DOGS portfolio update: DELL + HP + RIMM

I’m taking some dough and building a dogs tech portfolio starting with DELL, HP & RIMM.  I’m planning to hold 3 quarters or more — what other companies should we be researching for the dogs?

Designing Systems and Infrastructure in the Big Data IO Centric Era (Wikibon Repost)

Originating Author: David Floyer

Original Post Here:  http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Designing_Systems_and_Infrastructure_in_the_Big_Data_IO_Centric_Era

Contents 1 Executive Summary 2 Details of One Billion IOPS Demonstration 3 Implications for IO Infrastructure 4 Implications for System & Application Design 5 Conclusions 6 Links 7 Footnotes 7.1 Detailed Assumptions behind Configuration Costs 7.2 Deep Dive: Comparison with Other Billion IOPS Configurations 7.3 Deep Dive: Fusion-io VSL and Auto Commit Memory APIExecutive Summary

Executive Summary

In January of 2008, EMC landed a haymaker by announcing the incorporation of flash SSD technology into Symmetrix, and started the IO-centric era. At the same time, Fusion-io had just come out of stealth mode with the announcement of the first flash PCIe card. Later in 2008 IBM and Fusion-io announced the first million IOPS Quicksilver benchmark. Just four years later, the Big-Data IO-Centric Era came of age when Fusion-io and HP demonstrated 1 Billion IOPS using eight servers and 64 flash PCIe cards. The key technology making this possible is atomic writes directly from the server memory to flash. The reduction in latency and overhead allows the real-time ingestion of transactional and event data and the very near real-time creation of metadata and indexes to allow effective real-time analytics.

Figure 1 – Log Graph of Total 3-year Hardware & Facilities Cost for Four Alternative 1 Billion IOPS Write Configurations. Source: Wikibon 2012

Wikibon analyzed the costs of four different 1 Billion IOPS configurations, shown in Figure 1. The differences are so great that a log graph is required. Figure 1 shows that:

• The Fusion-io/HP Atomic write configuration costs $3 million;
• The best configuration using a traditional IO software stack with PCIe flash cost an order of magnitude more, $34 million;
• The cost of the cheapest configuration using disk and SSDs cost about two orders of magnitude more, $220 million;
• The cost of a disk only configuration costs about three orders of magnitude more, $2,276 million.

The introduction of flash with atomic writes has allowed nearly a thousand-fold increase in the affordability of high IO applications in just four years. The impact of four years on the amount of space required to provide the computing for 1 billion IOPS is shown in Figure 2 below, reduced from the size of 2.7 football fields to a ½ rack.

The IO writes in this demonstration were small (64 bytes), and no work was done other than move the data from the server to the flash memory. It would be easy to dismiss the demonstration as trivial and not real-world.

Wikibon believes that would be a mistake, as the cost and capability implications are very significant. Many data sources such as Twitter, instant messages, Machine to machine (M2M) communication (such as refrigerators, automobiles, central heating), mobile location coordinates, metadata about a picture, etc., consist of a few bytes per input and are often event-driven. The ability to deal with massive numbers of IO at low cost will drive the development of applications to exploit these data torrents.

This research note analyzes how 1 Billion IOPS was achieved with atomic writes, looks in detail at the alternative ways that 1 Billion IOPS can be achieved and the cost differences, and looks at the implications on both IO infrastructure and system design going forward.

Wikibon concludes that atomic writes direct to flash will open up completely new ways of designing systems with enormous potential for improving business and societal efficiency, and providing new services to and from consumers, businesses, and governments. Wikibon believes that the overwhelming returns on new IO centric applications will drive infrastructure change from storage centric to IO centric over the remainder of this decade. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to disrupt the current status in most business segments, and the spoils will go to those who understand well and invest early and often.

