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Samsung’s Stellus Technologies emerges from stealth. Soon…

Samsung’s Stellus Technologies is preparing to step out of stealth. Its LinkedIn entry states: “We are officially one month away from unveiling our revolutionary Native File System for unstructured data to the world.”

We understand that to mean providing reliably consistent access latencies to enterprise unstructured data. But beyond that, little is known about its activities.

The company is running job ads for account executives in Media and Entertainment sectors and, secondly, the Life Sciences and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sectors. Both mention working with Stellus partners. The Media and Entertainment post requires “Experience selling enterprise storage unstructured (File) data.”

Set up in 2016, Stellus is headquartered in Silicon Valley and has a development facility in Pune, India. LinkedIn records 52 employees. We can deduce more details about the company’s technology from its job ads, in which it describes itself as a “stealth company focused on solid state storage system technology for next-generation software-defined datacenters”.

One job opening exists for a senior software engineer skilled in file systems and object storage. It mentions the implementation of highly scalable, high-performance, distributed system software. Another ad mentions building the next generation object storage system for data centres. A further opening is for a staff software engineer in the NVMe area. These job requirements typically also mention file access protocols such as NFS, SMB (CIFS), and also LDAP. 

The ads also mention experience working with open source server-side software such as ZeroMQ, RocksDB, Ceph, Elasticsearch, and Key/Value (KV) stores is highly desired. RocksDB is a key:value-based store. Keep this point in mind.

Guessing game

Samsung manufactures DRAM, NAND chips and SSDs. We don’t know if Stellus is developing intelligent NVMe SSDs that are file access, object storage drives or storage arrays using its SSDs, and providing file access to object storage; unstructured data.

In a sense, customers can use any enterprise hard disk drive or SSD for storing unstructured data. The drives are simply incorporated into file and object storage systems. Blocks & Files believes Samsung’s notion is to implement the file and object storage in the drive by adding a CPU + DRAM + software.

Seagate first tried this in 2014 with its so-called Kinetic disk drives – which failed to take off. Samsung is trying again with SSDs.

In September last year Samsung revealed a Key:Value store SSD development. This has an object-like storage scheme on the drive and the company showed a demo in action using RocksDB. Pair this point with the RocksDB and Key:Value items above and Blocks & Files is shooting for a KV SSD featuring file access to an underlying object store.

Seagate lights up gamer SSDs

Seagate has launched a brace of external SSDs for gamers at CES. The accent is on speed and lighting effects.

The FireCuda Gaming SSD is based on Seagate’s FireCuda 510 NVMe SSD, an internal M.2 format drive, and sacrifices much of its speed in the transformation to an external drive. The 510 speeds along at up to 3,450MB/sec while the FireCuda Gaming manages up to 2,000MB/sec across  its USB 3.2 Gen 2 x 2 interface.

If your host system has a USB 3.1 port the speed falls to a maximum of 1,250 MB/sec.

While you are waiting for the IO to complete you can customise the drive’s LED lighting. This can be synchronised with a FireCuda Gaming Dock, “creating an immersive setup.” 

Seagate’s second new gaming SSD, the BarraCuda Fast SSD, has a SATA connection that can manage up to 540MB/sec. This is pedestrian compared to the FireCuda but better than a disk drive. It has a green LED light effect.

Both drives come in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacity points and have a five-year (FireCuda) or three-year (BarraCuda) warranty. The 510 uses Toshiba 64-layer 3D NAND set up in TLC (3bits/cell) form. We think the Gaming SSD version uses the same NAND while the BarraCuda Fast SSD uses 96-layer NAND.

The FireCuda Gaming SSD retails for $189.99 (500GB), $259.99 (1TB), and $499.99 (2TB) and is available in March. The BarraCuda Fast SSD is out in February,and retails for $94.99 (500GB), $169.99 (1TB), and $299.99 (2TB). Slower speed gets you lower prices than the FireCuda Gaming SSD.

Let’s start the New Year storage round-up with NAND passing the 3-digit layer count

Best wishes for the New Year, storage people. Let’s kick it off with our first storage roundup in 2020.

Short items

Samsung suffered a power outage on New Year’s eve at a DRAM and NAND foundry in Hwaseong, South Korea. According to reports, the company has lost up to three days output although backup power supplies were switched on when the outage was detected. The outage, caused by an explosion at a nearby electricity sub-station, lasted a few seconds. But assessing the damage to in-production wafers and bringing production back online could take up to 72 hours. The total cost is expected to be a few million dollars.

