With Help From Fusion-io, Facebook’s Data Centers Are Going All Flash

With Help From Fusion-io, Facebook’s Data Centers Are Going All Flash

Today, Fusion announced that its latest product, Fusion ioScale, which has been available to existing customers like Facebook for a while, is now generally available to new customers as well. The implications for data centers aren’t trivial. I talked with CEO David Flynn about this last week and he summed it up to me simply: Data centers are going all flash. Hard drives are on their way out. Get used to it.

FIO and OCZ got hammered last week…

OCZ got hammered after the earnings call so I went ahead added a boatload…earnings for FIO in 30 days.  One analyst predicts $95m for the quarter with increased margins above 54%*.  That equates to FY12 of $347.7m in revenue.  I believe the FY12 number will be closer to $400m and the margin will be slightly less — here is the YTD chart for FIO compared to OCZ.

FIO/OCZ YTD CHART

One expert I spoke with said the FIO/Princeton announcement about seamless memory w/ HSM applied is more marketing spin than technology innovation.  But my feeling is the horse is out of the barn on this announcement which was lead by Princeton University.  Net Net:  Rick White still owns the flash mindspace — no one even comes close.

In other not random news:

• A buddy of mine is now at CORAID — he’s one of the most senior and respected pre-sales engineers in the storage space and his Rolodex is without peer.  Carl Wright is making waves over there.
• Google just picked up some really ugly space on the western side of 101 and Informedika, my firm, got kicked out of our month-to-month lease recently — we were in the no-man’s-land east of 101 in that little corner tucked in between Moffett and NetApp.
• Traffic on both the 101 & 280 are misery this summer.
• Some friends  just paid $1000 sq/ft for a condo in SOMA on the east side of 3rd street.

Conclusion:  Silicon Valley (and the Bay Area in general)  Is Back

*Courtesy of Andrew Nowinski.  Copyright 2012 Piper Jaffray. All rights reserved.

GridIron CTO Talks About PCIe Flash

GridIron Systems is making news this week about its new SAN-attached data accelerator called the TURBOCHARGER (can somebody please alert the marketing department this product name is reserved for automobiles engines?).

Anyway, the CTO is Som Sikdar — no introductions needed, right?  Legend!  Here are his views on flash:

http://bigdatafasttracked.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/pcipart1/

SSD Update: this is the one session you MUST ATTEND at Percona MySQL in April

MySQL and SSD: usage and tuning

In this talk, Vadim Tkachenko (Percona CTO) will cover Solid State Drives internals and how they affect database performance.
IO level benchmarks for SATA (Intel 320 SSD) and PCI-e (FusionIO, Virident) cards
to show absolute performance and give an idea on performance per $.
And finally how you can use MySQL and Percona Server with SSD,
what tuning parameters are most important and what performance may expect in real
production usage.

Track:

Utilizing Hardware

Experience level:

 Beginner

MORE HERE:  
http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/sessions/mysql-and-ssd-usage-and-tuning

REGISTER HERE:  
http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/

Note from Steve:  This show is a MUST for anyone thinking about solid state memory extensions or SSDs.  Just take a look at the speakers, sponsors, and exhibitors!

Barclays Believes In Violin Memory

Violin Memory – All Flash Memory Arrays Seeing Increased Interest

Violin Memory is a privately held emerging player in storage, offering all SSD Flash storage arrays for primary data. Violin’s storage arrays connect to servers and provide significantly improved performance over traditional HDD/SSD hybrid storage arrays. The company’s solutions are used in environments that require high power and capacity with little to no latency. According to Violin, its SSD arrays can help accelerate the performance of applications in database environments (for reporting and transaction acceleration), Web servers, scientific computing (HPC), and Tier 0 storage. In June of 2010, Violin acquired Gear6, a company focused on Memcaching, a distributed memory caching system for web and cloud environments, which helps increase utilization among server and storage assets. The company has key strategic relationships with Toshiba (a supplier of its NAND Flash) and Juniper, who have each made significant investments in the company over the past several years.

Violin’s go-to-market strategy consists of its direct sales force, key VARs, and co-branded joint-selling agreements with HP (to compete against Exadata) and IBM to deploy IBM’s GPFS file system in clustered, scale-out environments. Violin’s solution is seeing significant interest in databases running Oracle, DB2 and SQL. Violin has previously stated that it expects to exit its current fiscal year (ending in January 2012) with $100mm in trailing revenue, with a go forward run-rate of $40 million-$50 million per quarter. We believe the company is looking to fill out its solution set with feature-rich software and could look to acquire new point products or develop these capabilities internally. Violin’s technology already includes data management tools but the company seems to be looking at adding increased features and functionality over time. We believe that both all-flash memory arrays and flash-based PCIe-based server storage represent the next wave of technologies that are altering the landscape of the storage industry. We believe that customers can find compelling use cases for these solutions and that Violin Memory (as well as companies such as Fusion-io) will continue to gain share within this growing market.