Figure 2 – Space to scale taken by Four Alternative 1 Billion IOPS Write Configurations, from ½ rack (the little red dot in the top left of the green sphere) to 2.7 football fields.  Source: Wikibon 2012

Details of One Billion IOPS Demonstration

Figure 3 – Process flow for one HP DL370 server with 8 Fusion-io ioMemory2 Duo flash cards with VSL and non-locking Atomic Write API.  Source: Wikibon 2012

Figure 4 –Breakdown of Total 3-year Hardware & Facilities Cost for Three Alternative 1 Billion IOPS Write Configurations.   Source: Wikibon 2012

In San Francisco on January 5, 2012 Fusion-io and HP demonstrated a system driving a billion IOs per seconds (IOPS). Figure 3 shows the process flow. The “secret sauce” to achieving this performance is the elimination of the traditional IO stack by writing directly to flash memory. These writes use the Fusion-io VSL software with a beta version of an Auto Commit Memory API. The API performs an atomic write by communicating directly with the controller in a PCIe Fusion-io Drive. An atomic write guarantees in one pass that the data is secure, and the ioDrive controller is then responsible for any recovery of the data. This reduction of latency enabled by avoiding the traditional IO stack increases the throughput of the ioDrives from 1 million to more than 15 million IOs a second. The overall throughput of the server is now 125 million IOPS, and eight servers with a total of 64 ioDrives deliver 1 billion IOPS. The three-year total hardware and facilities cost of the solution is about $3 million. More detail of the assumptions behind this figure can be found in Footnote 1 & 2.

This capability is of great interest to database vendors and operators, as IO write time to persistent storage (particularly for database logs) is almost always a limiting factor for database throughput. The beta version of the Auto Commit VSL software does not yet include the locking features to ensure flash memory is not overwritten by another task, hence the name “non-locking atomic writes” used in this post. Fusion-io has indicated that it is working closely with some data-base vendors on a locking capability within the Auto Commit Memory API, which is likely to come to market in 2012.

Footnote 2 in the Footnotes section below give greater detail about the configurations shown in Figure 1 and Figure 4, and is optional reading. Wikibon analyzed the benchmark and created three other “thought experiment” configurations with the same throughput to look at the impact at the cost benefits of atomic writes.

Figure 4 looks at a breakdown of the costs of the most reasonable configurations. The detailed cost assumptions are shown in Table 1 in Footnote 1.

Implications for IO Infrastructure

This finding illustrates what Wikibon has been indicating for some time, that hard disk drives suck the life out of system performance, and are a major constraint to performance improvements and cost reductions. Indeed disk drive performance degrades annually as more and more data is stored under the actuator, a trend not offset by minimal improvements in seek times and spin speeds. Very high IO systems can be designed using flash-only approaches for active data at a dramatically lower cost than previously possible. This leads to an IO-centric design for both applications and infrastructure.

Figure 5 – Logical Model of the five layers in an IO Centric Infrastructure  Source: Wikibon 2012

Figure 5 describes the Wikibon IO centric model. There are five layers in this model, three physical and two management:

