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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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GreyBeards on Storage year end 2015 podcast

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:42 — 22.8MB) | Embed

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Howard Marks

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

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