The contract price of client SSDs fell for seven consecutive quarters to 2Q19 until it was barely above the price of HDD, according to the latest analysis by DRAMeXchange. As a result, the share of SSD in notebook computers has risen since 2Q19.

The overall demand for NAND flash in 1Q20 is projected to be strong despite seasonal headwinds. Digitimes expects NAND prices to rise up to 40 per cent this year.

100-layer flash mark passed. Korean flash foundry operator SK hynix will introduce 128-layer 3D NAND drives at CES. There are two; Gold P31 and “Platinum P31 SSDs, both using a PCIe NVMe interface. Blocks & Files expects 100+layer 3d NAND enterprise drives later in the year.

Quantum has cleared the decks with the SEC relating to Quantum’s historic accounting practices, internal controls and a results restatement. This related to revenue recognition for transactions between Q4, fiscal 2015, and Q2 fiscal 2018. The settlement includes a cease and desist order and payment of $1m as a civil penalty.

CEO Jamie Lerner issued a quote about the SEC order: “The civil penalty was fully accrued in our financial results, and we are actively advancing our long-term strategy and working expeditiously to re-list on a national exchange.”

Western Digital is sampling its 20TB DC H650 shingled magnetic recording and 18TB DC HC5500 conventional magnetic recording disk drives. Dropbox is one of the sampling customers. These are helium-filled drives and use aspects of WD’s Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) technology.

Quantum will demo storage gear for autonomous vehicle development at CES. It will showcase its R-Series removable, in-vehicle storage and workflow systems that enables high-speed data capture, fast upload, automated tiering for analysis, and shared storage for mobile environments.

Enmotus makes multi-tier SSDs and will show a multi-tier drive using penta-level flash (5bits/cell) and a Phison controller at CES in Las Vegas, January 7-10. It will include machine learning algorithms.

Dell puts RSA on the block

Dell Technologies has hired Morgan Stanley to sell its RSA security business, according to PE Hub.

RSA supplies software to detect cyber-security risks such as fraud and malware. The business has more than 30,000 customers across the globe, generates $170m – $200m EBITDA and could fetch as much as $3bn, according to some estimates. Bloomberg first reported Dell was looking to offload RSA in November.

Dell inherited RSA when it bought EMC for $67bn in 2016. EMC bought RSA for $2.1bn in 2006.

Secure storage

The storage-security combination looks to be synergistic but there are several examples of such synergies evaporating. For example, Symantec (security) bought Veritas (storage) in 2004 and then sold it again in 2015.

Barracuda Networks tried to combine storage and security services and was bought by Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm in 2018. Barracuda now focuses more on security. Acronis seems to be making a go of its data protection and security business and is included in Coldago’s Storage Unicorns’ club.

Dell is reshaping its assets and owns two other security software businesses, Secureworks and, indirectly, Carbon Black, acquired by its subsidiary VMware for $2.1bn in October 2019.

VMware last week completed the $2.7bn acquisition of Pivotal, the application development containerisation and Kubernetes business. The Pivotal history is messy. Pivotal Labs was acquired by EMC in 2012 and spun-out in 2013. The company went public in April 2018. 

Acronis and Qumulo join the storage unicorn herd

Research outfit Coldago has updated its Storage Unicorn list, adding data protector Acronis and scale-out filer Qumulo for the first time.

A storage unicorn is a startup or privately-owned business valued at $1bn or more by VC investors or Coldago. (The unicorn concept was coined by Aileen Lee, a venture capitalist, in a 2013 Techcrunch article.)

Coldago published the Storage Unicorn report in June 2019 naming ten startups listed. The new list, expanded to 12 companies, includes:

  • Acronis, founded in 2003 with $158m funding
  • Actifio, founded in 2009 and with $311.5m funding
  • Barracuda Networks, founded in 2003 and bought by Thoma Bravo for $1.6bn in 2017
  • Cohesity, founded in 2013 and $410m funding
  • DataDirect Networks, founded in 1998 and privately-owned
  • Druva, started in 2008 and funded to the tune of $328m,
  • Infinidat, founded in 2010 and $325m funding
  • Kaseya, started in 2000 with and $544.8m funding
  • Qumulo, founded in 2012 and more than $223m funding
  • Rubrik, founded in 2014 and more than $552m funding
  • Veeam Software, started in 2006 and more than $500m funding
  • Veritas Technologies, started in 1983 and bought by The Carlyle Group for $8bn in 2016.