(Copyrighted Material from Barclays Capital Equity Research)

The Bleak Future of NAND Flash Memory?

Newly published research purports to claim that as NAND flash dies get smaller (as they inevitably will) there is a predictable drop in reliability and an increase in latency to the point of a diminishing return that “makes the future of SSDs couldy.”

According to one source:  the researchers chose 45 chips from 6 manufacturers.  They did not use specialized NAND flash controllers as are used by SSD vendors such as Intel, OCZ or Fusion-io. Instead their results were baseline and considered “optimistic” because they didn’t include latency added through error correction or garbage collection algorithms.

Really?  No controller & no error correction & no garbage collection?  That’s like putting a racing car on the track and forgetting the tires — results will be poor.  Here is the entire paper:

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/FAST2012BleakFlash.pdf

 

What’s going on at STEC?

Some serious discord:  
http://ssdblog12.wordpress.com/2012/02/

Zebi Storage Array Features De-Duplication, Compression, and Thin Provisioning

The latest entrant in the flash appliance war is the Zebi Storage Array from Tegile.  The marketing engine at Tegile is on steroids — according to their website, we can expect the following:

5X the Performance

Through the deep integration of SSD and caching technologies, Tegile systems deliver five times the performance of legacy arrays. These performance gains are recognized by applications even when their data ultimately lands on hard disk drives. High IOPS and low latency for everyone.

Up to 75% Less Capacity

In-line compression and de-duplication are used on SSD and hard disk drive media throughout the array. This allows customers to significantly reduce their acquisition and operational cost of storage. All application data is reduced – not just secondary applications, and not in a post-process manner.

NAS and SAN From the Same Array

Enjoy the flexibility of choice in how your storage is connected to your servers. Fibre Channel and iSCSI block protocols are supported, while both NFS and CIFS file protocols are available for NAS environments. No more silos of storage in your data center.

Built in Business Continuity

Integrated snapshot and remote replication functionality shrink backup windows down to next to nothing and eliminates the need for backup software. Our thin replication feature only transmits changed data to reduce the burden on the WAN as well, saving even more.

Storage Simplified

Tegile’s arrays are dramatically easier to manage than legacy systems. Application optimized templates accelerate the provisioning process and implement best practices in a single mouse click. Backup and replication are built in – no complex back-end software to manage. Best yet – all of our software is included in a single license.

and the best part of all is the price, of course.  Learn more here:  
http://www.tegile.com/products/zebi-storage-arrays/

 

Fusion-io Raised To Buy From Hold By Benchmark

According to Benchmark, “First, Fusion-io’s shares gapped down following 2Q12 results due primarily to gross margin concerns. Second, EMC’s official launch of VFCache (formerly known as Project Lightning) on Monday, February 6 took a bite out of Fusion-io’s share price, as investors became more concerned about competition in server attached flash storage. In our opinion, both of these factors are minor, and thus, have created an excellent entry point for investors. Therefore, we are increasing our rating from “Hold” to “Buy”.”

Benchmark maintains its $30 PT on Fusion-io, which closed yesterday at $24.10.

Read more: 
http://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/12/02/2346373/update-benchmark-upgrades-fusion-io-to-buy#ixzz1mSxN4MmW

FIO Financial Roadshows Update: Four Major Conferences in San Francisco

Credit Suisse Solid State Storage Conference
San Francisco, California
Wednesday, February 8, 2012, 2:15 p.m. (PT)
David A. Flynn, CEO, and Dennis P. Wolf, CFO

Barclays Big Data Conference
San Francisco, California
Monday, February 13, 2012, 4:30 p.m. (PT)
David A. Flynn, CEO, and Dennis P. Wolf, CFO

Goldman Sachs Technology & Internet 2012 Conference
San Francisco, California
Tuesday, February 14, 2012, 10:20 a.m. (PT)
David A. Flynn, CEO, and Dennis P. Wolf, CFO

Morgan Stanley 2012 Technology, Media & Telecom Conference
San Francisco, California
Tuesday, February 28, 2012, 4:05 p.m. (PT)
David A. Flynn, CEO, and Dennis P. Wolf, CFO