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Liqid unleashes the Honey Badger PCIe 4 SSD. It’s fast.Very fast

By
Chris Mellor
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Liqid has added the LQD4500, its first PCIe 4.0 SSD to its composable systems line-up. This is possibly the world’s fastest SSD. Internally, Liqid calls the thing ‘Honey Badger’ – which we associate with crazy-aggressive, rather than super fast. But hey ho.

Liqid’s composable system uses NVMe-over Fabrics to connect pools of compute, FPGA, GPU and storage resources, from which dynamically configured servers are created to run applications. Resources are returned to the pools when the application completes.

The Liqid SSD range consists of:

  • LQD3000 – NAND – AIC format with PCIe gen 3 x 8, 16TB, 1.25m IOPS and 7GB/sec
  • LQD3250 – NAND – U.2 format with PCIe gen 3 x 4, 8TB, 850K IOPS and 3.6GB/sec
  • LQD3900 – Optane – AIC format with PCIe gen 3 x 8, 1.5TB, 1.6m IOPS, >7GB/sec
  • LQD4500 – NAND – AIC format with PCIe gen 4 x 16, to 32TB, 4m IOPS, 24GB/sec

The LQD4500 is Liqid’s first SSD to use PCIe gen 4 only, and it concatenates 16 lanes to achieve its IOPS and GB/sec performance numbers. It uses TLC (3bits/cell) NAND.

LQD4500

The Optane LQD3900’s latency is 10μs for reads and writes while the LQD4500 boasts 20μs read and  80μs write. That’s not too shabby at all for for reading.

We can envisage Liqid introducing a PCIe gen 4 version of the LQD3900 Optane card. If that had 16 lanes too we might be looking at something that could deliver 8m IOPS and 30GB/sec, possibly more.

Check out an LQD4500 spec sheet. Liqid does not reveal the available capacities below the LQD4500’s 32TB maximum in this document. The Honey Badger is available from Liqid now.

It’s a Hard Drive gonna fail: HDD failure rates revealed

By
Chris Mellor
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Cloud storage service supplier Backblaze has revealed the annualised failure rates for its installed hard disk drives and Seagate is the worst performing manufacturer.

The percentage failure rates are revealed in a Backblaze blog and presented in a table:

The drives are listed in descending order of capacity. Blocks & Files wondered how the manufacturers would be graded if we re-ordered the table entries by Annualised Failure Rate per cent and charted them.

The results starkly illustrate that Toshiba drives are excellent, with its 14TB and 4TB drives experiencing zero failures. Western Digital’s HGST has four of the next five positions, and a 10TB Seagate drive pops up at number 5.

But then it’s wall-to-wall Seagate with positions 9 to 13.

We averaged the AFR percentages per supplier as a crude way of highlighting the differences between them;

  • Toshiba – 0.00%
  • HGST – 0.62%
  • Seagate – 1.71%

All the numbers are low because in general hard disk drives fail infrequently. But Seagate drives have an AFR that is 2.76 times worse than that of HGST, while both are put to shame by Toshiba’s zero AFR.

Now read our article ‘Why hard drives fail’.

Quantum emerges from accounting hell

By
Chris Mellor
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Quantum has finally filed corrected financial statements along with its latest quarterly results, and is set to focus on the video and image storage market.

This has cost $33m and taken more than 18 months but the work is now done and the financial restatements filed. They show a business in decline as its attempts to grow the business in the face of declining tape system-related revenues, such as DXi deduplication, failed.

The troubled tape systems and file management supplier experienced financial mis-management from 2015 to 2017, caused by premature revenue recognition.

Once discovered this led to being booted off the New York Stock Exchange and a board-level accounting examination to recalculate the wrong results and file corrected ones with the SEC.

Latest and restated results

Revenues in its first fiscal 2020 quarter, ended June 20, were $105.6m,  down 1.75 per cent annually, with a loss of $3.8m, better than the $7.5m recorded  a year ago.

