Category: Industry trends

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61: GreyBeards talk composable storage infrastructure with Taufik Ma, CEO, Attala Systems

In this episode,  we talk with Taufik Ma, CEO, Attala Systems (@AttalaSystems). Howard had met Taufik at last year’s FlashMemorySummit (FMS17) and was intrigued by their architecture which he thought was a harbinger of future trends in storage. The fact that Attala Systems was innovating with new, proprietary hardware made an interesting discussion, in its own right, from my perspective.

Taufik’s worked at startups and major hardware vendors in his past life and seems to have always been at the intersection of breakthrough solutions using hardware technology.

Attala Systems is based out of San Jose, CA.  Taufik has a class A team of executives, engineers and advisors making history again, this time in storage with JBoFs and NVMeoF.

Ray’s written about JBoF (just a bunch of flash) before (see  FaceBook moving to JBoF post). This is essentially a hardware box, filled with lots of flash storage and drive interfaces that directly connects to servers. Attala Systems storage is JBOF on steroids.

Composable Storage Infrastructure™

Essentially, their composable storage infrastructure JBOF connects with NVMeoF (NVMe over Fabric) using Ethernet to provide direct host access to  NVMe SSDs. They have implemented special purpose, proprietary hardware in the form of an FPGA, using this in a proprietary host network adapter (HNA) to support their NVMeoF storage.

Their HNA has a host side and a storage side version, both utilizing Attala Systems proprietary FPGA(s). With Attala HNAs they have implemented their own NVMeoF over UDP stack in hardware. It supports multi-path IO and highly available dual- or single-ported, NVMe SSDs in a storage shelf. They use standard RDMA capable Ethernet 25-50-100GbE (read Mellanox) switches to connect hosts to storage JBoFs.

They also support RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) NICS for additional host access. However I believe this requires host (NVMeoF) (their NVMeoY over UDP stack) software to connect to their storage.

From the host, Attala Systems storage on HNAs, looks like directly attached NVMe SSDs. Only they’re hot pluggable and physically located across an Ethernet network. In fact, Taufik mentioned that they already support VMware vSphere servers accessing Attala Systems composable storage infrastructure.

Okay on to the good stuff. Taufik said they measured their overhead and it was able to perform an IO with only an additional 5 µsec of overhead over native NVMe SSD latencies. Current NVMe SSDs operate with a response time of from 90 to 100 µsecs, and with Attala Systems Composable Storage Infrastructure, this means you should see 95 to 105 µsec response times over a JBoF(s) full of NVMe SSDs! Taufik said with Intel Optane SSD’s 10 µsec response times, they see response times at ~16 µsec (the extra µsec seems to be network switch delay)!!

Managing composable storage infrastructure

They also use a management “entity” (running on a server or as a VM),  that’s used to manage their JBoF storage and configure NVMe Namespaces (like a SCSI LUN/Volume).  Hosts use NVMe NameSpaces to access and split out the JBoF  NVMe storage space. That is, multiple Attala Systems Namespaces can be configured over a single NVMe SSD, each one corresponding to a single  (virtual to real) host NVMe SSD.

The management entity has a GUI but it just uses their RESTful APIs. They also support QoS on an IOPs or bandwidth limiting basis for Namespaces, to control manage noisy neighbors.

Attala systems architected their management system to support scale out storage. This means they could support many JBoFs in a rack and possibly multiple racks of JBoFs connected to swarms of servers. And nothing was said that would limit the number of Attala storage system JBoFs attached to a single server or under a single (dual for HA) management  entity. I thought the software may have a problem with this (e.g., 256 NVMe (NameSpaces) SSDs PCIe connected to the same server) but Taufik said this isn’t a problem for modern OS.

Taufik mentioned that with their RESTful APIs,  namespaces can be quickly created and torn down, on the fly. They envision their composable storage infrastructure to be a great complement to cloud compute and container execution environments.

For storage hardware, they use storage shelfs from OEM vendors. One recent configuration from Supermicro has hot-pluggable, dual ported, 32 NVMe slots in a 1U chasis, which at todays ~16TB capacities, is ~1/2PB of raw flash. Taufik mentioned 32TB NVMe SSDs are being worked on as we speak. Imagine that 1PB of flash NVMe SSD storage in 1U!!

The podcast runs ~47 minutes. Taufik took a while to get warmed up but once he got going, my jaw dropped away.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Taufik Ma, CEO Attala Systems

Tech-savvy business executive with track record of commercializing disruptive data center technologies.  After a short stint as an engineer at Intel after college, Taufik jumped to the business side where he led a team to define Intel’s crown jewels – CPUs & chipsets – during the ascendancy of the x86 server platform.

