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Using QLC for cold storage is a fool’s errand

By
Hubbert Smith
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Editor’s Note: This blog by storage industry veteran Hubbert Smith begins with a brief history of SLC-MLC-TLC-QLC and then gives a forecast of what to expect from QLC. It pertains mostly to server/cloud SSDs.

History

SLC – single level cell. It stores a single bit and a cell uses 2 charge levels. A full charge of 1.8V is a one and zero charge is a zero.

MLC – multi level cell stores two bits. A cell uses several charge levels to store two bits; 1.8V, 1.2V, .6V, and 0V.

TLC – three level cell stores three bits. A cell uses even more charge levels to store three bits; 1.8V, 1.5V, 1.2V, 0.9V, 0.6V, 0.3V, 0V.

QLC – quad level cell stores four bits. A cell uses even more charge levels… you get the idea. Voltage charge deltas are even tighter and more error prone.

Let’s look at the capacity and the value of the NAND and SSD:

  • As compared to SLC; MLC doubles capacity, adds 100 per cent more bits per cell.
  • As compared to MLC; TLC adds 50 per cent more bits per cell.
  • As compared to TLC; QLC adds only 25 per cent more bits per cell.

Diminishing returns 

QLC is only 25 per cent better capacity than TLC, and with every generation the industry trades slower and slower performance with poorer write endurance. With just 25 per cent better capacity than TLC, QLC shows diminishing returns.

Additionally NAND is ugly and QLC NAND is a whole new level of ugly. Here’s why.

NAND cells are less than perfect. Firmware goes through all sorts of contortions to identify and correct media errors. As mentioned earlier, SSD data retention relies on the electrical charge of a cell and given enough time these electrical charges will evaporate. Recharging cells is one of the many maintenance tasks handled by firmware. When an SSD is plugged in, the firmware will refresh cell charges every 30 to 60 days. 

What happens when an SSD is without a power source to refresh cell charges? No power means no cell recharge. Sooner or later the electrons will drift away and the cell electrical charge will evaporate; data loss occurs.

QLC promise and reality

The promise of QLC is very different than the reality of QLC. There are systems vendors attempting to drive to lower cost/GB. In a system this is likely workable.

There are memory vendors attempting to use QLC for cold storage; these folks are naively over-selling QLC.

Humble advice 

  1. Stick to proven TLC. Let someone else save a nickel and learn hard lessons.
  2. Consider SLC for systems where the data sets are small but the over-writes are high. (Its endurance is far higher than that of MLC, TLC and QLC.)

Note: Consultant and patent holder Hubbert Smith (Linkedin) has held senior product and marketing roles with Toshiba Memory America, Samsung Semiconductor, NetApp, Western Digital and Intel. He is a published author and a past board member and workgroup chair of the Storage Networking Industry Association, and has had a significant role in changing the storage industry with data centre SSDs and Enterprise SATA disk drives.


Micron results suffers Huawei-sized hangover

By
Chris Mellor
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Micron’s fourth quarter revenues were affected by the US trade dispute with China – and Huawei in particular. Quarterly revenues fell 42 per cent to $4.87bn, down from $8.44bn a year ago. Net income declined from $4.33bn to $561m.

Its outlook for the next quarter is $5.1bn at the mid-point, which contrasts with $7.9bn reported a year ago. 

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said: “We are encouraged by signs of improving industry demand, but are mindful of continued near-term macroeconomic and trade uncertainties.” 

You can be certain of that, with President Trump’s trade dispute with China nowhere near resolution. The Trump administration has barred sales of American software and componentry to firms on the so-called Entity list without an export licence.

Micron stated fourth quarter sales to Huawei – its biggest customer – were lower than anticipated. According to IHS Markit Huawei bought $1.7bn worth of DRAM and $1.1bn worth of NAND in 2018 – not just from Micron.

Micron has applied for licenses with the U.S. Department of Commerce to sell more products to Huawei. But the company said if U.S restrictions against Huawei continue it could see a worsening decline in sales to Huawei in coming quarters.