Signs of progress included;

  • After excluding non-recurring charges, adjusted net income was $4.4m compared to $2.3m a year ago,
  • Total operating expenses in the quarter were $43.1m, compared to $50.7m a year ago,
  • SG&A expenses declined 11 per cent to $34.4m compared to $38.5m in the year-ago quarter,
  • R&D expenses were $8.4m, up one per cent compared to $8.3m a year ago.

Gross margins were flat year over year despite lower royalty revenue in the first fiscal quarter of 2020 that was negatively impacted by LTO media supply issues. This was resolved in early August and the tape market should return to growth, Quantum said.

Quantum filed amended results for its 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 fiscal years. It said the revenue restatement re-casted the timing of revenue, not the quality or accuracy of the revenue itself. 

We can now see how the business has performed historically. Our chart showing revenues and profits since fiscal 2005:

Clearly it is a business in decline. Why should the declining stop? 

Chairman and CEO Jamie Lerner said in a canned quote; “Today, Quantum is a leaner, more efficient company poised for growth based on a series of transformative steps we have taken.”

That means new execs, eliminated expenses and participation in growing markets.

New management

Almost three quarters of the senior management prior to January 2018 has been replaced. Quantum said it has adopted new business priorities, standards and governance practices focused on product innovation and profitable sales.

Costs have been cut, as Quantum has chopped nine facilities and offices worldwide, and eliminated $60m in annualised operating expenses that included a reduction of about 30 per cent of its employees.

Looking for a revenue upturn

Lerner said: “With the restatement behind us, we are focused on growing our business profitably and creating sustainable value for our shareholders.” Quantum wants to get its shares re-listed on a national stock exchange hopes to accomplish that by the end of 2019.

It aims to grow revenues based on its lower expense base, a stronger tape market, and the growing video and image market.

The product line that has growth potential is its StorNext file lifecycle management system which has been successful in the entertainment and media industries with an integrated set of fast file, long-term object, cloud and tape storage capabilities integrated with application workflows.

Quantum thinks t80 per cent of the world’s data by 2025 will be video or video-like data, across industries – and not just in the entertainment and media world. It is specifically looking at the high-speed processing of video and long-term archiving of video and unstructured data.

The company forecasts revenues between $99m and $105m next quarter (Q2 fy20). That’s $102m at the mid-point which will almost exactly equal the $101.98m reported last year. It hopes for six to 10 per cent revenue growth for the remaining three quarters of its fiscal 2020, compared to the prior year.

That, and getting relisted, would be a good result.

LucidLink gains Cloudian back end

By
Chris Mellor
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LucidLink, has combined its technology with Cloudian to provide a high performance object storage system for enterprises.

Customers can replace all but the most demanding HPC workloads in their existing NAS environment with a LucidLink-Cloudian system, the vendors said.

They say on-premises NAS systems can be limited in scale and are costly to buy and operate. Customers can swap this for the more cost-effective and scalable LucidLink Cloudian combination.

LucidLink Filespaces accelerates file access from public clouds to remotely stored files by managing file metadata and using file streaming. The software is layered above Amazon S3 object storage, which can be stored in a cloud service or on-premises.

Step forward Cloudian, with its S3-compatible HyperStore object storage software.

Cloudian’s HyperStore product would be the S3-compliant object store in this LucidLink diagram.

Out with the NAS

The two suppliers say data stored in the HyperStore platform is instantly available to any device that has a LucidLink client installed.

Users and applications use a LucidLink mount point to connect to the HyperStore’s global namespace and refer to it as a local, shared volume.

LucidLink also has a partnership with Scality, another object storage supplier.

800-layer 3D NAND? It can be yours in 2030, SK hynix says

By
Chris Mellor
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Western Digital and SK hynix both talked about 128-layer 3D NAND at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara this week, with SK hynix outlining a roadmap to 800+ layers in 2030.

The increase in 3D NAND layers is leading to huge capacity increases at the die level and consequent developments of zoning technology. Zoning will help manage SSDs made with such flash to extend its life. Specifically it can reduce the setting aside of spare cells to replace worn-out ones; over-provisioning.