He honed his business skills as Co-GM of Intel’s Server System BU before leaving for a storage/networking startup.  The acquisition of this startup put him into the executive team of Emulex where as SVP of product management, he grew their networking business from scratch to deliver the industry’s first million units of 10Gb Ethernet product.

These accomplishments draw from his ability to engage and acquire customers at all stages of product maturity including partners when necessary.

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59: GreyBeards talk IT trends with Marc Farley, Sr. Product Manager, HPE

In Episode 59,  we talk with Marc Farley, Senior Product Manager at HPE discussing trends in the storage industry today. Marc been on our show before (GreyBeards talk Cloud Storage…, GreyBeards video discussing file analytics, Greybeards talk cars, storage and IT…) and has been a longtime friend and associate of both Howard and I.

Marc’s been at HPE for a while now but couldn’t discuss publicly what he is working on, so we spent time discussing industry trends rather than HPE products.

We discussed the public cloud and its impact on enterprise IT. Although the cloud has been arguable alive and well for almost a decade now, its impact is still being felt today and for the foreseeable future

We next discussed AI and data storage. HPE’s acquisition of Nimble brought InfoSight into their product family, which was arguably one of the first to use big data analytics to improve field support and ongoing operations.

Howard mentioned that a logical next step is to apply AI to storage performance. Using AI to fingerprint application workloads and thereby help determine when that app’s data was needed in cache. We also mentioned that AI could be better used to help workload optimization/orchestration, in almost real time, rather than after the fact.

We talked about containerization as the next big thing. Howard and Marc said sometimes it’s less risky to just keep chugging away with what IT has always done rather than risking a move to a new paradigm/platform AKA containers. As further evidence, Marc had seen a survey (by an unnamed research firm) of customers pre-purchase expectations for new storage and what they actually used it for post-purchase. Pre-purchase, customers expected to use storage for server virtualization but post-purchase, a majority used it for more traditional, non-virtualized applications.

We returned to a perennial theme, when will SSDs supplant disk. Howard talked about a recent vendors introduction of a dual head disk and which he thought was  overreach. But all agreed the key metric is $/GB and getting the difference between rotating media and SSD $/GB below 10X. Howard believes when it’s more like 4X, then SSDs will kill off disk technology. Although some of us felt disks would never completely go away, witness tape.

The podcast runs ~38 minutes. Marc’s always a gas to talk with and is currently the most frequent guest we have had on our show  (although Jim Handy was tied with him up until now). Its’ great to hear from him again.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Marc Farley, Senior Product Manger, HPE

Marc is a storage greybeard who has worked for many storage companies and is currently providing product strategy for HPE. He has written three books on storage including his most recent, Rethinking Enterprise Storage: A Hybrid Cloud Model and his previous books Building Storage Networksand Storage Networking Fundamentals.

In addition to his writing books he has been a blogger and podcaster about storage topics while working for EqualLogic, Dell, 3PAR, HP, StorSimple,  Microsoft, HPE and others.

When he is not working, Marc likes to ride bicycles, listen to music, spend time with his family and dote on his cats. Of course there’s that car video curation…

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55: GreyBeards storage and system yearend review with Ray & Howard

In this episode, the Greybeards discuss the year in systems and storage. This year we kick off the discussion with a long running IT trend which has taken off over the last couple of years. That is, recently the industry has taken to buying pre-built appliances rather than building them from the ground up.

We can see this in all the hyper-converged solutions available  today but it goes even deeper than that. It seems to have started with the trend in organizations to get by with less man-women power.

This led to a desire to purchase pre-buit software applications and now, appliances rather than build from parts. It just takes to long to build and lead architects have better things to do with their time than checking compatibility lists, testing and verifying that hardware works properly with software. The pre-built appliances are good enough and doing it yourself doesn’t really provide that much of an advantage over the pre-built solutions.

Next, we see the coming systems using NVMe over Fabric storage systems as sort of a countertrend to the previous one. Here we see some customers paying well for special purpose hardware with blazing speed that takes time and effort to get working right, but the advantages are significant. Both Howard and I were at the Excelero SFD12 event and it blew us away. Howard also attended the E8 Storage SFD14 event which was another example along a similar vein.

Finally, the last trend we discussed was the rise of 3D TLC and the absence of 3DX and other storage class memory (SCM) technologies to make a dent in the marketplace. 3D TLC NAND is coming out of just about every fab these days and resulting in huge (but costly) SSDs, in the multi-TB range.  Combine these with NVMe interfaces and you have msec access to almost a PB of storage without breaking a sweat.

