End of High-End HDD Storage?

This article has been written by Dani Golan, CEO and founder of Kaminario, on the blog of the company.



SSDs Are Ready for Take-Off

 2011 has been a year in which SSD storage built up a head of steam for takeoff in 2012. Or, as Zsolt Kerekes said on storagesearch.com: "The user mood is changing from 'Can I afford to use SSDs?' to a realization that 'I can't afford not to use SSDs". It’s seen major new and maturing products and technologies, big-time venture capital funding, and catch-up efforts by major storage vendors shoehorning fast SSD into array architectures designed for much slower disks. Here are some of the SSD highlights of the past year.

Venture capital funding poured into SSD start-ups. Some of the highlights of 2011 included: $7.75 million for IO Turbine (and the acquisition by Fusion-io); $25 million for SolidFire; $21 million for Virident Systems; and Kaminario, which raised a total of over $34 million. In addition, Fusion-io pulled off a successful IPO.

SSD pricing continued to decline to about $9 per gigabyte for SLC flash and $3 per gigabyte for MLC flash, versus 50 to 60 cents per gigabyte for SAS or Fibre Channel drives, according to Computerworld. IDC has predicted a drop in SSD pricing to $1 per gigabyte in the second half of 2012, making SSD much less of a stretch for database, virtualization, analytics, and other applications that benefit from its random read-and-write performance. Of course, nothing beats SSD when cost per IOP is the main concern. SSD looks even more attractive when its low TCO - in terms of power, cooling, and data center floor space versus hard disk TCO - is factored into the equation with declining up-front pricing. Hard disk pricing is also expected to take a jump in the next few months due to flooding in Thailand, which produces approximately 40 percent of the hard disks worldwide; this is making SSD more attractive, at least temporarily. Indeed, DRAMeXchange reported that orders for SSD showed an uptick in November as a result of Thailand’s flooding.

Products and technologies continued to mature with major progress made in tackling Flash’s limited lifespan and performance issues. Big advances have been made in wear leveling and background garbage collection to increase reliability, predictability, and performance in Flash-based arrays and PCI cards. A newer form of MLC for the enterprise offers up to three times the life of non-enterprise MLC, and advances in controllers have made even non-enterprise MLC more long lasting and reliable than ever before. The combination of improvements in performance, lifespan, and reliability with MLC’s low cost promise to make Flash more and more attractive as an enterprise performance storage option. Kaminario took advantage of this in September by announcing an all-Flash storage array with built-in HA.

Hybridification continued with major storage vendors offering hybrid Flash/hard disk combinations as well as options for incorporating SSD drives in existing RAID solutions. The obvious issue that comes up is the performance bottleneck that occurs when legacy RAID and disk controllers designed for much slower mechanical hard disks sit in front of SSD drives. The start-ups still have an edge when it comes to SSD optimized architectures. Kaminario’s SPEAR architecture, where you can scale performance and capacity independently, is a perfect example. And, of course, Kaminario became the first to hit the market with a truly useful hybrid solution combining Flash and DRAM in a SAN-based solution optimized for SSD performance and low latency. The ability to allocate heavy writes to DRAM and distribute writes across all K2 flash modules, preventing hot spots, increases Flash lifespan by leaps and bounds.

The 'host-based versus shared storage' conundrum continued but became less of an issue as Kaminario and Fusion-io teamed up to bridge the two worlds and allow the incorporation of Fusion-io PCIe cards in a shared, SAN-based solution offered by Kaminario.

All these positive developments are laying the groundwork for what Kerekes calls a 'kick ass' year for SSD in 2012, moving the storage industry toward a time when SSD becomes the new disk and disk eventually becomes the new tape.   

The SSD makers are confident - because they can see better than anyone outside the industry - that 2012 is going to be when SSD storage really takes off.