SK hynix

The Korean NAND fabber has already announced work on 128-layer (128L) flash. It calls this technology version 6 of its 4D NAND but all other manufacturers refer to this as 3D NAND.

NAND product using SK hynix’ 1Tbit 128-layer die.

At FMS 2019 SK hynix revealed its layer count roadmap:

  • V4 – 72 layers – mass production now
  • V5 – 96 layers – mass production now and taking over from V4
  • V6 – 128 layers – mass production starts in Q4 2019
  • V7 – 176 layers in 2020
  • V? – 500 layers in 2025 and 30 per cent increase in TB/wafer
  • V? – 800+ layers in 2030 and 50 per cent increase in TB/wafer to 150-200TB

The 128L die is 1Tbit in size. Adding more layers on their own could mean:

  • 176 layers – 1.38 Tbit die
  • 500 layers – 3.9 Tbit die
  • 800 layers – 6.25 Tbit die

These are huge numbers. A 15TB SSD made using SK hynix’s 128L 1Tbit die could become a 93.75TB drive using 800L technology.

In common with Western Digital, SK hynix is keen on zoning SSDs – partitioning them into different zones for different purposes.. The company thinks zoning will enable 67 per cent reduction in write-amplification, 25 per cent improvement in read latency,  and 86 per cent reduction in NAND over-provisioning in SSDs. 

Western Digital

Western Digital is shipping 64-layer flash product today, using the so-called BiCS3 process, and bringing on 96-layer (BiCS4.) Production of 96-layer NAND is expected to surpass 64-layer volumes this quarter.

BiCS5 will introduce 128 layers, referred to as 1XXL. This is slated for debut in 2020.

According to Western Digital, the transition from 64L to 96L entails a 60 per cent increase in manufacturing capital costs. The 96L to 1XXL transition could need additional 15 per cent more capital expense. 

In its FMS presentation Western Digital illustrated the manufacturing difficulties involved in transitions to more layers.

The table above show the 128-layer die is denser on all counts. There are two ways of making a 128-layer die. One is to add 32 more layers to the existing 96-layer die. The other, known as string-stacking, is to stack two 64-layer dies one above the other and interconnect them. WD did not talk about string-stacking in its presentation.

Putting more bits on a wafer lowers the cost per bit but the wafer can then be more expensive to make.

the manufacturer’s overall cost/bit goes down as long as the manufacturing cost increase is less than the cost decrease from adding more layers. That can facilitate a price drop.

An SSD using 128-layer 3D NAND nominally has one-third more capacity than a 96-layer SSD, as each die could hold a third more bits. A 3TB SSD, made with 96L 3D NAND could become a 4TB SSD with 128 layers.

But the manufacturer could, instead of increasing capacity, offer SSDs with 128 layers at the same capacity as 96L product, and price it at a lower cost/bit.

Comment

Blocks & Files believes all the NAND manufacturers have roadmaps out to 200+ layers and beyond. But they are not publicising them – except for SK Hynix.  SK hynix wants to be taken more seriously as a client and enterprise SSD manufacturer.

Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers notes the company held a three per cent and 10 per cent share of enterprise and client SSD capacity shipped over the year to March 2019, rising from the <1 per cent and seven per cent in the previous year. Publishing a long-term technology road map could help convince OEMs and enterprises that SK hynix is a serious, long-term player.

Acknowledgement

Aaron Rakers mailed clients about these presentations at FMS 2019 and we have extracted the layer count and zoning information from his newsletter.

WD and Tosh talk up penta-level cell flash

By
Chris Mellor
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The Flash Memory Summit lived up to its major flash technology revelation status with news of penta-level cell flash.

Toshiba Memory and Western Digital operate a NAND fabrication joint-venture. In presentations at FMS in Santa Clara yesterday, the companies talked about PLC NAND in the context of responding to general data growth by increasing flash storage capacity.

Penta-level cell or PLC flash has five bit levels per cell. The continues the progression from SLC (1 bit/cell), MLC (2 bits/cell), TLC (3 bits/cell) and today’s developing QLC (4 bits/cell).