We can segment this list by product characteristics, into block storage, file storage, data security, protection and management, and group the startups into these categories.

Only two hardware-based companies are in the list and there is a strong concentration in data protection and management. The colour bar on the chart spreads across the relevant categories where suppliers have products in more than one category. The colour is darkest in their main product category. Thus Infinidat is strongest in block storage and less strong in file storage. The reverse is true for DDN.

Coldago does not include the data warehouse and analytics side of storage, hence the non-appearance of Snowflake and Databricks in the list.

Coldago expects an Actifio IPO in coming quarters. Blocks & Files suggests Komprise, Portworx, WekaIO and VAST Data are candidates for unicorn status in 2020/2021.

NetApp tops IDC’s inaugural scale-out file storage Marketscape

NetApp has topped IDC’s new Marketscape, the Worldwide Scale-Out File-Based Storage 2019 Vendor Assessment. Dell EMC and IBM are also awarded leader status.

Qumulo is pleased with its ranking and has helpfully mailed out an extract of IDC’s inaugural report for this Marketscape category.

A cluster of major players trails the leaders’ group and there are no suppliers in the Contenders or Participants sections. Qumulo heads the major players’ pack. 

The IDC report says: “Qumulo’s partnership with HPE gives it a wide reach across several regions via channel partners and local sales teams. Qumulo is taking advantage of this partnership to increase its customer base.“

IDC has included just 11 vendors in this Marketscape. Several notable names fail to make the cut for the Scale-out File-based storage vendors, with HPE (StoreEasy and 3PAR File Persona) the biggest example. Infinidat, Nasuni and Panasas are also absentees. No cloud file service suppliers are included.

IDC’s inclusion criteria include a requirement for more than $10m revenue from the file product in 2018 or customer deployments of 600TB or greater in support of high-performance workloads in addition to traditional file-based workloads (such as home directories). 

Coldago comparison

Let’s compare this Marketscape with Coldago’s Research Map for File Storage, published last month.

The Coldago study encompasses many more file system suppliers and positions several differently from IDC. DDN and Qumulo are both in Coldago’s leaders’ section, for example, and there is only one Major Player (Coldago’s Challenger section) – Pure Storage, which is halfway to being a leader, vs IDC’s eight suppliers in this category.

We recommend prospective file software purchasers should examine IDC and Coldago reports in tandem if they are looking for analyst assessments of prospective suppliers and products.

Marketscape explainer: IDC’s Marketscape is a 2D square chart with two axes; Capabilities from low to high on the vertical axis and Strategies (low to high) on the horizontal axis. Suppliers are placed in sections called Leaders, with the highest ratings in capabilities and strategies, Major Players with the next-highest ratings, Contenders with the next highest, and Participants which has the lowest ratings. A supplier’s spot or bubble on the chart increases in size with their object-based revenue.

Coldago explainer: The Coldago map columns are labelled Leaders, Challengers, Specialists and Niche. They correspond well to the Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) categories: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players. The two axes are Execution and Capabilities on the vertical axis and Vision and Strategy on the horizontal one. They correspond well to the MQ axes; ability to execute and completeness of vision.

VMware to use MinIO object storage in Kubernetes embrace

VMware looks likely to provision storage to Kubernetes Pods using MinIO open source object storage, if its own slide is to be believed.

But first some background. VMware is embracing Kubernetes containers, an alternative, more granular form of server virtualization than its own vSphere virtual machines.

VMware is the dominant form of server virtualisation on-premises, and is also available in the cloud with, for example, VMware Cloud Foundation. But cloud-native workloads use containers, not virtual machines and that is a fundamental threat to VMware.

VMware’s Project Pacific strategy

When applications are containerised their code exists in many small pieces, called containers. These deliver micro-services to each other and have standard interfaces, permitting the code inside a container to change without prejudicing its interaction with other containers. When an application is run the component containers have to be loaded into a server’s memory in the right sequence. 

Orchestrator code has to be used for this and the Google-originated Kubernetes has become the most popular orchestrator. In its terminology the set of containers that make up an application is called a Pod and Kubernetes is used to provide storage to a Pod.