Q3 and Q4 fy19 revenue bars show slump is bottoming out.

Full fiscal 2019 revenues fell 23 per cent to $23.4bn and net income fell 55 per cent to $6.31bn.

DRAM sales accounted for 63 per cent of overall revenues and were down 48 per cent on the year. NAND sales, 31 per cent of overall revenues, declined 32 per cent.

Free cashflows were $263m for the quarter and $4.08bn for the full year. Micron has $9.3bn in cash, marketable investments, and restricted cash. Making DRAM and NAND eats capital, and Micron expects capital expenditures in fiscal 2020 to be between $7bn and $8bn. 

Micron Technology President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said: “Micron delivered fourth quarter results ahead of expectations, capping a fiscal 2019 in which we executed well in a challenging environment, significantly improved our competitive position, and returned cash to shareholders through share repurchases.” 

Q4 revenues for Micron’s four business units were:

  • Compute and Networking – $1.9bn revenues – down 56 per cent
  • Mobile – $1.4bn – down 26 per cent
  • Storage -$848m – down 32 per cent
  • Embedded – $705m – down 24 per cent

The DRAM and NAND downturns are ending, according to Micron. DRAM demand has bounced back as issues affected the first half of 2019 dissipated, while NAND elasticity – i.e. lower prices – is driving robust demand. NAND bit shipments will be higher than DRAM bit ships in the next quarter.

Micron chalked up record revenue and unit shipments in consumer SSDs and said it is positioned to gain share in the NVMe SSD market in fiscal 2020. It saw quarterly rises in demand for cloud and enterprise data centre products.

The company said it was on track to ship its first 3D XPoint products by the end of calendar 2019. That will signal the end of Intel’s monopoly in selling XPoint products. 


Yellowbrick Data does that cloud warehousing thing

By
Chris Mellor
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Yellowbrick Data has introduced a public cloud version of its data warehouse, so customers no longer have to buy its custom scale-out analytics appliance.

The Cloud Data Warehouse is a SaaS offering that connects customers to a single Yellowbrick Cloud Data Warehouse via multiple public and private clouds. The service supports data warehouse volumes ranging from 10TB to several petabytes.

The Yellowbrick Cloud Data Warehouse has operated in enterprise production environments since early 2019. It now has the ability to replicate between the on-premises Yellowbrick Data Warehouse Appliance and the cloud, to support hybrid deployments on-premises with users in the cloud, and to move data to and from the cloud at will.

Cloud DR provides an up-to-date replica in the cloud of an on-premises or cloud data warehouse at a substantially lower cost than purchasing additional instances, according to Yellowbrick.

The Yellowbrick Cloud Data Warehouse is generally available with support for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Yellowbrick Cloud Disaster Recovery will be generally available later this year.

Blocks & Files has been told by Yellowbrick that the Cloud Data Warehouse runs on Yellowbrick hardware in a co-location site with very fast direct connections to the public cloud. This means that Yellowbrick’s custom high-speed hardware is running the software and not the public cloud provider’s hardware. That may happen in the future.

About Yellowbrick

Yellowbrick Data was founded in 2014 by Chief Revenue Officer Jim Dawson, a previous chief sales officer at all-flash pioneer Fusion-io, and CEO Neil Carson. Carson is also an Fusion-io alumnus, having been its CTO in what now seems like the distant past. 

CEO Neil Carson (left) and CRO Jim Dawson (right)

Its first data warehouse product, an integrated and scale-out analytics system, hit the market in September 2017. This all-flash system with custom hardware and software streamed data directly from the SSDs into the CPU’s cache.

The system used NVMe and bypassed main memory to get extra performance. This involved Yellowbrick writing its own operating system, schedulers, memory managers, device drivers and file systems. The claim was that users could get comparable performance to an in-memory database like  SAP HANA, but with less server infrastructure.