PLC details

The number of bits stored in a cell depends upon the number of voltage levels, and thus the binary values it can have:

  • SLC = 0 or 1 – meaning two states and one threshold voltage,
  • MLC = 00, 10, 01, or 11 – four states and so three threshold voltages,
  • TLC = 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111 – eight states and thus seven threshold voltages,
  • QLC = 0000, 0001, 0010, 0011, 0100, 0101, 0110, 0111, 1000, 1001, 1010, 1011, 1100, 1101, 1110, 1111 – 16 states and so 15 threshold voltages,
  • PLC = 00000, 00001, 00010, 00011, 00100, 00101, 00110, 00111, 01000, 01001, 01010, 01011, 01100, 01101, 01110, 01111, 10000, 10001, 10010, 10011, 10100, 10101, 10110, 10111, 11000, 11001, 11010, 11011, 11100, 11101, 11110, 11111 – 32 states and so 31 threshold voltages.

A PLC cell has 25 per cent more capacity than a QLC cell. Therefore a 256GB QLC SSD will become a 320GB PLC SSD when organised into penta-level cells. The flash manufacturer gets that extra capacity from a flash wafer without much increase in manufacturing expense and the cost per bit goes down.

This short life

However, the endurance (read/write cycles) and speed of PLC NAND will be less than that of QLC flash, which is less than that of TLC flash and so on. Endurance also reduce as the cell process size decreases. Simply put, the number of electrons available in a cell to indicate a voltage level diminishes as the process size shrinks.

Here is a table of representative raw endurance numbers for flash with different cell levels and different process sizes:

These are example numbers, dating from before the 3D NAND era, and different manufacturer’s NAND products will vary. We have estimated the PLC column numbers as none have been released by the manufacturers.

Charting this provides an instant view of how short-lived the working life of PLC flash can be in terms of write cycles;

The short cycle life of PLC flash will limit its applicability.

SSD suppliers can mitigate this short life by reducing the number of writes needed during storage operations and by supplying extra cells to replace worn-out ones; over-provisioning. They did this with TLC flash and are doing the same with QLC flash.

Western Digital is also introducing zoning, with different zones used to store data of different kinds, such as unchanging data.

Low-cycle flash can also be used for read-centric applications such as archiving where data, once written, is not changed.

If PLC flash proves practicable then cost/bit should be closer to disk drive storage than QLC flash. Also read latency should be much less than that of disk drives, making it more attractive where archive data needs to be accessed quickly.

According to Aaron Rakers, a senior Wells Fargo analyst, Toshiba is looking at Charge Trap and Floating Gate technology for its PLC NAND. It wants to understand which one offers the best cost structure. 

With manufacturers openly discussing PLC technology for the first time we might see initial product in 2021/2022 – if the manufacturing and development issues are straightforward.

Nvidia GPUs gain direct access to NVMe storage

By
Chris Mellor
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Nvidia has crafted a direct link between its GPUs and NVMe-connected storage to speed data transfer and processing.

Until now a GPU was fed with data by the host server’s CPU, which fetched it from its local or remote storage devices. But GPUs are powerful and can be kept waiting for data; overwhelmed server hosts simply can’t deliver data fast enough.

GPUDirect Storage cuts out the host server CPU and its memory, calling it a bounce buffer,  and sets up a direct link between the GPU, a DGX-2 for example, and NVMe-connected storage, including NVMe-over-Fabrics devices.

GPUDirect Storage uses direct memory access to move the data into and out of the GPU, which has a direct memory access engine. 

The results are promising. For instance, in a blog the company noted: “NVIDIA RAPIDS, a suite of open-source software libraries, on GPUDirect and NVIDIA DGX-2 delivers a direct data path between storage and GPU memory that’s 8x faster than an unoptimised version that doesn’t use GPUDirect Storage.”

And in a developer blog Nvidia said: “Whereas the bandwidth from CPU system memory (SysMem) to GPUs in an NVIDIA DGX-2 is limited to 50 GB/sec, the bandwidth from many drives and many NICs can be combined to achieve maximal bandwidth, e.g. over 200 GB/sec in a DGX-2. “

Read the developer blog for lots more details.