The missing 3DX SCM tsunami some of us predicted is mainly due to the difficulties in bringing new fab technologies to market. We saw some of this in the stumbling with 3D NAND but the transition to 3DX and other SCM technologies is a much bigger change to new processes and technology. We all believe it will get there someday but for the moment, the industry just needs to wait until the fabs get their yields up.

The podcast runs over 44 minutes. Howard and I could talk for hours on what’s happening in IT today. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Howard Marks is the Founder and Chief Scientist of howardmarksDeepStorage, a prominent blogger at Deep Storage Blog and can be found on twitter @DeepStorageNet.

 

Ray Lucchesi is the President and Founder of Silverton Consulting, a prominent blogger at RayOnStorage.com, and can be found on twitter @RayLucchesi.

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53: GreyBeards talk MAMR and future disk with Lenny Sharp, Sr. Dir. Product Management, WDC

This month we talk new disk technology with Lenny Sharp, Senior Director of Product Management, responsible for enterprise disk with Western Digital Corp. (WDC). WDC recently announced their future disk offerings will be based on a new disk recording technology, called MAMR or microwave assisted magnetic recording.

Over the last decade or so the disk industry has been investing in HAMR or heat assisted magnetic recording as the next recording innovation. So, MAMR is a significant departure but appears well worth it.

WDC is arguably the leading supplier of HDD and one of the leading SSD suppliers to the industry today. Any departure from industry technology roadmaps for WDC is big news.

WDC is banking on MAMR technology to continue to offer capacity disk (for big data) at prices that are 10X below the price of flash storage for the foreseeable future. If they and the rest of the disk industry can deliver on that promise then there should be a substantial market for capacity disk for the next decade or so.

What’s  MAMR?

HAMR uses lasers to heat up a media spot being recorded. This boost in energy helps reduce the magnetic threshold of the grains inside the media and allowed them to be written or change state. Once that energy was removed, the data state on media would persist and could be read multiple times without error.

MAMR uses microwaves to add similar energy to the spot being written on disk media. MAMR doesn’t actually heat up the spot with microwaves, but it does add elector-magnetic energy to the spot being written, which has the same affect of reducing the threshold for writing the media.  I wrote a recent blog post about MAMR technology describing the technology in more detail

HAMR heated the media spot from 400C to 700C, which was potentially reduces disk reliability. MAMR, because it doesn’t heat the disk anymore than normal operations, should not impact disk reliability.

Also MAMR can use pretty much the same disk substrate used in enterprise disks today and be fabricated using much the same manufacturing lines used for PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) heads, today.

Disk densities

MAMR should allow the industry to get to ~4.5Tb/sqin. Current PMR technology will probably max out at 1.0 to 1.3Tb/sqin.  PMR density growth has flatlined (6-7% per year) recently, but MAMR should put the disk industry back on a 15% density growth/year. The new MAMR disks will be sampling for enterprise customer in 2018 and in production by 2019.

As for how far MAMR will take disk, WDC said we can expect a 40TB disk device (using multiple platters) by 2025 and Lenny said perhaps double that eventually.

We ended our discussion with Lenny on WDC and other disk vendor moves outside of the device level. Over time, IT use of disks have changed and the disk vendor’s seem to believe the best way to address this transition is to look beyond disk/SSD devices and towards manufacturing storage shelves and potentially even systems!? We’ll need to wait and see the dust settle on these moves.

The podcast runs ~45 minutes. Lenny was very knowledgeable about current and future disk technology and seems to have been around the disk industry forever.  He’s got an insider’s view of disk technology, IT’s use of disk and storage market dynamics. Both  Howard and I enjoyed our time with him.   Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Lenny Sharp, Sr. Dir. Product Management, WDC

Lenny Sharp serves as Western Digital’s Sr. Director of Enterprise HDD product line management and planning. He has over 30 years of experience in high technology and storage. Sharp joined HGST in 2009, iniIally responsible for enterprise SSD.
He has also managed client HDD and spent four years in Japan, working closely with the development team and APAC customers.
Previously, he was responsible for managing systems, software, storage and semiconductors for companies including Dell, Philips, Western Digital and Maxtor (since acquired by Seagate).
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50: Greybeards wrap up Flash Memory Summit with Jim Handy, Director at Objective Analysis

In this episode we talk with Jim Handy (@thessdguy), Director at Objective Analysis,  a semiconductor market research organization. Jim is an old friend and was on last year to discuss Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2016. Jim, Howard and I all attended FMS 2017 last week  in Santa Clara and Jim and Howard were presenters at the show.

