In this episode, the Greybeards discuss the year in storage and naturally we kick off with the consolidation trend in the industry and the big one last year, the DELL-EMC acquisition. How the high margin EMC storage business is going to work in a low margin company like Dell is the subject of much speculation. That and which of the combined companies storage products will make it through the transition make for interesting discussions. And Finally what exactly is Dell’s long term strategy is another question.
We next turn to the coming of age of object storage. A couple of years ago, object storage was being introduced to a wider market but few wanted to code to RESTful interfaces. Nowadays, that seems to be less of a concern and the fact that one can have onsite/offsite/cloud based object storage repositories from open source, proprietary solutions and everything in between is making object storage a much more appealing option to enterprise IT.
Finally, we discuss the new Tier 0. What with NVMe SSDs and the emergence of NVMe over Fabric coming out last year, Tier 0 has never looked so promising. You may recall that Tier 0 was hot about 5 years with TMS and Violin and others coming out with lightning fast storage IO. But with DELL-EMC DSSD: startups (E8 storage, Mangstor, Apeiron data systems, and others); NVMDIMMs, CrossBar, and Everspin coming out with denser offerings; and other SCM (Micron, HPE, IBM, others?) technologies on the horizon, Tier 0 has become red hot again.
Sorry about the occasional airplane noise and other audio anomalies. The podcast runs over 47 minutes. Howard and I could talk for hours on what’s happening in the storage industry. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
In our annual yearend podcast and it’s the Ray and Howard show, talking about storage futures, industry trends and some storage world excitement of- the past year.
We start the discussion deconstructing recent reductions in year over year revenues at major storage vendors. It seems with the advent of all flash arrays (AFA), and all major vendors and most startups now have AFAs, customers no longer feel the need to refresh old storage hardware with similarly (over-)configured new systems. Instead, most can get by with AFA storage, at smaller capacities that provides the same, if not better, performance. Further9, the fact that AFAs are available from so many vendors and startups, customers no longer have to buy performance storage exclusively from major vendors anymore. This is leading to a decline in major vendor storage revenues, which should play itself out over the next 1-2 years as most enterprise storage systems are refreshed.
Recent and future acquisitions also came up for discussion. NetApp’s purchase of SolidFire was a surprise, but SolidFire had carved out a good business with service providers and web-scale customers which should broaden NetApp’s portfolio. In the mean time, the Dell-EMC acquisition takes them out of the competition for new technology acquisitions, at least until it closes. NetApp’s new CEO, George Kurian, appears more willing than his predecessor to go after good storage technology, wherever it comes from.
Software delivered (defined) storage came up as well. With the compute available in todays micro-processors, there’s very little a software delivered storage system can’t do. And with scale-out storage, there’s even more cores to work with. Software delivered storage and scale-out will continue to play a spoiler role, at least in the low to mid-range, in the storage market throughout the next year.
Nonetheless, hardware still has some excitement left. Intel’s recent acquisition of Altera, now makes Xeon/x86 processing available for embedded applications that previously had to rely on ARM and MIPS processing. Now, there’s nothing an FPGA hardware based system can’t do. Look for lot’s more activity here over the long term.
We talked about recent SMR disks coming out and how they could be used in storage systems today. There was some adjacent discussion on the flash-disk crossover, and conclude it’s unlikely over the next 3-5 years, at least for capacity drives. Although there’s plenty of analyst that say it’s already happened, on a pure $/GB there’s still no comparison.
We then turned to 3D TLC NAND and the reliability capabilities available from current controlller technologies. Raw planar NAND available today is much less reliable than what we had 1-2 generations back, but the drives, if anything, have gotten more reliable. This is due to the reliability technology inherent in todays SSD controllers.
We had an aside, on SSD overprovisioning and how this should become a customer level option. Reducing overprovisioning would decrease drive endurance but it’s a tradeoff that the vendors/distributors make for customers today. We feel that at least for some customers, they could make this decision just as well. Especially if drive replacements were a customer maintenance activity with replacement SSDs shipped in a just-in-time manner.
We conclude on 3D XPoint (3DX) non-volatile memory.We both agreed 3DX adoption depends on pricing which will change over time. In the long term, we see the potential for a new storage system with 3DX or other new non-volatile memory as a top performing storage/caching/non-volatile memory tier, 3D TLC NAND as a middle tier and SMR disk as the bottom tier. When is another question.
Our year end discussion always wanders a bit, from high end business trends to in the weeds technologies and everything in-between. This one is no exception and runs over 49 minutes. We tried to do another Year End video this time but neither of our video recording systems worked out, but we had a good audio recording, so we went with the podcast this year. Next year should be back to video. Listen to the podcast to learn more.
In this our end of year video podcast Howard and I discuss some of the trends impacting the storage industry today. Which include Cloud, SSD/Flash, software defined storage and converged server-storage systems and object storage.
The video comes in at a little more than 43 minutes and is available to be streamed, from Vimeo
or as a downloadable podcast in as a 3 videos.
Part 3 (~8 minutes) discusses the state of object storage and some of the trends impacting it’s adoption.
In this our end of year video podcast Howard and I discuss some of the trends impacting the storage industry today. Which include Cloud, SSD/Flash, software defined storage and converged server-storage systems and object storage.
The video comes in at a little more than 43 minutes and is available to be streamed, from Vimeo
or as a downloadable podcast in as a 3 videos.
Part 2 (~18 minutes) discusses flash/ssd pricing and when if ever this will crossover with disk pricing.
Welcome to our fourth episode. In this year end wrap-up Howard and Ray talk about the three trends that have emerged over the last year or so which are impacting the storage industry in a big way and will continue to affect the industry in the the years to come.
First up is scale-out storage. Howard and Ray were part of Storage Field Day 4 (SFD4) where we met with at least 5 different vendors of scale out storage. All the blogger participants were starting to call this the “Scale-Out” field day. It turns out that the compute requirements for storage are starting to increase, for many reasons not the least of which is the performance of SSDs. This rising compute requirement generates a need for scale-out storage.
Second is software defined storage. Howard took a stab at defining it and in our view software defined storage is delivered as a software only solution that provides storage and compute services together in one server environment. With a 2U server, one can have a couple of SSDs and a gaggle of HDDs and still only use 4 of the 24 cores to supply storage services, leaving the other 20 for compute. What with VMware’s VSAN and the other software defined storage players, this is becoming another hot trend this year.
Finally, whither the disk drive? Drive capacity continues to grow with no end in sight, with helium, HAMR, and shingled magnetic recording. SSD is not killing them off as quickly as we thought, even though SSD costs on $/GB basis keep coming down. The net effect of this is that both of us believe disks are going to be around for the near term (5 yrs or so) but we differed on the long term prospects of disk.
Ray Lucchesi is the President and Founder of Silverton Consulting, a prominent blogger at RayOnStorage.com, and can be found on twitter @RayLucchesi.
DeepStorage, a prominent blogger at Deep Storage Blog and can be found on twitter @DeepStorageNet.