1. Local working flash layer
   • This layer places flash very close to clusters of processors and uses locking atomic writes. This enables all the operational and event IO from multiple sources to be processed. Because of the removal of the constraints of writing out to hard disks, the metadata and indexes can be created for use by security, compliance, real-time analytics, and archiving. This obviates the need to separate operational and data warehouse systems.
   • A reference model for equipment in layer 1 could be HP Proliant servers and Fusion-io cards with atomic writes using the Auto Commit Memory (ACM) API.
   • End-to-end security models would be managed at this level. A reference model could the the Stealth Technology from Unisys.
2. Active Data Management
   • This layer manages the integrity and movement of data between the local working flash layer (1) and the distributed, shared flash layer (3). Short-term backup and recovery would be controlled in this layer.
   • A reference model for equipment could be the later stages of Project Lightening from EMC with a plan to integrate tiering and cache coherency between the servers and storage arrays.
3. Distributed Shared Flash Layer
   • This layer provides lower latency access but is shared both locally and remotely by server clusters. Most metadata and indexes would be held in this layer, as well as other active transactional, event, and analytic data.
   • Compression and de-duplication of data at this level would lower costs and facilitate movement of data over distance.
   • A reference architecture could be a combination of flash-only arrays from vendors such as SolidFire that include flash IO tiering and management and federated arrays from HP 3PAR, EMC and NetApp.
4. Archive Management layer
   • This layer would manage the interface between the metadata and indexes and the archive disk layer and minimize the access and load times for data on disk.
   • Frameworks for this layer that could be considered would be object systems such as WOS from DDN and Cleversafe’s dispersed storage technology. These would require integration with cross-industry (e.g., email archiving) and industry specific archive software.
5. Distributed Archive/Long-Term Backup Layer
   • This layer provides the lowest cost storage (on hard disk drives or tape for the foreseeable future), where the detailed data is geographically distributed under the management of the metadata/indexes in layer 3 and the layer 4 management layer.
   • Reference models could be DDN S2A9900 architecture for sustained sequential IO and distributed cloud systems such as Nirvanix.

The thickness of the arrows in Figure 6 indicate the amount of data being transferred, and the arrow, the direction. Note that major flow is down through the layers. In practice there would be minimal transfer upwards from the lowest layer, as the IO and transfer costs are so high from hard disk drives.

Implications for System & Application Design

The results of the change in capability and cost of IO infrastructure is that the design of systems will also change dramatically:

1. Current Operational Systems could be consolidated or separate databases independent linked to provide a single source of “truth” of the state of a large and small business and government organizations.
2. Big Data Transaction and Event Systems can leverage the vast amount of information coming from people, systems, and M2M, ingest it and use the information to manage business operations, government operations, battlefields, physical distribution systems, transport systems, power distribution systems, agricultural systems, weather systems, etc., etc., etc.
3. Big Data Analytical Systems allow the extraction of metadata, index data and summary data directly from the input stream of operational big data. This in turn allows the development of much smarter analytical systems designed as an extension of the operational system in close to real time instead of a much delayed extract of available operational data.
4. Archive Systems would have the same ability to exploit the extracted metadata and indexes in real time. This could at last allow a complete separation of backup and archiving, improve the functionality of archive systems, and reduce the cost of implementing them. The ability to hold archive metadata and indexes in the active storage layers will allow much richer ability to mine data, and at the same time allow more effective access to detailed data records and the deletion of old data.

Conclusions

Systems design has been constrained for decades by the low speed of disk drive technology. The impact of this constraint has been increasing as server technologies improve while mechanical disk rotation speed remains constant. The cost per gigabyte has improved enormously; the cost per IO has changed very slowly.

The technology of atomic writes direct to flash removes these constraints. It allows the potential for unification of big transactional data and big-data analytics in the same system and will open up completely new ways of designing systems. Wikibon has written about theenormous potential for improving business and societal efficiency, and providing new services to and from consumers, businesses and governments.

Over the next decade, Wikibon believes that the overwhelming returns on new IO-centric applications that combine operational and analytic system will drive infrastructure change from storage-centric to IO-centric.

Action Item: CIOs should lead the business discussion on the potential of these system to radically improve the efficiency and reactiveness of their organizations. If their systems designers are not drooling over the potential of IO Centric, they should be assigned maintenance tasks. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to disrupt the current status in most business segments, and the spoils will go to those who understand well and invest early and often.

Links

Link to interview between John Furrier and David Floyer at the Node Summit 1/28/2012

Footnotes

The footnotes provide more detail on the configuration details and cost assumptions of the comparisons, as well as more technical detail about VSL.

Detailed Assumptions Behind Configuration Costs

Footnote 1

Table 1 below shows the detailed assumptions and costs underlying the previous figures.

