under capacity pressure after the IPS installed new high-definition cameras, that generated larger video files.  Amazingly, footage from the traditional storage array had never been deleted,and the IPS lacked the visibility and a technical process for systematically deleting video. 

There are three suppliers involved in the IPS video surveillance IT system: HPE, CTERA and Scality. HPE provides local storage using CTERA running on HPE DL380 servers to capture video 24/7 at each prison facility (5TB/server). Long-term offsite storage is on HPE Apollo 4000 servers and Scality RING.

Two Scality RING object storage clouds, with replication between them, provide 300TB of storage that can scales to multiple petabytes, and supports automated and systematic deletion.

News shorts

Alluxio, an open source cloud data orchestration system developer, said it closed out 1H 2020 with sales growth of more than 650 per cent over 1H 2019. Recent notable additions include Alibaba, Aunalytics, Datasapiens, EA, Nielsen, Playtika, Roblox, Ryte, Tencent, VIPShop, Walmart, Walkme and WeRide.

The Fibre Channel Industry Association has published the FC-NVMe-2 standard. Enhancements include Sequence Level Error Recovery (SLER), which significantly increases the speed at which bit errors are detected and recovered during data transmission.

HYCU says it is the first Nutanix Strategic Technology Partner to have a data protection product that has been tested and supports Nutanix Clusters on AWS.

IDC market watchers have forecast the size of the on-premises enterprise installed storage base from 2020 to 2024 in a “Worldwide Enterprise Storage Systems Installed Base Forecast, 2020-2024” report. They have estimated the installed base by deployment location, product category and storage class. They discuss the market context and drivers, looking at all-flash arrays, HCI, and the effect of Covid-19.

InfiniteIO has released v2.5 of its file metadata acceleration software. This goes faster with enhanced memory, processor and 40GbitE network connectivity to reduce metadata latency from 77µs to as low as 40µs in a single node. The new release adds NAS migration via hybrid cloud tiering, data tiering, and enhanced analytics. 

N2SW’s v3.1 Backup & Recovery provides replication between AWS S3 buckets across regions and accounts, Amazon EBS snapshot copy to S3 for long-term archiving, custom tag integration; recovery drill scheduling and cross-region DR for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). 

Pivot3 says it is the first HCI vendor to be certified for the Bosch video management system (BVMS) from Bosch’s Building Technologies division.

Tableau customers can rapidly ingest data, enabling exploration, analysis, correlation and visualisation of significantly more data with more dimensions by using a SQream Connector. This is available in the Tableau Extension Gallery.

Storage array vendor StorOne has produced a white paper advising storage admins and CIOs on how to cope with the next pandemic.

The ICM Brain and Spine Institute has selected Western Digital’s OpenFlex open composable infrastructure, with F3100 NVME drives, to speed up work on cures and treatments.


Intel Alder Stream Optane SSDs deliver ‘multiple millions of IOPS’

By
Chris Mellor
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Intel has teased out some more details for the upcoming Barlow Pass PMEM 200 Optane DIMMs and Alder Stream Optane SSDs. These are the second generation versions of the company’s 3D Xpoint memory products.

The company also showed a slide at the Intel Architecture Day 2020 PowerPoint fest yesterday which showed third and fourth gen Optane are in the works.

Alder Stream

Alder Stream is the first Optane SSD to use four-layer 3D XPoint technology and will use PCIe 4.0. This combo will deliver “multiple millions of IOPS” – i.e. much faster performance than the gen 1 DC P4800X SSD which uses PCIe 3.0. The four-layer scheme increases bandwidth via parallelisation opportunities for the Optane controller, with the PCIe 4 bus providing an access pipe that is twice as fast as today’s PCIe 3.

Intel presented this Alder Stream performance chart at IAD 20.

The gen 1 P4800X Optane SSD, with its dual ports, (blue line in chart above) is faster than the P4610 NAND SSD (green dashes). Alder Stream (orange dots) has a 10 microsec latency and delivers upwards of 800,000 mixed read/write IOPS. Intel showed a similar chart at a September 2019 event in Seoul, which showed Alder Stream surpassing 700,000 IOPS. It now goes faster.

Barlow Pass

Barlow Pass is about 25 per cent faster in memory bandwidth than the gen 1 Optane DC Persistent DIMM and will come in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. The 256GB Barlow Pass PMEM 200 series DIMM has a 497PBW rating while the gen 1 256GB capacity DIMM has a 360PBW rating. Both generations provide up to 4.5TB of memory per socket.

Optane roadmap

A slide at IAD 20 shows the Optane roadmap stretches to four generations.

That’s interesting as far as it goes but the company is not saying anything yet about the technology underlying gen 3 and gen 4 Optane. Gen 2 Optane doubles the 2-layer gen 1 technology to 4 layers (or ‘decks’ in Intel terminology).  A continuation of this doubling trend would mean gen 3 has 8 layers and gen 4 will have 16 layers.

However a caveat is necessary as neither Intel nor XPoint manufacturer Micron have said that gen 3 will be a double decker compared to gen 2 or that gen 4 will double-deck gen 3. Layer count increases for 3D NAND have generally followed a 32 – 48 – 64 – 96 layer scheme rather than doubling and XPoint could grow by simply adding an extra 2 decks each generation. Analysts are wary of predicting XPoint layer count progress as neither Micron nor Intel provide any hints.