Yellowbrick has bagged $173m in three funding rounds between August 2018 and June 2019 This is dwarfed by rival Snowflake’s funding total – a massive $923m including $713.5m raised in two rounds in 2018.

Investors in both companies are no doubt attracted by the revenue potential for cloud data warehousing- projected by Allied Market Research projects to reach $34.7bn by 2025.

Intel Gen 2 Optane DC SSDs are at least 50 per cent faster and keep latency low

By
Chris Mellor
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Intel showed off some performance figures for upcoming Alder Stream second generation Optane SSDs today at its Seoul Memory and Storage Day The info is a little sparse and presented in slide format. But it shows that Alder Stream should deliver at least 50 per cent better performance than the first generation P4800X Optane SSD.

Alder Stream is Intel’s codename for gen 2 Optane SSD using Barlow Pass 3D XPoint media with four layers. Current gen 1 Optane has two layers and is used in the DC P4800X SSD. The Alder Stream successor is due in 2020 and could have up to double the capacity of the P4800X. It uses a second generation controller which will make performance faster.

Three slides in Seoul showed relative performance indications:

ADS is Intel shorthand for Alder Stream

The first slide charts read latency as a function of total IOPS. Latency increases as IOPS rises. The NAND P4610 has the highest latency and latency increase on the chart, finishing at around 380,000 IOPS. The first generation Optane P4800X performs better, recording lower latency and giving up at 500,000 IOPS.

Alder Stream (ADS on the slide) starts at the same latency level but keeps on going consistently, rising slowly to reach at least 700,000 IOPS, the limit of Intel’s chart.

The second slide charts Alder Stream’s Aerospike benchmark performance: 

The chart plots failure rate against device read latency and Alder Stream has the lowest failure rate compared to the 3D NAND P4610 and the Optane P4800X. The bar chart on the right shows maximum TPS (transactions per second) at less than five per cent failure rate.

The P4610 reached 300,000 TPS and the P4800X achieved 435,000 while Alder Stream soared to about 1.3m TPS.

The third slide examined the three drives on a Rocks DB test, looking at Gets/sec plotted against latency but with no actual numbers in the axes:

The hard-to-read slide above shows the P4610 curve on the left – the hard-to-see-number in the white circles are the number of threads. The P4800X is the middle line, riding steeply from 12 to 16 threads. Alder Stream is the lowest line and extends furthest to the right.

Intel said Alder Stream has three times the performance (Gets/sec) of the P4610 at the 16 thread count and four times lower latency. This misses the point somewhat. We are interested in how gen 2 Optane compares to gen 1 Optane, not how it compares to NAND.

How does Alder Stream compare to the P4800X? Based on the chart we think Alder Stream has 4.5 to five times lower latency at 16 threads than the P4800X.

Let’s award a nominal performance rating of 1 for the P4610. This makes Alder Stream a 3, and, by estimation the P4800X is 2. This gives Alder Stream a 50 per cent performance boost over the P4800X.

Overall, Alder Stream seems to have at least 50 per cent performance boost over the P4800X and slightly lower latency that is maintained over a wider workload range. Pair that with larger capacities and the gen 2 Optane SSDs will be big beasts indeed.

Hammerspace builds ransomware bunker in universal data services extension

By
Chris Mellor
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Hammerspace has introduced ransomware protection and other security services to its data-as-a-service platform.

The new features span hybrid and multi-cloud environments and are as follows:

  • Global undelete for files and snapshots that allows users to self-service data recovery
  • Automated data classification
  • Integration with customer-managed key management systems for multi-cloud security
  • Metadata harvesting integration with cloud analytics services to detect and tag files with content information

When files are deleted they are moved to the equivalent of a PC’s trashcan. They can be recovered – undeleted – using snapshot technology.

User-managed key management enables customers to put encrypted data in the public cloud, safe in the knowledge that it is secure against access, Hammerspace claims. Even if the cloud service provider suffers a breach, as AWS did in July this year with Capital One, the data is secure and the public cloud acts as a ransomware bunker, the company said.