Table 1 – Detailed Assumptions and Costs for Four Alternative 1 Billion IOPS Write Configurations.   Source: Wikibon 2012.

Deep Dive: Comparison With Other Billion IOPS Configurations

Footnote 2

This section gives greater detail about the configurations shown in Figure 1 and Figure 4 and is optional reading. Wikibon analyzed the benchmark and created three other “though experiment” configurations with the same throughput to look at the impact at the cost benefits of atomic writes. Figure 6 shows the four detailed configurations and the constraint on performance. One configuration is proven capable and the other three are theoretically capable of reaching one billion IOPS.

Figure 6 – Details of Four Alternative 1 Billion IOPS Write Configurations.
Source: Wikibon 2012

• The non-locking atomic write configuration is based on eight HP DL370 servers taking 2U of rack space, each with eight Fusion-io ioMemory2 Duo cards with 2.4TB of MLC flash. The total space is 16U of rack space (in the demonstration more space was left between the servers),and the total power requirement is 15kW. The system is well balanced, with the ultimate constraint being the flash cards, which topped out at 15,625,000 IOPS per card.
• The traditional write to PCIe flash uses the same type of configuration that was used in earliest one million IOPS demonstrations.
  • 1 million IOPS achieved by IBM and Fusion-io with the quicksilver project in 2008.
  • In 2009, HP reduced the server configuration required down to four quad-core AMD Opteron processors with five 320GB Fusion-io ioDrive Duos and six 160GB ioDrives.
  • At HP Discover in November 2011, HP achieved 1.55 million random 4K IOPS within a single HP ProLiant DL580 G7 server and ten ioDrives.
  • The “thought” configuration to achieve one billion 64 byte IOPS requires 250 HP ProLiant DL580 G7 servers configured with 4 x Ten-Core Intel® Xeon® E7-4870 2.40GHz 6.4GT/s QPI 30MB Cache (130W), 256 GB of 1333MHz ECC/REG DDR-III Memory, and 2,000 0.4TB ioDrive2 flash cards from Fusion-io. The performance constraint is the server. This delivers an IOPS rate of about 4 million/server. The rack space/server is 4U.
• The third 1 billion configuration assumes that the data is written to disk. To be able to balance the IOs, flash SSDs are used to block the 64byte writes into 1 MB chunks. For each server, five Anobit Genesis SSD drives were assumed with 200GB signal processing MLC. The form factor is 2.5” 6Gb/s SAS 2.0 drives with 510MB/s read and write speed and 50,000 P/E cycles. The output from the four drives is written to a single 2.5” Seagate® Savvio® 15K.3 6-Gb/s 146GB Hard Drive at a rate of 40 IOPS and 40 megabytes/second. The server assumed is a HP DL370 with 2 x Six-Core Intel® Xeon® X5660 2.80GHz 6.4GT/s QPI 12MB L3 Cache (95W), 72GB 1333MHz ECC/REG DDR-III Memory, in 2U of rack space. 5,000 servers are required.
• The fourth “thought” configuration assumes no flash or battery protected RAM, just disk drives: DAS/JBOD gone wild. It is assumed that with sequential write 300 IOPS could be achieved with a Hitachi 2.5″ drive. 5,000 servers are required to meet the server throughput (as in configuration 3), and 667 drives are required for each server to handle the IO write rate. In total 5,000 servers and 3.3 million disk drives are required, taking 8,588 racks to house the configuration and 90,875 kW of power.

Deep Dive: Fusion-Io VSL And Auto Commit Memory API

The VSL memory architecture provides multiple 2TB address space chunks. The first 2TB is used for system files. The remaining 2TB allocation chunks are for user data or directory files. A large file takes the whole chunk, while multiple small files share a single chunk. There can be up to 2⁷³ 2TB chunks.