VMware is working on an internal Project Pacific development to add a Kubernetes control plane to vSphere. This will enable vSphere admins to manage containerised apps and it will embed Kubernetes concepts in vSphere so that VM-based apps are also orchestrated using Kubernetes.

A VMware blogger, Jared Rosoff, senior director, product management for workload management in vSphere, wrote in August: “The key insight we had at VMware was that Kubernetes could be much more than just a container platform, it could be the platform for ALL workloads.”

He added: “This brings the great Kubernetes developer experience to the rest of our datacenter. It means developers can get the benefits of Kubernetes not just for their cloud native applications, but for ALL of their applications. It makes it easy for them to deploy and manage modern applications that span multiple technology stacks.”

A developer interacts with Project Pacific as if it were Kubernetes. On the other hand a VMware admin sees Project Pacific as vSphere. It gives vSphere the ability to manage complete Kubernetes Pods as well as individual virtual machines that make up applications in existing vSphere environments.

MinIO’s role

A briefing slide showed MinIO’s positioning in VMware’s Kubernetes Pods: 

K8s (Kubernetes) Pods use Minio object storage

MinIO is used in this way, Minio CEO AB Periasamy said, because the software is S3-compliant, fast, widely used across enterprises, and also extensively used by containerised applications.

He said: “We are the native storage when it comes to Kubernetes for VMware. VMware is betting on Kubernetes.”

MinIO CEO AB Periasamy

There have been 288.8 million Docker pulls (downloads) of MinIO instances. Sixty two per cent of all MinIO instances are containerised with Docker, and 27 per cent of all MinIO instances are managed using Kubernetes, meaning 43 per cent of the containerised instances. MinIO is deployed in 84 Fortune 100 enterprises. Blocks & Files understands Apple also has a multi-PB instance of MinIO running.

As VMware users adopt Kubernetes Pods through vSphere, MinIO should be pulled along in its wake.

Hitachi Vantara tops IDC Object Storage Marketscape

NetApp and Cloudian were promoted, IBM demoted, Cohesity ejected and OpenIO brought indoors from the cold in IDC’s 2019 Object Marketscape report.

NetApp has published an extract that contains the 2019 Marketscape diagram and we can compare this to 2018. Here is the 2019 version:

Here is the 2018 diagram:

In the Leaders section, NetApp was promoted to second place with higher capabilities and lower strategies ratings than top-ranked Hitachi Vantara.

IBM fell back to fifth place in the Leaders ranks, behind Scality and Dell EMC. Dell EMC improved its capabilities but deteriorated a little in the strategies area.

Cloudian improved its strategies rating in the Major Players’ section, as did SwiftStack to a lesser degree. Caringo entered this section, improving on last year’s placement in the Contenders’ area.

Last year Cohesity was present in the Major Players area. This year it does not feature in MarketScape. We have asked Cohesity and IDC for clarification.

A Cohesity spokesperson said: “Based on our conversation with IDC, they changed the criteria this year to only include traditional Object Storage products that did just object storage natively and required a gateway to deliver any file services on top of it.

“[With] the Smart Files release a few months ago, Cohesity has a unique ability to natively deliver file and object not just on the same cluster but also on the same Bucket/Volume/View. IDC assumed that this didn’t meet their criteria for traditional object storage appliances and decided not to send the survey to us.”

OpenIO enters the Object Storage Marketscape for the first time, in the Contenders area.

MinIO, the supplier of the world’s fastest object storage system, is not placed in the chart. Earlier this month IDC published an Innovators report profiling three companies that offer open source object storage for high performance workloads. They are MinIO, OpenIO, and SoftIron. IDC noted: “MinIO has seen over 268 million docker pulls and over 480 contributors.”

IDC said suppliers had generate more than $10m object storage revenue for inclusion in the Marketscape report. So that probably ruled out MinIO.

But IDC adds: “If revenue requirements were not met, the participant must have proven customer deployments of 4PB or greater.” That would rule MinIO in. We have asked IDC why Minio is not present in the report.

Minio CEO AB Periasamy said in a tweet that MinIO would be positioned “Somewhere outside the chart at the bottom.” 