Intel has not confirmed availability dates for Barlow Pass or Alder Stream, though both are expected this year.

Liqid diet boosts Dell MX7000 composable system

By
Chris Mellor
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Dell is adding GPUs, FPGAs and NVMe storage to the MX7000 composable system via a deal with Liqid. This makes the MX7000 systems better suited for data-intensive applications such as AI, machine learning and low-latency analytics.

Dell indirectly announced the hookup with Liqid, a software-defined composable infrastructure vendor, via a reference architecture document published on August 7.

We think all composable systems suppliers will need to support NVMe fabrics and PCIe, in order to bring Nvidia’s GPU Direct into their systems.

NVMe is on its way to becoming the dominant composable systems fabric and SSD storage access protocol, in Ethernet and PCIe fabric incarnations. Today, most composable systems suppliers favour Ethernet as their control plane fabric. However, Nvidia GPU Direct bypasses the CPU to load data direct from NVMe storage into the GPUs across a PCIe bus.

MX7000

Composable systems dynamically build servers from pools of disaggregated compute, storage and networking elements using control plane software, with some having dedicated chassis to house the components. When the composed server is no longer needed its components are returned to the resource pools for re-use. 

The MX7000 organises component resources across an Ethernet fabric and via Fibre Channel, but GPUs typically need a PCIe bus connection with NVMe to get data to the GPUs.

Dell has worked with Liqid to add a PCIe expansion chassis to its MX7000 and this houses up to 20 full height, full length GPUs or devices such as FPGAs and NVMe storage.

PCIe gen 3 4-lane adapters link the MX7000 compute sled to the Liqid PCIe expansion chassis. The Dell document states: “Once PCIe devices are connected to the MX7000, Liqid Command Center software enables the dynamic allocation of GPUs to MX compute sleds at the bare metal (GPU hot- plug supported). Any amount of resources can be added to the compute sleds, via Liqid Command Center (GUI) or RESTful API, in any ratio to meet the end user workload requirement.”

Dell MX7000 and Liqid PCIe expansion chassis

The MX7000 is managed by Dell’s OpenManage Enterprise Modular Edition (OME-M) software, which means there are two control planes.

Composable systems and NVMe

HPE Synergy is probably the most well-known composable system. The ProLiant servers used in Synergy can support direct-attached NVMe SSDs. However, the Synergy storage modules use SAS connectors, not NVMe, with SAS and SATA HDDs and SSDs supported.

Liqid has a partnership with Western Digital, which has its own OpenFlex composable systems line using chassis filled with disk drives or NVMe SSDs. Liqid can harness OpenFlex NVMe resources in systems it composes.

DriveScale, another composable systems supplier, uses Ethernet NVMe-over Fabrics via RoCE, TCP or iSCSI.

Fungible is set to join the composable systems supplier ranks later this year.

WD F3200 flash device is ‘open, fast, composable’

By
Chris Mellor
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Western Digital has announced the F3200, the latest iteration of its flash fabric shared storage system for composable systems. Key takeaways? The NVMe-oF device is faster than its predecessors, there are software improvements and capacities stay the same. Also it’s not cheap.

The F3200 tucks into WD’s OpenFlex composable systems storage and is “open, fast and composable,” according to the company blog announcing the product. OpenFlex disaggregates server CPUs, memory and storage. It has an openly available API and is supported by DriveScale and Silk (rebranded Kaminario.) Its architecture allows for disaggregating GPUs and FPGAs.

The F3200 looks the same as the F3100.

F3000, F3100 and F3200

Two years ago WD introduced OpenFlex F3000, a ruler format flash drive using 64-layer 3D NAND, with 61TB capacity, NVMe-oF RoCE connectivity, and housed in an E3000 Fabric enclosure which could take ten F3000s. 

The F3100 launched in August 2019 and used 96-layer 3D NAND in a ruler format and 61.4TB capacity. It had up to 11.7GB/sec bandwidth; more or less the same as the F3000’s 12GB/sec, and delivered up to 2.1m IOPS with a latency of less than 48μs.

Now WD has announced the F3200, with the same 61.4TB maximum capacity and faster write performance; up to 48 per cent random and 22 per cent sequential write speed gain. There is up to 4 per cent mixed read and write performance increase.

WD says latency is under 40μs 99.99 per cent of the time but a speeds table puts a different slant on this:

This shows the 61.4TB model has 47.2μs 99.99 per cent ransom write latency while the 51.2TB variant has a 46.7μs number. Only the lower capacity models slip under the 40μs figure.

The F3200 has 2 x 50GbitE ports and is available in 15.3, 30.7 and 61.4TB capacity points. The endurance is 0.8 drive writes per day, but can be increased to 2 DWPD by formatting capacity down to 12.8TB, 25.6TB or 51.2TB, respectively.

New software includes VLAN tagging, secure erase, expanded NVMe namespace and non-disruptive firmware updates. The F3200 also incorporates Open Composable APIs to enable filterable email alerts and telemetry data.

A 25.6TB F31200 costs $19,721.04 at NCDS, a Canadian retailer, while the 12.8TB model is priced at $13,829.71.The 61.4TB model will set you back $31,988.64.

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