VSL provides a set of functions that allow the flash storage to act as a memory subsystem. The key addition is that these functions allow the higher levels of the storage hierarchy to exploit the persistent nature of flash. The architecture pushes down the sector, buffer, and log management of flash to the flash controller, which takes responsibility for guaranteeing any write action or allocation request, and maintaining recoverability. The VSL layer is responsible for block erasures, reliability, and wear-leveling. In the event of a crash, the VSL driver can reconstruct its metadata from the flash device.

With the addition of the Auto Commit Memory (ACM) API, applications can declare a region of a VSL 2TB virtual address space as persistent. The application can then program to this region using regular memory semantics, such as pointer dereferences, and access the memory directly via CPU load and store operations. These operations bypass the normal IO stack components of the operating system, and as a result latency is significantly reduced.

In the event of a failure or restart, VSL and ACM work in cooperation with the existing platform hardware and CPU memory hierarchy, to apply the memory updates and ensure data persistence and integrity.

One obvious initial use of ACM is for acceleration of database and file-system logs, which will allow almost instantaneous releasing of locks held by a transaction. Fusion-io has indicated it is working with system and application developers to apply this technology to other opportunities in operating systems, hypervisors, and databases, and directly in applications.

Can Fusion-IO Outrun The Tiger? (repost)

There is a saying that goes, “you don’t have to be faster than the tiger, you just have to be faster than your slowest friend.” That may be a constructive way of thinking about Fusion-IO (NYSE:FIO) today. There’s no question that this is a high-growth tech stock with a huge multiple and huge expectations, but that has never stopped those tech stocks that can deliver the goods. (For more, seeEarning Forecasts: A Primer.)

Big Data 2.0
In some respects, what Fusion-IO seeks to do is relatively simple. In the same way that solid-state drives (SSD) have offered consumers considerably better performance than hard disk drives, Fusion-IO is trying to bring the advantages of flash/SSD memory to the enterprise data market.

Fusion-IO sells a two-part solution. The hardware consists of products like to ioDrive, a collection of flash cards (ioMemory) containing an array of NAND flash chips and an FPGA. These attach literally to the process server (through PCI Express) and can dramatically increase the throughput rates as a result.

There is also a software component, with the Virtual Storage Layer (VSL) software arguably the most important part. This is host driver software that manages the interface between the ioDrive and the operating system. Fusion-IO also has the directCache product that allows Fusion-IO’s products to work in virtualized systems like those created byVMware (NYSE:VMW).

Why Bother?
So why is Fusion-IO doing this? Don’t EMC (NYSE:EMC), NetAppliance (Nasdaq:NTAP) and International Business Machine (NYSE:IBM) already handle the storage needs for Big Data? Yes and no. There are certainly ample virtues to the approach used by EMC (and the others), particularly when it concerns large amounts of data.

The problem, though, is that these aren’t always especially fast systems – there’s something of a “request and go fetch” aspect to it. What Fusion-IO offers is a solution that is much faster (and ultimately cheaper) when speed is of the essence. It’s not yet economical to create an entirely flash-based storage network, but it can make sense for smaller pieces of time-sensitive data.

Early Days
It’s not fair to say that Fusion-IO is a solution in search of a market, but it is fair to say that this is a small early-stage opportunity. Some analysts believe that this will be a $5 billion addressable market in 2015 – by way of comparison, EMC has logged over $19 billion in revenue in its past twelve months. That said, don’t confuse “small today” with “small forever.” Just as hard drives replaced tape-based drives years ago, SSD is going to continue to grow as the costs come down.

Competitors and Buyers
Fusion-IO has a head-start on the competition, but that won’t last very long. First, there is a risk that the VSL software becomes a commoditized product over the next couple of years. More to the point, companies like EMC, NetApp, STEC (Nasdaq:STEC) and LSI (NYSE:LSI) have this market opportunity in their sights. EMC’s Project Lightning should ship in 2012 and while not so much is known about the hardware component, EMC does already have very good storage management software.