Marketscape explainer: IDC’s Marketscape is a 2D square chart with two axes; Capabilities from low to high on the vertical axis and Strategies (low to high) on the horizontal axis. Suppliers are placed in sections called Leaders, with the highest ratings in capabilities and strategies, Major Players with the next-highest ratings, Contenders with the next highest, and Participants which has the lowest ratings. A supplier’s spot or bubble on the chart increases in size with their object-based revenue.

WD: Storage class memory will not replace DRAM or NAND

In our recent interview with Siva Sivaram, the Western Digital’s president for technology and strategy discussed upcoming solid state storage technology. Let’s begin with his thoughts on storage-class memory.

Storage-class memory

Storage-class memory (SCM) is faster than NAND but slower than DRAM. It slots between the two in the memory-storage hierarchy and there are a number of candidate technologies vying to become the SCM leader; PCM, MRAM, FeRAM, STT-RAM and others.

Storage-class memory in the memory-storage hierarchy

Some analysts suggest storage-class memory (SCM) could ultimately replace NAND and – if fast enough – DRAM, to become a universal memory.

Sivaram doesn’t buy into this notion. No universal SCM technology will supplant NAND and DRAM, he argued. “The future for NAND is NAND. The future for DRAM is DRAM,” he said. “There is no general storage-class memory market.”

According to Sivaram, SCM is a collection of specialised niches, with “different types for different applications.” For instance, MRAM is suited to a certain niche market while FERAM is suited to another.

WD has looked at many different types of SCM technology over the years, such as PCM, MRAM and FeRAM. “We have done a lot of work on it. We hold the original patents on XPoint and 3D XPoint. We built 8-layer crosspoint in 2004 [and] we’re watching the area closely.”

To emphasis WD’s involvement with SCM, Sivaram said Western Digital even made $400m from shipping certain SCM products in 2004.

QLC flash adoption

Each flash technology level change goes undergoes improvements in performance, endurance and reliability (PER). At any layer count transition point, such as 64-layer to 96-layer, it is feasible to move to the extra bits/cell generation, for example, from MLC (2bits/cell) to TLC (3 bits/cell).

WD 64-layer 3D NAND chips

Sivaram said: “TLC gets better generation to generation. But this runs out. So QLC becomes more interesting.” For Western Digital, cost-benefit considerations about cell bit count increases are based on first deciding if PER improvements achieved from the extra layers are enough to meet market demand. If not, should WD also increase the cell bit count? This gives extra capacity but at the cost of lowering the PER value of the increased layer count.

Siva Sivaram, Western Digital

Controller advances and over-provisioning can mitigate the disadvantages of the cell bit count change.

That is happening now with QLC flash, Sivaram said. Enterprise SSDs using 3D NAND with 96 layers are best with TLC cells. But the next layer generation, known as 1xx – 100-plus layers – will likely be QLC flash.

Dummy layers

As an aside, Sivaram mentioned that 3D NAND has dummy layers with no bits in them – it is just a feature of the way 3D NAND is made. He said a strict layer count, including the dummy layers, would turn a 96-layer 3D NAND die into a 100+ layer one.  However, WD only counts layers with wordlines, meaning shippable bits in them, and ignores the dummy layers. 

The implication is that other manufacturers may not do this and one manufacturer’s 112 layers, for example may not be the same as another manufacturer’s 112 layers. This makes layer-count based comparisons between suppliers more difficult.

Penta-level cell flash

Penta-level cell flash (5bits/cell or PLC) means selecting one of 32 voltage levels in a cell. This takes longer than the 16 voltage levels of QLC flash and read performance is slower and longevity is worse than QLC flash.

Diminishing endurance as the cell bit count increases.

PLC delivers more capacity but raw PER values are all lower than QLC flash. Sivaram believes PLC adoption will take place in the next two to three years because of the diminishing returns from QLC generational advances. By then, “controllers will have machine learning algorithms” and will be better able to manage PLC flash’s limitations, he said.

The transition from QLC to PLC will follow the same pattern as the MLC-TLC and TLC-QLC transitions. It’s a feature of the industry, according to Sivaram.

N.B. Read our interview with Siva Sivaram, concerning enterprise disk drive technology, here.

Petabytes ahoy! SwiftStack leaves crowded cheap-and-deep object storage field

Object storage supplier SwiftStack has laid off an undisclosed number of employees and is steering from commodity object storage to high-performance, petabyte scale applications.