Xilinx claims 10x CPU performance for Alveo FPGA

By
Chris Mellor
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Xilinx has launched a FPGA that supports PCIe v4 and uses high-bandwidth memory to munch data manipulations faster and firehose the results.

Field-programable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are reprogrammable hardware products used as CPU accelerators. Xilinx, founded in 1984, invented FPGA devices, also known as programmable logic devices.

The Alveo U50 follows on from existing U200 and U250 accelerators, which connect to host systems across PCIe v3  and use DRAM memory.

The half-height, half length device delivers a claimed 10-20x improvement in throughput, latency and power efficiency, with a 75-Watt power envelope.

It has 8GB of high-bandwidth memory (HBM2) with greater than 400 Gbit/s data transfer speed, and 100Gbit/s external connectivity. That helps support for NVMe-over-Fabrics and disaggregated computational storage – a hint about composable systems.

It also supports CCIX, the Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators. 

Target application areas are deep learning inference, data analytics, computational storage, network acceleration and financial modelling.

For data analytics, Xilinx claims the U50 provides 4x higher throughput per hour and reduced operational costs by 3x compared to in-memory Xeon Platinum 8260 CPU, with a 24ms query time compared to the Xeon’s 210ms.

Xilinx is showcasing the Alveo U50 at the Flash Memory Summit 2019, August 6-8 at Santa Clara.

The Alveo U50 is sampling now with OEM system qualifications in process. General availability is slated for Fall 2019.

Excelero adds scale-up NVEdge to scale-out NVMESH

By
Chris Mellor
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Excelero, the NVMe-over-Fabrics flash array software startup, has announced a scale-up NVEdge product to complement its scale-out NVMESH offering.

NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) extends the PCIe/NVMe protocol across network links so a server application can access remote flash drives for block data as if they were local. This is much faster than accessing the drives across iCSCI or Fibre Channel protocol links.

Excelero’s scale-out software adds NVMESH storage nodes to an existing set of nodes to manage data growth potentially requiring tens of thousands of nodes. A scale-up offering adds NVMe drives to an existing system, at rack or sub-rack level. Scalability lis imited by the number of drive bays available in the system’s enclosures.

The Edge for Excelero ranges from a smart device through remote and branch offices to a small data centre; – think five to 1,000 servers accessing an array.

NVEdge needs to run on dual X86 controller-based commodity storage arrays with high availability. The software is based in part on open SPDK, and supports SmartNICs such as Mellanox’ BlueField and Broadcom’ Stingray.

It provides:

  • Thin provisioning up to 1,000x
  • Support for RDMA and NVMe over TCP/IP networking
  • Data protection – RAID 10
  • Checksums

Excelero said OEMs and system integrators will build the systems using Intel and AMD processors. Current partners include Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Quanta, SuperMicro and Western Digital.

An NVEdge array can deliver up to 2.7m IOPS across a 100Gbit/s link using 4K blocks.

Scale-up

According to Excelero co-founder and CEO Lior Gal, the scale-up NVEdge system is comparable to scale-up NVMe-oF systems from AWS-acquired E8, StorCentre’s Vexata, and Pavilion Data Systems. They are all appliances, he says, and Excelero’s advantages include easier deployment and use of standard hardware.

Excelero co-founder and CEO Lior Gal

Appliance vendors with new technology find it difficult to scale their businesses and Excelero, with its scale-out technology is already past that barrier, Gal argued.

He hinted that we might expect NVMESH systems to include NVEdge units in some way.

EXTEN Technologies, the revived Mangstor, has announced its HyperDynamic NVMe-oF array software for use by OEMs and that will compete with NVEdge.

NVEdge is available to select partners immediately and is on show at this week’s 2019 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara.

Toshiba flash memory is thinner, fatter, faster

By
Chris Mellor
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Toshiba has come out with three flash news announcements detailing a range of smaller, denser and speedier drives.

  • 96-layer TLC (3bits/cell) NAND RD500 and RC500 gumstick card SSDs,
  • Low-latency XL-FLASH media,
  • XFMEXPRESS fingernail-sized flash card for mobile and embedded device use.

