EMC DSSD D5 Flash Storage Rack System

Highlights:

• EMC DSSD D5 delivers superior IO/s, throughput and latency metrics for the most data-intensive applications to enable complex, real-time data processing and real-time analytics and insight
  10 million IO/s, ~100μs latency, 100GB/s of bandwidth and 144TBs of raw storage in five rack units
• Up to 68% lower TCO, 5X lower latency and 10X higher IO/s and bandwidth than today’s fastest flash platforms
• Order of magnitude improvement in Hadoop HBase workload performance compared to traditional Hadoop deployed on DAS
• VCE Converged Infrastructure platforms to leverage DSSD D5 to expand flash offerings
   

EMC Corporation announced DSSD D5, a quantum leap in flash storage.

Available in March, DSSD D5 is a new category of flash storage – Rack-Scale Flash.

DSSD D5 is a new architecture designed for the most data-intensive applications, both traditional and next-generation, which require extreme levels of performance and the lowest possible latency. DSSD D5 reaches new performance heights, with real-world results that speed applications such as genetic sequencing calculations, fraud detection, credit card authorization, and advanced analytics by as much as 10X.

Enterprises at the cutting edge demand high-performance infrastructure to leverage data growth, data velocity and variety for business needs. These organizations require shared enterprise-ready flash storage with the highest levels of performance, throughput and almost nonexistent latency. Latency that in the past was only attained through direct-attached PCIe flash cards with major drawbacks in price, scale, expandability, serviceability, availability, and shareability – with every PCIe card an individually managed and non-redundant island of storage.

DSSD D5 delivers dense, high-performance, highly available and low latency shared flash storage for up to 48 redundant connected servers. D5 is connected to each node through PCIe Gen3 and leverages NVMe technology, to deliver the performance of PCI-attached flash. D5 is a standalone appliance that is disaggregated from compute, delivering the benefits of shared storage. The result is next-generation performance with latency as low as 100μs, throughput as high as 100GB/s, and IO/s of up to 10 million in a 5U system.

The high performance D5 was developed from the ground up and packaged with multiple hardware and software innovations that set it apart from any other storage offering available on the market. DSSD D5 moves beyond storage into the realm of enabling next-generation applications that require extreme performance and scalability. Designed to meet the demands of the high-performance, data-intensive workloads of tomorrow, D5 also delivers a crucial link to emerging next-generation applications based on extremely large, fast-growing working sets with 100% hot and active data.

DSSD D5 reduces data center footprint and costs with dense, shared flash. The appliance provides up to 36 flash modules with 144TB RAW (100TB usable) capacity, in a five rack-unit chassis that can be accessed redundantly by up to 48 direct-attached servers. D5 is also engineered to provide increased application uptime through enterprise availability and serviceability features. These features include dual-ported client cards, dual H/A controllers, redundant components and flash reliability and resiliency with Cubic RAID, dynamic wear leveling, flash physics control and space-time garbage collection.

Proven Use Cases
EMC offers DSSD D5 to benefit industries currently limited by traditional architectures that were not designed for the extreme performance needs of their business critical applications. These include applications built on top of Hadoop, high performance databases and data warehouses as well as custom applications used for complex, real-time data processing and real-time analytics and insight.

DSSD D5 accelerates current databases and data warehouse solutions, such as Oracle, through an innovative low-latency data path to deliver 3X lower latency, one-fifth the rack space and 68% lower TCO than the highest published performance Oracle solution. With DSSD D5, customers can consolidate multiple applications onto a single storage platform, and simplify data warehouses by eliminating multiple copies of data, complex indexing, intricate partitioning, and the need for materialized views.

For Hadoop workloads, DSSD D5 accelerates operational analytics compared to traditional DAS infrastructure. Also, customers can independently scale compute and storage, capturing return from their flash investment by writing only one copy of data on flash, irrespective of replication factor set in HDFS.

DSSD D5 is creating a new category of flash storage, Rack-Scale Flash. EMC’s Converged Platforms Division (VCE), will incorporate DSSD D5 into its VCE converged infrastructure portfolio in the near future.

EMC DSSD D5 is available in March 2016.

Brian Dougherty, chief technical architect, CMA, said: “We’re running some of the most complex workloads in the world, but traditional flash couldn’t offer the performance or bandwidth we wanted to service our applications or analyze our data in real time. DSSD D5 has fundamentally changed our business by eliminating unnecessary software, hardware and pre-processed batch jobs. With DSSD, we’re able to support applications and analytics at never-before-seen speeds; this is what enabled us to make the leap to this new generation of flash storage, and we’re not looking back.”

Doug Babb, chief IT systems architect, Systems Implementers Inc., contractor supporting the USAF and initiator of Project BonFire, said: “We were an early adopter to direct attached server flash, 100% flash SANs and hyper-converged flash appliances. DSSD D5 provides a performance capability that exceeds our expectations. We anticipate DSSD D5 will provide at least a 10x performance improvement over our existing analytic platforms. In my opinion, DSSD D5 will also have a transformative impact on our ability to securely increase our application consolidation efforts on smaller footprints, dramatically reducing hardware and licensing costs while delivering to our customers a real-time return on their information and fueling real-time security.”

Gary Grider, HPC division leader, Los Alamos National Laboratory, said: “We have been testing the DSSD D5 technology for several months with multiple workloads: file systems, NOSQL DBs and the DSSD direct API. The unique shared high bandwidth PCI connectivity, the low latency, and the very high read bandwidth achieved are impressive in such a small footprint.”

Mike Olson, chief strategy officer, Cloudera, Inc.https://cloudera.com, said: “DSSD was built for big data. The joint engineering solution from Cloudera and EMC provides an HDFS plug-in to accelerate applications and tools using DSSD and Cloudera. EMC is a key strategic partner for us, and the two companies worked hand-in-hand to bring this joint offering to market. Cloudera has tested the DSSD D5 appliance in our lab, and we’ve seen an order of magnitude increase in performance. It’s the fastest HBase cluster we’ve ever tested.“

Bob Olwig, VP of business strategy and marketing, World Wide Technology, Inc., said: “WWT has been an early DSSD partner and tested and validated the D5, and we’ve demonstrated the performance and TCO benefits of rack-scale flash to our joint customers. Increasingly, customers are looking to WWT for innovations that solve challenging business problems, particularly in the areas of big data and high performance enterprise analytics. DSSD’s D5 storage product is screaming fast and we see immediate benefits the D5 can bring to IT environments within our financial services, technology/telco and Federal verticals.“

Eric Burgener, research director for storage practice, IDC, said: “As companies come to better understand the value that real-time analytics offers in terms of identifying new prospects and new market opportunities, lead generation, and customer retention, the evolving big data segment will increasingly penetrate mainstream computing. This changes the scale, both in terms of performance and capacity, at which IT infrastructure must operate going forward, demanding significant changes in storage architectures. DSSD identified this opportunity early on and is introducing a new category of enterprise storage, called Rack-Scale Flash, with key features that define this new category, including a completely flash-optimized design, direct memory attachment for networked storage, a much lighter weight I/O stack that breaks latency and throughput barriers, and the separation of control and data planes.“
 
CJ Desai, president emerging technologies division, EMC, said: “EMC acquired DSSD in 2014 because we recognized its game-changing innovation. Today, we’re bringing a hardened, tested platform to market, changing the face of flash as we know it and rounding out EMC’s already-robust flash portfolio. DSSD is a blazing fast, high-performance solution and customers are in for a magnitude improvement in what’s now possible for demanding applications in this new era of Rack-Scale Flash.”