Looking more broadly, a host of other companies could potentially get into this market. Chip companies like Marvel Technology (Nasdaq:MRVL), SanDisk (Nasdaq:SNDK), Intel (Nasdaq:INTC) and Samsung arguably have the hardware wherewithal, but need to find a way to implement the software side – something that could get easier if VSL does become a commodity.

There’s also a good chance that Fusion-IO goes into the buyout rumor mill. OEM partners IBM and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) could certainly use this company to enliven the growth prospects of their storage businesses, while EMC has never been shy about pulling out its wallet to cover gaps in its own technology.

The Bottom Line
There’s no point in talking about valuation on a stock like Fusion-IO; sell side analysts will assign grotesque multiples to sales or earnings three years hence, but the reality is that it’s nearly impossible to model growth stories like this correctly. Trading at about nine times trailing sales, Fusion-IO is already in the neighborhood of pure software plays like VMware and ahead of other growth hardware names like F5 Network (Nasdaq:FFIV) or Mellanox (Nasdaq:MLNX).

None of this means that the stock can’t work – the reality of growth tech investing is that multiples seldom stand in the way of further appreciation if the growth is there. It’s a consummate case of “buy high and hope to sell higher.” So long as investors understand the risks that go with that sort of investing, and the inevitability of some “hiccups” along the way that lead to occasional sharppullbacks, it isn’t such a bad aggressive play. (For additional reading, check out 5 Must-Have Metrics For Value Investors.)

Use the Investopedia Stock Simulator to trade the stocks mentioned in this stock analysis, risk free!

At the time of writing, Stephen D. Simpson did not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this article.

By Stephen D. Simpson, CFA

 

Read more: http://stocks.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2012/Can-Fusion-IO-Outrun-The-Tiger-FIO-EMC-IBM-VMW0117.aspx#ixzz1jqpYngsv

SSDs choked by crummy disk interfaces: NVMe and SCSI Express Explained

This is the complete repost of Chris Mellior’s terrific article from last week:

Gotta be PCIe and not SAS or SATA

By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author

Posted in Storage, 7th December 2011 15:43 GMT

Free whitepaper – VMready

A flash device that can put out 100,000 IOPS shouldn’t be crippled by a disk interface geared to dealing with the 200 or so IOPS delivered by individual slow hard disk drives.

Disk drives suffer from the wait before the read head is positioned over the target track; 11msecs for a random read and 13msecs for a random write on Seagate’s 750GB Momentus. Solid state drives (SSDS) do not suffer from the lag, and PCIe flash cards from vendors such as Fusion-io have showed how fast NAND storage can be when directly connected to servers, meaning 350,000 and more IOPS from its ioDrive 2 products.

Generation 3 PCIe delivers 1GB/sec per lane, with a 4-lane (x4) gen 3 PCIe interface shipping 4GB/sec.

You cannot hook an SSD directly to such a PCIe bus with any standard interface.

You can hook up virtually any disk drive to an external USB interface or an internal SAS otr ATA one and the host computer’s O/S will have standard drivers that can deal with it. Ditto for an SSD using these interfaces, but the SSD is sluggardly. To operate at full speed and so deliver data fast and help keep a multi-core CPU busy, it needs an interface to a server’s PCIe bus that is direct and not mediated through a disk drive gateway.

What could go wrong with this rosy outlook? Plenty; this is IT. There is, of course, a competing standards initiative called SCSI Express.

If you could hook an SSD directly to the PCIe bus you could dispense with an intervening HBA that requires power, and slows down the SSD through a few microseconds added latency and a hard disk drive-connectivity based design.

There are two efforts to produce standards for this interface: the NVMe and the SCSI Express initiatives.

NVMe

NVMe, standing for Non-Volatile Memory express, is a standard-based initiative by some 80 companies to develop a common interface. An NVMHCI (Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface) work group is directed by a multi-member Promoter Group of companies – formed in June 2011 – which includes Cisco, Dell, EMC, IDT, Intel, NetApp, and Oracle. Permanent seats in this group are held by these seven vendors, with six other seats held by elected representatives from amongst the other work group member companies.