RD500 and RC500

These SSDs use 96-layer 3D NAND, like Western Digital’s SN640 and SN340 announced yesterday. However they are M.2 format drives for gamers (RD500) and mainstream POC (RC500) use. 

Both use Toshiba’s 96-layer 3D NAND organised as TLC (3bits/cell) with a faster SLC (1bit/cell) cache. They are connected via the PCIe 3.0/NVMe v1.3c protocol.

The RD500 has 512GB, 1TB and 2TB capacity options while the RC500 has 256BB, 512GB and 1TB capacities. These match Toshiba’s XG6-P (2TB) and XG6 (2576GB, 512GB, 1TB) which are also made with 96-layer TLC flash. The RD500 is faster than the XG6-P.

The performance numbers are:

The XG6-P drives are sold to OEMs for mainstream use while the RC 500 and RD500 are for retail sale; RD500 being targeted at gamers.

The RC500 appears to overlap Toshiba’s XG6 drive, being about the same speed on random IO but much slower on sequential IO, as the XG6 does up to 3.18/2.96 GB/sec for read and write respectively. 

Toshiba warrants the RD500 for five years and the RC500 for three, but does not provide total-petabytes-written or drive writes/day numbers. Nor does it provide any prices. They’ll hit the shops in the fourth quarter.

XL-FLASH

Toshiba XL-FLASH is fast, low-latency SLC 3D NAND, like Samsung’s Z-NAND, positioned between ordinary and slower NAND and faster DRAM, equivalent to storage-class memory (SCM) such as Optane (3D XPoint) and Samsung’s Z-NAND.

It was first announced by Toshiba at FMS 2018  and Tosh is now telling us it will be producing 128Gbit dies in a 2-die, 4-die, 8-die package. A die will be sectioned into 16 planes for parallelism, with 4Kbit pages. They will be manufactured using the latest BiCS processes, Toshiba’s 3D NAND technology; that implies 96-layers. 

The die will be formatted as SLC (1 bit/cell) and the read latency will be down to 5µs, with Tosh saying this is ten times faster than today’s NAND. An Optane DIMM’s read latency is as low as 0.35 µs.

Scott Nelson, GM of Toshiba Memory America, Inc., issued a quote: “SCM is the next frontier for enterprise storage, and our role as one of the world’s largest flash memory suppliers gives XL-FLASH a cost/performance edge over competing SCM solutions,” such as Optane.

Toshiba will sample its XL-FLASH from September onwards with OEMs likely to ship SSD product in 2020. It suggests XL-FLASH could be designed into industry-standard DIMMs connected to a server’s memory channel.

Target applications are high-speed storage and memory extension, just like Optane. We can expect Optane, XL-FLASH and Z-NAND devices competing in the SCM market in 2020.

XFMEXPRESS

Toshiba has devised a new format for fingernail-size flash cards and used it to build a NVMe-connected device; the XFMEXPRESS.

The existing microSD format is sized at 15mm x 11mm x 1mm and a WD Purple QD312 device holds between 32GB and 256GB of data, which can be transferred at up to 30MB/sec.

The XFMEXPRESS card is larger at 18mm x 14mm, and it fits in a 1.44mm deep connector slot. It has a proprietary format and uses a fastened hinged connector. That is less removable than a USB stick.

It can transfer data at up to 4GB/sec, across 2 to 4 PCIe 2.0, 3.0 or 4.0 lanes. with a second generation device doubling that to 8GB/sec.

Details of the XFMEXPRESS card’s capacity are non-existent but Toshiba said it can use the latest and future 3D NAND. That means 64-layer, 96-layer and 128-layer technology. We can envisage 512GB-class capacities or possibly greater.

Toshiba said it is for thin and embedded devices like skinny PCs, notebooks, tablets and the like.

Whether Tosh will try and get the format standardised is unsaid. A difficulty is that the SD Association has already proposed a microSD Express standard.