SwiftStack issued a statement yesterday, as reported by The Register: “Today at SwiftStack we reorganized our sales, partner, and marketing teams to focus on areas where we are experiencing success, and unfortunately, some valued members of the company were affected.

“With this change, our product and engineering team is boosted with additional resources that allow us to go after these new opportunities while continuing to support our existing customers as they evolve and become more data-driven. With this adjustment, SwiftStack is in a position for continued success and growth going into the new calendar year with our customers and partners.”

We asked SwiftStack about its new direction. Answers below.

Blocks & Files: It appears SwiftStack is withdrawing from areas where it is not having success. Which are they? 

SwiftStack: Selling object storage into centralized IT use cases has become very competitive over the last year. For uses such as object storage as-a-service, long-term backup repositories, tape replacement, and others, all of the tier-1 technology vendors now have object storage offerings and are competing aggressively in these solution areas that are commoditising rapidly. 

For SwiftStack to distinguish itself in a crowded field, we need to compete in areas where we have strong product differentiation.

Blocks & Files: SwiftStack appears to be re-orienting its product to successful areas? Which are they?

SwiftStack: While common uses of object storage are commoditising, over the past 18 months we have experienced customer success in areas such as deep learning (autonomous vehicle development), personalized medicine (genomics), telco/5G (edge computing), and analytics (esports, logistics). 

The use cases in these areas require unseen levels of performance at many petabytes scale, seamless management of data from edge to core to cloud, and a distinct partner ecosystem. These demanding applications and workflows are not going to be satisfied by object storage products designed for classic ‘active archive’ or ‘cheap and deep’ purposes.

Micron calls the bottom of the memory market

Micron thinks it has reached the bottom of the trough of over-supply affecting the industry and revenues will grow in coming quarters.

The memory and flash chip maker’s Q1 fy2020 earnings show a 35 per cent decline in revenue from last year’s $7.93bn to $5.14bn and a thumping 85 per cent fall in net income to $491m.

CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement: “With our strong execution and improving industry conditions, we are optimistic that Micron’s fiscal second quarter will be the cyclical bottom for our financial performance.”

In the 2016 trough Micron made losses. In the current trough it’s making profits.

Micron makes DRAM, flash chips and SSDs and is starting to supply its own 3D XPoint memory after decoupling from Intel. Its main markets are mobile telephony, data centres, PCs, graphics processing and the automotive industry.

Micron Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadana presenting on 3D XPoint at a Micron Insight event. Scroll forward to the 10 min 15 sec point in the video, and then the 18:28 point where he claims Micron’s XPoit SSD is nearly 3x faster than Intel’s Optane SSD.

DRAM comprised 67 per cent of total revenues in the quarter and NAND accounted for 28 per cent. Compute and Networking business unit revenues fell 45 per cent to $1.98bn. Mobile revenues fell 34 per cent to $1.46bn; storage decline 15 per cent to $968m and embedded systems shrank 21 per cent to $734m.

The current quarter’s revenues are expected to be $4.65bn at the mid-point and down 21 per cent from the $5.85bn recorded a year ago and less than the 35 per cent fall this quarter. This is Micron’s seasonally weakest quarter and market demand is rising due to 5G phones, autonomous systems, AI, and machine learning. 

In the earnings call Mehrotra said: “5G phones are driving a step-level function increase in the average content of both DRAM as well as NAND.” Micron is introducing its own deep learning accelerating hardware for AI to capitalise on that area’s increased demand.

Micron doesn’t see any macroeconomic environment or trade-related issues affecting its markets. Things are looking up as it anticipates making, shipping and selling more and smaller DRAM and NAND bits with better pricing.

Micron forecasts DRAM and NAND bit supply growth will lag behind demand growth and this should help pricing. The company has gained permission from the US government to qualify new products with Huawei, Micron’s biggest customer until the US Government imposed restrictions on US companies working with the Chinese giant. Micron does not anticipate significant revenues from Huawei for at least a couple of quarters.

Higher value and smaller cells

In response to the supply glut, Micron has changed its NAND product mix to include more high-value, high-margin products and so improve profitability. These are expected to grow from 50 per cent of NAND bits in fy2019 to over 66 per cent this fiscal year and up to 80 per cent in fy2021.  