Hammerspace provides a software control plane or gateway through a SaaS model, to access all of a company’s data, whether block, file or object, across all of its data centre sites and public cloud stores.

It is not a fan of NAS filers as an access path to files. CEO David Flynn told us in a briefing: “NAS as a delivery system for file is broken [because access and control are combined]. You have to be in the data path and that kills you.” Hammerspace separates control from the data path.

Hammerspace technology

According to Hammerspace, users and applications typically access data in specific silos in specific ways; data is stuck in place and format without dedicated tools to move and convert it. The control plane and data planes are co-located. Hammerspace Data Services technology separates the control and data planes. One generic storage and protocol-agnostic control plane can be used across all data stores, types and protocols, enabling data access planes to all of them.

Hammerspace Data Services diagram.

Hammerspace is developing a hybrid, multi-cloud environment covering on-premises bare metal, virtualized and containerised systems as well as AWS, Azure and GCP. Data lives in a universal namespace across all of these locations and can move between them.

Users and applications can access data anywhere within this namespace. Every data centre has a full copy of the metadata needed. The cloud-native Hammerspace Data Services software uses machine learning to optimise the system for performance and cost.  

Kubernetes orchestrates container micro-services for users who declare what they need. Hammerspace orchestrates data services for users in the same declarative way, Flynn said.

Hammering away at the file access problem

Hammerspace emerged from the ashes of a defunct company called Primary Data and came out of stealth in October 2018. Flynn previously founded or co-founded FusionIO, bought by SanDisk for $1.1bn,  and Primary Data. He told Blocks & Files ithat Hammerspace has done very well since its product was launched, earning “several millions of dollars in  revenue”.

He said customers have had bad experiences with failed cross-data centre file virtualization technology and need convincing that Hammerspace works in the area where previous companies crashed out.

“Other suppliers’ messages about hybrid cloud data management are just fluff,” he said, citing recent acquisitions by Google’s Cloud business and Commvault. “These other suppliers weren’t successful in the market,” according to Flynn, implying Hedvig (Commvault) and Elastifile (Google) are hybrid cloud data management duds.

Intel’s Gen 2 Optane bursts into life. Details are sketchy

By
Chris Mellor
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Intel’s second generation Optane storage-class memory is code-named Barlow Pass, and the company is developing 144-layer QLC (4bits/cell) NAND technology.

The chip giant is also opening a second Optane development line at its Rio Rancho, New Mexico facility, which will run gen 2 wafers through the first line.

At an Intel Memory and Storage Day briefing in Seoul today , Kristie Mann, head of product management for the Data Center Group, showed this slide;:

Mann’s slide shows there is a roadmap for generations 3 and 4 of Optane, with Sapphire Pass Xeons and then an un-named future Xeon after that.

The company will release Barlow Pass DIMMs in 2020, along with Cooper Lake (14nm) and Ice Lake (10nm) versions of the Xeon CPUs. Alder Stream gen 2 Optane SSDs are also coming.

A single-port gen 2 Optane enterprise drive is expected in 2020. A new controller will speeds things up even more.

Blocks & Files thinks Optane gen 2 will have 4 layers instead of the 2 in gen 1. We think DIMM gen 1 capacities of 128GB, 256GB and 512GB will double with gen 2 to 256GB, 512GB and 1TB.

Intel fellow Frank Hady confirmed this, and said gen 2 Optane has 4 layers, doubling the size of the die. In theory that means Intel could double the capacity of Optane drives and DIMMs.

More Barlow Pass details – capacity, endurance and performance – will come in a later article. Intel is in drip feed mode.

However the company revealed that Microsoft is updating its client OS to support Optane gen 2 features.

144-layer NAND

Intel will ship 96-layer QLC SSDs to customers next quarter. It will then move to 144-layer 3D NAND and will ship 144-layer SSDs in 2020. (This is likely to be a pair of 72-layer string stacks although we await confirmation)

VAST Data uses Optane and QLC flash. Expect VAST Data to use gen 2 Optane and the 96-layer and 144-layer QLC NAND drives. VAST’s Jeff Denworth, VP Product Management, said: “VAST is primed to go from today’s 64 layer QLC to whatever 3D NAND QLC offering Intel has in the future.”