It appears that HP is not an NVMe member, and most if not all NVMe supporters are not SCSI Express supporters.

The work group released a v1.0 specification in March this years, and details can be obtained at the NVM Express website.

A white paper on that site says:

The standard includes the register programming interface, command set, and feature set definition. This enables standard drivers to be written for each OS and enables interoperability between implementations that shortens OEM qualification cycles. …The interface provides an optimised command issue and completion path. It includes support for parallel operation by supporting up to 64K command queues within an I/O Queue. Additionally, support has been added for many Enterprise capabilities like end-to-end data protection (compatible with T10 DIF and DIX standards), enhanced error reporting, and virtualisation.

The standard has recommendations for client and enterprise systems, which is useful as it means it will embrace the spectrum from notebook to enterprise server. The specification can support up to 64,000 I/O queues with up to 64,000 commands per queue. It’s multi-core CPU in scope and each processor core can implement its own queue. There will also be a means of supporting legacy interfaces, meaning SAS and SATA, somehow.

A blog on the NVMe website discusses how the ideal is to have a SSD with a flash controller chip, a system-on-chip (SoC) that includes the NVMe functionality.

What looks likely to happen is that, with comparatively broad support across the industry, SoC suppliers will deliver NVMe SoCS, O/S suppliers will deliver drivers for NVMe-compliant SSDs devices, and then server, desktop and notebook suppliers will deliver systems with NVMe-connected flash storage, possibly in 2013.

What could go wrong with this rosy outlook?

Plenty; this is IT. There is, of course, a competing standards initiative called SCSI Express.

SCSI Express

SCSI Express uses the SCSI protocol to have SCSI targets and initiators talk to each other across a PCIe connection; very roughly it’s NVMe with added SCSI. HP is a visible supporter of it, with there being SCSI Express booth at its HP Discover event in Vienna, and support at the event from Fusion-io.

Fusion said its “preview demonstration showcases ioMemory connected with a 2U HP ProLiant DL380 G7 server via SCSI Express … [It] uses the same ioMemory and VSL technology as the recently announced Fusion ioDrive2 products, demonstrating the possibility of extending Fusion’s Virtual Storage Layer (VSL) software capabilities to a new form factor to enable accelerated application performance and enterprise-class reliability.”

The SCSI Express standard “includes a SCSI Command set optimised for solid-state technologies … [and] delivers enterprise attributes and reliability with a Universal Drive Connector that offers utmost flexibility and device interoperability, including SAS, SATA and SCSI Express. The Universal Drive Connector also preserves legacy investments and enables support for emerging storage memory devices.”

An SNIA document states:

Currently ongoing in the T10 (www.t10.org) committee is the development of SCSI over PCIe (SOP), an effort to standardise the SCSI protocol across a PCIe physical interface. SOP will support two queuing interfaces – NVMe and PQI (PCIe Queuing Interface).

PQI is said to be fast and lightweight. There are proprietary SCSI-over-PCIe products available from PMC, LSI, Marvell and HP but SCSI Express is said to be, like PQI, open.

The support of the NVMe queuing interface suggests that SCSI EXpress and NVMe might be able to come together, which would be a good thing and prevent the industry working on separate SSD PCIe-interfacing SoCs and operating system drivers.

Of course this imagining could be just us blowing smoke up our own ass.

There is no SCSI Express website but HP Discover in Vienna last month revealed a fair amount about SCSI express, which is described in a Nigel Poulton blog.

He says that a 2.5-inch SSD will slot into a 2.5-inch bay on the front of a server, for example, and that “[t]he [solid state] drive will mate with a specially designed, but industry standard, interface that will talk a specially designed, but again industry standard, protocol (the protocol enhances the SCSI command set for SSD) with standard drivers that will ship with future versions of major Operating Systems like Windows, Linux and ESXi”.