The DRAM and NAND industries are on a permanent quest to build denser chips with smaller cells and, in the case of NAND, higher layer and bit counts. Micron is progressing through a DRAM node transition to smaller cells with 1Z production ramping up and it says cleanroom expansion in Taiwan is on track. The next, smaller still, 1 alpha, beta, and gamma nodes can be made with current advanced immersion and multi-patterning technology. The Taiwan cleanroom is EUV-capable – for if and when this more advanced and costly technology is needed. 

Micron is ramping production of 96-layer 3D NAND, using floating gate technology, and developing 128-layer chips with denser replacement gate (RG) technology. Gen 1 RG technology will start production in the second half of 2020, with slightly lower-cost chips. A gen 2 will appear in fy2021 bringing in more layers, more cost-reduction and a strong focus on QLC (4bits/cell) technology.

Inspur spurs storage to go faster and store more

Inspur, the Chinese computer systems maker, has announced a dozen storage products – eight updated AS5000 hybrid and all-flash unified block and file arrays, three distributed systems and a software-only system.

There are four AS5000 flash arrays – AS5300G5-F, AS5500G5-F, AS5600G5-F, and AS5800G5-F – plus four hybrid flash/disk arrays – AS5300G5, AS5500G5, AS5600G5, and the AS5800G5. They are positioned as mid-range arrays and succeed the AS5000 G2 line.

Blocks & Files thinks these systems will compete with Dell EMC Unity, NetApp FAS and AFF arrays as well as HPE Nimble and 3PAR arrays.

Li Hui, Inspur’s general manager of storage, issued a quote: “According to statistics, real-time data will account for 24.5 per cent of global data by 2023, which will bring great challenges to storage systems. In response to this trend, Inspur Storage has increased its investment and innovation in SSD media and high-speed interconnection technologies to improve the operating efficiency of major applications in data centres with high-performance, low-latency storage systems.”

All-flash systems

The G5 all-flash arrays support dual-port Optane SSDs as a caching layer. They deliver up to 8 million IOPS with latency down to 0.1ms.

The arrays have four storage tiers: boiling, hot, warm and cold. Metadata, classed as boiling, goes on the Optane SSDs.

Inspur said data hotspots are located and dealt with by using AI-based hotspot identification, sequence flow identification and a cold data elimination algorithm.

The current AS5000 G2s all support FC, FCoE, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, HTTP, and FTP but not NVME-oF. Their networking support is limited to 8 and 16Gbit/s FC, 10GbitE, and 1/10GbitE iSCSI. There is no 40 or 100GbitE support, nor 32Gbit/s FC. Hopefully the G5 products have uprated networking support

The systems are managed by a multi-device InView facility, which features predictive resource usage. Inspur positions this as an AIOps feature and claims 14-day accuracy of up to 95 per cent or better.

The current G2 range divides into two pairs. The AS5200 G2-F and AS5500 G2-F come in a 2U enclosure. The AS5600 G2-F and AS5800 G25-F use a 4U enclosure. Blocks & Files expects these enclosures to continue in use.

Distributed systems

Inspur has released three distributed systems: the P-series for high-performance, H-series for high density, and X-series for flexibility in cloud storage.

The P-series uses IBM’s POWER architecture CPUs with up to 3.GHz processors and the PCIe 4.0 bus. The performance of the P-series is described in Inspur’s announcement in an odd way: “2 times 4M sequential write performance, 1.5 times 4M sequential read performance, 3 times 4K random write performance, and 1.3 times 4K random read performance.”

Other suppliers release direct numbers, such as 12GB/sec for sequential reads. (We have asked Inspur for the direct numbers.)

Inspur says the H-series can store almost 1PB per AS13000G5-H node. The X-series is for storage in the cloud, with the AS13000-X able to handle multiple storage tiers, including an archival tier.

A software-only AS23000G5 supports single-port Optane SSDs.

Inspur Gartner status and questions

In its press announcement, Inspur mentions three large scale deployments in China and reveals Inspur ranked first in the Gartner 2019 global user ratings in distributed storage as well as among the top three in all indicators of Gartner’s 2019 distributed file storage critical capabilities’ report.

Inspur was placed in the niche player’s box in Gartner’s 2019 Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Magic Quadrant.

There are no data sheets or other document available about the new storage systems on Inspur’s website yet.

Blocks & Files has asked Inspur questions about networking support, data sheet availability and the P-series performance numbers. We’ll update our story as soon as we hear back.