Rob Crooke, GM for Intel’s Non-volatile Memory Solutions Group, said Intel is developing Optane persistent memory for PCs and notebooks that could remove the need for storage. Applications could be changed almost instantaneously by switching a pointer to Optane memory instead of loading the new app from storage.

Intel showcases the 665P – a faster, denser consumer-level QLC flash drive

By
Chris Mellor
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Intel has launched the 665P – a faster version of its 660p quad-level cell NAND flash drive.

Blocks & Files saw the drive today at an Intel Memory and Storage day in Seoul, Korea.

The 660P is an M.2 format drive with a PCIe 3.0 x4 and NVMe v1.3. interface. It supports 0.1 drive writes per day (DWPDF) and has a five-year warranty. The drive uses SLC write cache and has 256MB of DRAM on board. It has random read/write IOPS numbers of 220,000/220,000 and 1,800MB/sec sequential read and write bandwidth. Here is a picture: 

And here is the 665P, looking almost exactly the same; 

Intel showed a CrystalDiskMark v7 benchmark test comparison of 1TB versions of the 660P and 665P.

660P

665P 1TB

The summarised numbers are;

  • 660P sequential read/write – 1,229/1333 MB/sec
  • 665P sequential read/write – 1,817/1,888 MB/sec
  • 660P random read/write IOPS – 13,137/37,105
  • 665P random read/write IOPS – 17.279/47,608

The 660P uses 64-layer NAND while the 665P uses 96-layers. Dave Lundell, head of strategic planning and marketing for Intel’s Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, said the media is better and the ASIC and firmware on the drive are also improved.

The 665P will hit the streets in the fourth quarter. No pricing information is available yet.

Dell strengthens HCI lead, Nutanix sees Cisco in side mirrors

By
Chris Mellor
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Nutanix is a more distant number two to hyperconverged infrastructure leader Dell Technologies while Cisco has overtaken HPE to become the number three player. Cisco’s 46.8 per cent growth rate was almost twice the rest of the market.

This is according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker for the second 2019 quarter. IDC tracks three kinds of system; Certified reference systems and integrated infrastructure (sucha as Dell EMC VxBlock), integrated platforms (e.g. Oracle Exadata), and hyperconverged systems (e.g. Dell EMC VxRail).

The category revenue numbers for the quarter are:

  • CRS & IS – almost $1.5bn (10.5% y-o-y) – 37.5% of market
  • IP             – $626m (-14.4% y-o-y)   – 16% of market
  • HCI          – $1.8bn (23.7% y-o-y)     – 46.6% of market
  • TOTAL    – $3.82bn – we calculate this is 13.2% growth

HCI is the fastest-growing category, with CRS and IS growing strongly too.

HCI stats

IDC tracks suppliers in the HCI market by branded system and by software owner. This reveals the extent of VMware’s penetration as many HCI brands use VMware’s software.

The analyst publishes figures for the top three branded suppliers: 

IDC table. Blocks & Files highlighting.

As expected Dell is top of the table, Nutanix’s six per cent revenue fall reflects poor performance in the first half of 2019. But the main standout is that Cisco overtook HPE in the second quarter to take third place. HPE ranked third in the first 2019 quarter.

Cisco revenues were $114m in the second quarter and HPE’s were $83.5m in the first quarter. We can deduce HPE’s revenues did not grow to $114m in Q2. However, HPE reported 25 per cent SimpliVity HCI sales growth in the second 2019 quarter, slowing to four per cent in Q3.

Nutanix software strength

The HCI software owners’ table shows Nutanix has a far stronger claim to the number two spot than branded HCI sales on their own indicate:

IDC table. Blocks & Files highlighting.