NVMe & NVMeF to the front

Although, unfortunately the show floor was closed due to fire, there were plenty of sessions and talks about NVMe and NVMeF (NVMe over fabric). Howard believes NVMe & NVMeF seems to be being adopted much quicker than anyone had expected. It’s already evident inside storage systems like Pure’s new FlashArray//X, Kamanario and E8 storage, which is already shipping block storage with NVMe and NVMeF.

Last year PCIe expanders and switches seemed like the wave of the future but ever since then, NVMe and NVMeF has taken off. Historically, there’s been a reluctance to add capacity shelves to storage systems because of the complexity of (FC and SAS) cable connections. But with NVMeF, RoCE and RDMA, it’s now just an (40GbE or 100GbE) Ethernet connection away, considerably easier and less error prone.

3D NAND take off

Both Samsung and Micron are talking up their 64 layer 3D NAND and the rest of the industry following. The NAND shortage has led to fewer price reductions, but eventually when process yields turn up, the shortage will collapse and pricing reductions should return en masse.

The reason that vertical, 3D is taking over from planar (2D) NAND is that planar NAND can’t’ be sharing much more and 15nm is going to be the place it stays at for a long time to come. So the only way to increase capacity/chip and reduce $/Gb, is up.

But as with any new process technology, 3D NAND is having yield problems. But whenever the last yield issue is solved, which seems close,  we should see pricing drop precipitously and much more plentiful (3D) NAND storage.

One thing that has made increasing 3D NAND capacity that much easier is string stacking. Jim describes string stacking as creating a unit, of say 32 layers, which you can fabricate as one piece  and then layer ontop of this an insulating layer. Now you can start again, stacking another 32 layer block ontop and just add another insulating layer.

The problem with more than 32-48 layers is that you have to (dig) create  holes (connecting) between all the layers which have to be (atomically) very straight and coated with special materials. Anyone who has dug a hole knows that the deeper you go, the harder it is to make the hole walls straight. With current technology, 32 layers seem just about as far as they can go.

3DX and similar technologies

There’s been quite a lot of talk the last couple of years about 3D XPoint (3DX) and what it  means for the storage and server industry. Intel has released Octane client SSDs but there’s no enterprise class 3DX SSDs as of yet.

The problem is similar to 3D NAND above, current yields suck.  There’s a chicken and egg problem with any new chip technologies. You need volumes to get the yield up and you need yields up to generate the volumes you need. And volumes with good yields generate profits to re-invest in the cycle for next technology.

Intel can afford to subsidize (lose money) 3DX technology until they get the yields up, knowing full well that when they do, it will become highly profitable.

The key is to price the new technology somewhere between levels in the storage hierarchy, for 3DX that means between NAND and DRAM. This does mean that 3DX will be more of between memory and SSD tier than a replacement for for either DRAM or SSDs.

The recent emergence of NVDIMMs have provided the industry a platform (based on NAND and DRAM) where they can create the software and other OS changes needed to support this mid tier as a memory level. So that when 3DX comes along as a new memory tier they will be ready

NAND shortages, industry globalization & game theory

Jim has an interesting take on how and when the NAND shortage will collapse.

It’s a cyclical problem seen before in DRAM and it’s a question of investment. When there’s an oversupply of a chip technology (like NAND), suppliers cut investments or rather don’t grow investments as fast as they were. Ultimately this leads to a shortage and which then leads to  over investment to catch up with demand.  When this starts to produce chips the capacity bottleneck will collapse and prices will come down hard.

Jim believes that as 3D NAND suppliers start driving yields up and $/Gb down, 2D NAND fabs will turn to DRAM or other electronic circuitry whichwill lead to a price drop there as well.

Jim mentioned game theory is the way the Fab industry has globalized over time. As emerging countries build fabs, they must seek partners to provide the technology to produce product. They offer these companies guaranteed supplies of low priced product for years to help get the fabs online. Once, this period is over the fabs never return to home base.

This approach has led to Japan taking over DRAM & other chip production, then Korea, then Taiwan and now China. It will move again. I suppose this is one reason IBM got out of the chip fab business.

The podcast runs ~49 minutes but Jim is a very knowledgeable, chip industry expert and a great friend from multiple  events. Howard and I had fun talking with him again. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

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Jim Handy, Director at Objective Analysis

Jim Handy of Objective Analysis has over 35 years in the electronics industry including 20 years as a leading semiconductor and SSD industry analyst. Early in his career he held marketing and design positions at leading semiconductor suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon.

A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his technical depth, accurate forecasts, widespread industry presence and volume of publication. He has written hundreds of market reports, articles for trade journals, and white papers, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media.  He posts blogs at www.TheMemoryGuy.com, and www.TheSSDguy.com