It is slower than Toshiba’s XFMEXPRESS, using a single PCIe 3.1 lane and NVMe v1.3  to enable transfers at up to 985MB/sec; 0.985GB/sec compared to XFMEXPRESS’ 4GB/sec. Adding multi-lane support to microSD Express would nullify Toshiba’s speed advantage.

Sony and Fujifilm settle LTO-8 tape media patent dispute

By
Chris Mellor
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LTO tape
LTO tape

Fujifilm and Sony have buried the hatchet over a patent dispute that crippled the global supply of LTO-8 tape media.

The two tape media makers have agreed a global patent cross-licensing deal and the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit subsequently dismissed their patent dispute case.

Although neither side are talking in public, the LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), – HPE, IBM and Quantum – have announced that Fujifilm and Sony both plan to produce LTO-8 media.

The TPCs are licensees of LTO-8 technology, and they will officially certify media made by Sony and Fujifilm. Global LTO-8 tape media availability is anticipated in the fourth 2019 quarter.

That means customers will get full access to LTO-8 media and its 12TB raw capacity (up to 30TB compressed). Until now they have had to make do with 6TB LTO-7 technology tape, possibly formatted to 9TB via an M8 formatting step in an LTO-8 drive.

Neither Fujifilm nor Sony said anything about their dispute being over. The two tape media manufacturers had been at each other’s legal throats with a flurry of IP lawsuits and US LTO-8 media import bans. This stopped the supply of LTO-8 tape media, rendering LTO-8 tape technology useless.

An anodyne statement of approval was issued by a Quantum senior director, Eric Bassier: “We are pleased to have two licensees for tape solutions allowing us to deliver more product to market, and enabling us to once again provide tape technology solutions, including LTO generation 8, to our partners and end-users.”

Nathan Thompson, founder and CEO of tape systems vendor Spectra Logic, told us by mail: “The IP lawsuits between Sony and Fujifilm have been entirely resolved, globally.  Since neither company was producing LTO-8 recently, the TPC will carefully validate both companies products before enabling sales.”

He added: “I don’t know all of the details, but know that both companies were under a lot of pressure from the TPC, end users and market participants like Spectra to resolve the lawsuits. It is my understanding that there is cross licensing on LTO-7, 8 and 9 technologies.” 

And, “Spectra is very pleased with the outcome.”

It will take months to fulfil backlogged LTO-8 tape media orders so customers could wait until some time next year to get their cartridges. The succeeding LTO-9 format, with doubled LTO-8 capacity at 24TB raw, is due to arrive in 2020.

Frustrated customers may decide to jump the LTO-8 generation and go straight to LTO-9.

LTO-7 media formatted as type M in LTO-8 drives, will not be readable by LTO-9 drives, adding to the complexity.

Blocks & Files has asked Fujifilm, Sony, and the LTO-8 consortium for comment.

Your enterprise storage news round-up

By
Chris Mellor
-

Take a quick dip into our weekly collection of enterprise storage news briefs

Toshiba on the Rocks

Toshiba Memory America has worked on the open source RocksDB to produce its TRocksDB that uses key values more efficiently with SSDs to enable improvements in storage and DRAM usage.

RocksDB takes a log-structured merge-tree (LSM tree) approach to storing data, and rewrites data at least one time for every level of the database, and in many cases, multiple times per level. 

The total write amplification for RocksDB will often be greater than 21x, which leads to application-level performance delays and early SSD wear-out.

Toshiba MA has remedied this by storing values and keys in separately managed files. This enables more efficient database lookups, minimises write amplification, and optimises SSD utilisation.

TRocksDB runs on any Linux hardware supported by RocksDB and the server software will soon be available under the terms of Apache2 open-sourced licensing.

EXTEN speeds up NVMe over TCP

EXTEN Technologies has announced the availability of the third generation of its HyperDynamic storage software. It improves TCP performance with Solarflare TCP acceleration that provides TCP performance near RDMA.