Nutanix’s second spot comes from its 28.6 per cent revenue share. Its revenues grew 4.9 per cent, a long way behind top dog Dell’s 39.5 per cent and its 38 per cent market share.

This table reveals the real distance between Cisco and Nutanix. While Cisco’s 46.8 per cent growth rate is impressive, the company will have to grow at a lick for many more quarters to make an impact on Nutanix. Hurdlers don’t win marathons.

MemSQL joins cloud database gang

By
Chris Mellor
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MemSQL has released Helios, a cloud-native version of its eponymous in-memory database.

Helios provides access to MemSQL, running-in memory on AWS and the Google Cloud Platform. Azure support is on the way.

MemSQL is a distributed, in-memory relational database accessed through SQL. It is said to be much faster than other relational databases as it runs in memory,  avoiding time-sapping IO to local or networked storage.

MemSQL Co-CEO Nikita Shamgunov, sent out a quote: “With the majority of growth in the database market moving to the cloud, the time is right to release MemSQL Helios for enterprises looking for a viable alternative to legacy on-premises vendors like Oracle and SAP.”

Oracle has its own cloud version of its database and SAP’s in-memory database HANA is available in the cloud too. So MemSQL is following them…

Helios is freely available via MemSQL’s website for preview. Pricing for the on-demand service has not been revealed but expect it to be cheaper than running MemSQL on-premises in your own servers.

MemSQL Helios diasgram.

SingleStore

MemSQL yesterday also released a beta version of MemSQL 7. The updated database manages data in a new way, called SingleStore. According to the company this reduces the pain of choosing between a rowstore or a columnstore for workloads. A columnstore approach is read-optimised for large data sets but works less well with lots of individual record queries. Rowstores are optimised to read index data records but are slower at mass data reads.

The company said MemSQL 7 reduces the differences between the two approaches. It claims it is the fastest database in real-world conditions and offers the lowest cost for performance.

MemSQL has system of record features – it is the authoritative source for multiple sources of the same data held inside an enterprise. Accordingly, it offers incremental backup, and synchronous replication with little performance penalty to ensure data is secure and available.

MemSQL 7.0 beta is available for download now, and will be generally available in the cloud and for download later this year.

Data Domain joins Dell’s Power gang, debuts bigger faster backup arrays

By
Chris Mellor
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Dell EMC has changed the name of its Data Domain product line to PowerProtect, to coincide with the launch of bigger, faster systems.

Data Domain is Dell EMC’s deduplicating backup to disk array target and is the market leader in purpose-built backup arrays, according to IDC.

It has a back-end cloud storage facility with multiple public clouds and works with various backup software vendors to deduplicate backups before they are sent to the arrays. This accelerates data ingest speed.

Speeds and feeds

The old product line starts with the software-only DD Virtual Edition and includes various scale-up appliances from the mid-range DD3300 through DD6300, DD6800, and DD9300 to the top-end DD9800.

The DD6300 and DD6800 are replaced by the new DD6900, the DD9300 by the DD9400 and the DD9900 replaces the DD9800. That’s four products replaced by three.

The new systems are faster, using PowerEdge servers, and store more data in less rack space; they use 8TB disk drives instead of the 4TB ones mainly used before. They store metadata in SSDs.

PowerProtect enclosure and bezel

Why not use larger drives still as 14TB and 16TB ones are available? Beth Phalen, President, Dell EMC data protection division, told us that the 8TB drives provided the ideal mix of cost, reliability and performance.

Dell EMC said it has improved logical capacity by up to 30 per cent and data reduction by up to 65x. Backups are up to 38 per cent faster and restores up to 36 per cent quicker.

The product can provide instant access and instant restore of up to 60,000 IOPS for up to 64 virtual machines; it was 40,000 IOPS before. Phalen said this was achieved with the help of a larger cache and improvements to the file system inside the system’s software.

The new systems also support 25GbE and 100GbE network speeds. 

Here is a speeds and feeds table:

Logical capacity is based on deduplication effectively increasing the raw capacity. Active Tier is the main storage tier. It can be extended to locally-attached storage (Extended Retention) and to the public cloud (Cloud Tier.)

We have positioned the old and new model ranges, using usable capacity and ingress speed, in the chart below.

In addition, PowerProtect Software has stronger integration with vSphere, enabling self-service recovery. It supports cloud disaster recovery for automated disaster recovery fail-over and failback of VMware workloads in the public cloud. The software integrates with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery to protect against malware. This provides automated data recovery from a secure, isolated vault to ensue clean data. 

Phalen told us Dell EMC is now on a quarterly release cycle for software updates to the PowerProtect systems, and the company will release new features more quickly.

PowerProtect DD VE and DD3300 products are available now, as are the PowerProtect Software and Cyber Recovery. The DD6900, 9400 and 9900 are globally available from September 30. 

Dell EMC is standardising on PowerX branding across its product range; witness PowerMax arrays, PowerEdge servers, and PowerSwitch networking products. Now we have PowerProtect backup boxes and software.

Igneous builds cloud-native data protection service atop Amazon S3

By
Chris Mellor
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Igneous has built a software-only version of its DataProtect backup and archive, using Amazon’s four S3 stores as a file backup target. According to the company this removes the need for on-premises backup hardware and offline tape storage for archived data.

Announcing the data protection-as-a-service, Igneous yesterday described AWS Glacier Deep Archive as ‘an economic game-changer, allowing customers options never before considered – such as moving on-premises backup and restore services to public cloud”. 

The four AWS S3 targets are S3, Standard-IA. Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive. Igneous said these cloud targets are vastly more scalable than legacy or existing on-premises target stores.

The cloud is also cheaper, according to Igneous’s numbers for 1PB of capacity for five years:

On-premises appliance input costs:

  • Hardware (usable TB) – $!28 – $280
  • Data centre space (RU) – $210 – $275
  • Power and cooling – (TB/Y) – $5.36 – $7.92
  • Networking (per port) – $136 – $512
  • R and S time ($317/RU) – $317
  • Time to implementation – 4 weeks

The total is $178,469 to $354,492.

Backup to cloud input costs:

  • Cloud Object (usable TB/Yr) – $12.7 – $49.16
  • Request Costs – $0.10 – $0.50
  • Networking (per port) – $136 – $512
  • 10GbitE Direct Connect (Yr) – $19,710
  • Restore Cost (3%/TB/Yr) – $52 – $62
  • Time to implementation – 4 hours

The total is $77,303 to $260,910.

At the mid-points the on-premises appliance costs $266,481 compared to $169,107 for cloud backup..

The house that Igneous built

Igneous Inc. is a venture-backed startup. Based in Seattle, the company first came to market with an unstructured data management-as-a-service. Its software is cloud-native and can handle billions of files.

With its new DataProtect-as-a-Backup-Service Direct to AWS, on-premises primary file storage is backed up using Igneous agent software running in a virtual machine. The company has built the service using three home-grown technologies, DataDiscovery, DataProtect and DataFlow.

DataDiscover provides the file discovery and indexing service, building an indexing and metadata store in an Igneous cloud. Scans run up to 1.6 billion files per hour. Data Protect kicks off backups from on-premises targets and is policy-driven. Data transfers via DataFlow uses parallel ingest streams to speed things up.

DataDiscover has API access to popular NAS targets such as NetApp, Isilon, Qumulo and Pure Storage filers, which accelerates file discovery on these systems. The software handles petabytes of data in multiple locations, Igneous said.

DataFlow copies, moves and syncs files automatically, and this enables Igneous’s DPaaS to migrate files – for instance from site-to-site via replication or from site-to-cloud. If local storage is needed the target can be an on-premises version of S3.

DataDiscover GUI showing file systems’ capacity and files grouped by age.