V3 adds;

  • Node level resiliency with synchronous replicas
  • Shared volumes with replicas for supporting parallel file systems
  • Dual parity (RAID 6) resiliency
  • Integrated drive management and hot swap

There is declustered RAID, which provides the ability to simply configure resilient volumes that use standard, Linux multi-path IO software to provide redundancy in networking and storage. Different RAID levels per volume allow flexible, optimised provisioning for separate use cases

The web user interface provides node and cluster level telemetry and the ability to set QoS limits to manage performance during drive or node rebuilds.

2019 Flash Memory Summit

The storage industry’s pre-eminent solid state storage show kicks off in Santa Clara this week and there will be a plethora of announcements and exhibitors. Among them;

  • Burleywood will talk about its SSD TrueInsight SSD workload profiling analysis software,
  • DCIG will provide an update on all-flash array developments,
  • Everspin will display its MRAM products,
  • Cadence Design Systems is providing DDR4 Design IP (DIP) and Verification IP (VIP) support for Everspin’s 1 Gbit STT-MRAM memory,
  • Lightbits Labs execs will discuss the state of NVMe/TCP,
  • Phison Electronics showcases its lineup of PCIe Gen4 SSD controllers,
  • Dr. Rado Danilak, CEO of Tachyum Inc., will speak about the need for new approaches, and capabilities of data centrer architectures, interconnects, storage and memory types to help artiificial intelligence,
  • Virtium’s Scott Lawrence, director of business and technology development, will discuss embedded-system designers’ data-security demands and industrial SSDs.

Short items

An Active Archive Alliance report: “Active Archive and the State of the Industry 2019,” highlights data growth challenges facing the storage industry and the expanding role of active archives in the data management lifecycle. Download it with minimal registration here.

Aderas, a systems integrator for US government and commercial customers, is developing an IT platform-as-a-service for its customers, using Private MultiCloud Storage from Madison Cloud powered by StorONE SDS and direct connections to cloud providers at Equinix data centres. 

Apple has joined the open source Data Transfer Project to help transfer data to and from its iCloud. Members include Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter.

IDC has profiled Storage Made Easy, Panzura, and Igneous in an Innovators report on unstructured file and object data content management – IDC Innovators: Unstructured (File and Object) Content Management, 2019 ($2,500(.

FalconStor, a storage software company, has hired David Morris as VP of global product strategy and marketing. He’s a 25-year IT vet with career history at EMC, VMware, Pillar Data, and Huawei .

Intel has canned the gen 2 OmniPath connect project (OPA200) leaving the low-latency 200Gbit/s interface field to Nvidia’s Mellanox. The 100Gbit/s OPA100 Intel product remains.

Kalray’s target controller PCIe cards can be seamlessly configured to support NVMe-over Fabric either over RDMA (“RDMA over Converged Ethernet” or RoCE) or over TCP protocols. The cards can support JBOF/JBOD NVMe-oF target controller functionality.

Kingston is shipping its A2000 NVMe  PCIe SSD; a single-sided M.2, next-gen entry-level, consumer NVMe PCIe SSD utilising 3D NAND.

Marvell has introduced PCIe Gen 4 4-channel NVMe controllers. The 88SS1321, 88SS1322 and 88SS1323, represent the industry’s first PCIe Gen4 DRAM and DRAM-less SSD controllers to be fabricated on a 12nm process.  They support M.2 (22110 to 2230), BGA, EDSFF and U.2 SSD form factors.

Special effects company Whiskytree is buying Panasas ActiveStor parallel access filers to to store and manage its creative computer graphics and visual effects workflows.

The SNIA EMEA Storage Developer Conference (SDC) will return to Tel Aviv in early February 2020.

Tape systems and data protection vendor Spectra Logic is celebrating its 40th anniversary. It announced that TransMedia Dynamics (TMD) has completed client certification of its Mediaflex-UMS Content Supply Chain platform with Spectra’s BlackPearl Converged Storage System.

Storage Made Easy’s new Enterprise File Fabric v1906 release is now available through the Early Access upgrade channel. Features include, faster synchronisation and indexing, a Microsoft OneDrive connector, team folder permission reporting and more.  

Toshiba’s KumoScale NVM Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage software has received an Interop ‘Best of Show’ award in the Server & Storage category.

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