Comment

Providing data protection as a service is the coming trend in backup. Many on-premises backup suppliers can send backups to the cloud – Veeam and Rubrik and Cohesity, for instance. Like Druva and Clumio, Igneous says its software is cloud-native and can therefore operate more efficiently. It also relieves customers of the need for an on-premises backup hardware appliance.

Cloud-native DPaaS providers will almost inevitably offer protection against cyber-threats and layer on data analytics and copy data management services on top. This is the new frontier for backup. 

Seagate: our disk drives are safe from SSDs for at least 15 years

By
Chris Mellor
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A Seagate analysts’ day last week showed the company thinks the $/TB cost advantage of disk over SSDs will last for 15 years.

As reported by Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers, Seagate said it can increase disk area density to maintain the $/TB cost differential with SSDs. The company is also introducing twin read/write heads, known as multi-actuator technology, to increase data IO speed.

Some technology analysts argue buyers will move from disk drives to SSDs when the $/TB cost of SSDs falls to five times or less that of disk. If disk drive makers can put more bits on a platter their $/TB cost goes down.

Seagate is introducing HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) to cram more bits on a disk’s surface, and anticipates 20 per cent compound annual growth in areal density out to 2034. At the analyst briefing it provided a chart that shows the growth out to 2026:

Accordingly, Seagate thinks it can match the reduction on $/TB of SSDs coming from QLC flash (4 bits/cell) and increased 3D NAND layer counts. The NAND industry is introducing 96-layer NAND and plans to move to 128-layers after that. It is also looking at PLC penta-level cell (5bits/cell) technology.

Seagate does not see the disk and enterprise SSD curves in the chart getting closer.

All of which means Seagate opposes the idea that SSDs will kill disk drives.

Hammering down on details

Seagate CTO Dr John Morris told analysts that Seagate has built 55,000 HAMR drives and aims to get disks ready for customer sampling by the end of 2020. Some customers are already testing early samples.

A few HAMR tech details emerged at the briefing. The drives use glass platters with Iron Platinum (FePt) media, the heads use a Near-Field Transducer design and the bits are oriented perpendicularly to the surface of the drive. The writing process completes in about two nanoseconds and involves heating the bit area using a laser and then cooling it (which is a passive part of the process).

Seagate’s disk drive roadmap sees nearline 7,200rpm 18TB conventional HAMR drives and 20TB shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HAMR drives ramping to mass production in the first half of 2020. These will be helium-filled and have 9 platters. Capacities will grow to 30TB+ in 2023 and 50TB+ in 2025.

OEMs are qualifying the multi-actuator heads which are shipping to customers now in 14TB and 16TB drives. The 14TB drive’s sequential bandwidth is up to 520MB/sec with twin heads.

Single head drives operate at up to 250MB/sec. SSDs operate up to 2.5GB/sec with four PCIe v3 lanes and well beyond that with more lanes. With PCIe 4.0 we can expect the SSD speed advantage over disk to increase.

Market size

In his presentation Seagate CEO Dave Mosley categorised IT history into four phases, with the number of connected devices increasing in each phase.

  • IT 1.0: Centralized architectural with mainframes in 1960-1980; ~10 million connected devices
  • IT 2.0: Distributed compute client-server phase 1980-2010; 2bn connected devices,
  • IT 3.0: Centralized phase 2005-2025; ~7bn connected devices; mobile-cloud
  • IT 4.0: Distributed edge compute 2020+; trend to 42 billion connected devices.

These connected devices will need storage. The total capacity needed in 2025 will be around 17 zettabytes – 17 million PB. Generally speaking, half of that data will be stored in the public cloud and half on-premises.

Mosley reckons the total addressable market for disk drives will grow from $21.8bn in 2019 to $24bn in 2025. Some 80 per cent of storage will be mass capacity, which is where nearline disk drives slot in.

Comment

Seagate’s management is betting the company’s future on disk drives, unlike its rival Toshiba and Western Digital which make SSDs too.

Seagate has no NAND chip-making interest and a small SSD selling business. Any migration away from disk drives will hit it severely.


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