HP SCSI Express card from HP Discover at Vienna

Fusion-io 2.5-inch, SCSI Express-supporting SSDs plugged into the top two ports in the card pictured above. Poulton says these ports are SFF 8639 ones. The other six ports appear to be SAS ports.

A podcast on HP social media guy Calvin Zito’s blog has two HP staffers at Vienna talking about SCSI Express.

SCSI Express productisation

SCSI Express productisation, according to HP, should occur around the end of 2012. We are encouraged (listen to podcast above) to think of HP servers with flash DAS formed from SCSI Express-connected SSDs, but also storage arrays, such as HP’s P4000, being built from ProLiant servers with SCSI Express-connected SSDs inside them.

This seems odd as the P4000 is an iSCSI shared SAN array, and why would you want to get data at PCIe speeds from the SSDs inside to its X86 controller/server, and then ship them across a slow iSCSI link to other servers running the apps that need the data?

It only makes sense to me if the P4000 is running the apps needing the data as well, if the P4000 and app-running servers are collapsed or converged into a single (servers + P4000) system. Imagine HP’s P10000 (3PAR) and X9000 (Ibrix) arrays doing the same thing: its Converged Infrastructure ideas seem quite exciting in terms of getting apps to run faster. Of course this imagining could be just us blowing smoke up our own ass.

El Reg’s takeaway from all this is that NVMe is almost a certainty because of the weight and breadth of its backing across the industry. We think it highly likely that HP will productise SCSI Express, with support from Fusion-io and that, unless there is a SCSI Express/NVMe convergence effort, we’re quite likely to face a brief period of interface wars before one or the other becomes dominant.

Concerning SCSI Express and NVMe differences, EMC engineer Amnon Izhar said: “On the physical layer both will be the same. NVMe and [SCSI Express] will be different transport/driver implementations,” implying that convergence could well happen, given sufficient will.

Our gut feeling is that PCIe interface convergence is unlikely, as HP is quite capable of going its own way; witness the FATA disks of recent years and also its individual and admirably obdurate flag-waving over Itanium. ®

Fusion-io ioDrive2: FIRST LOOK for THE REGISTER

Fusion-io deploys PCIe flash toaster

Self-healing powers claimed if you play the magic card

By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author

Posted in Storage, 4th October 2011 10:13 GMT

Free whitepaper – Fluid data architecture pays off for CMA

Fusion-io has refreshed the whole of its ioDrive product range with smaller flash chip dies and new controller firmware to produce high performance, longer lasting flash using less silicon.

CEO David Flynn said the current ioDrive technology was introduced four years ago and Fusion was now “introducing something that will toast it. This thing is a beast”.

The ioDrives are PCIe-connected cards in half-length format and use NAND chips that are either single-level cell (SLC) or 2-bit multi-level cell (MLC) and require a 29nm to 20nm process (2Xnm). We think this is Samsung NAND using a 27nm process. There’s a half-height ioDrive and a full-height ioDrive Duo to choose from.

The 2Xnm NAND is inherently slower than 3Xnm dies, but Fusion says its controller technology, including its firmware, more than compensates for this.

Flynn says Fusion can use the cheapest commodity 2Xnm dies and give it performance and endurance such that second-generation ioDrives out-perform first-generation products. There’s no need, he says, to use enterprise-grade MLC (eMLC).

ioDrive 2

There is a new card design with the flash mounted on up to three daughter cards attached to the base card.

The ioDrive 2 comes in SLC form with capacities of 400GB and 600GB. It can deliver 450,000 write IOPS working with 512-byte data blocks and 350,000 read IOPS. These are whopping great increases, 3.3 times faster for the write IOPS number, over the original ioDrive SLC model which did 135,000 write IOPS and 140,000 read IOPS. It delivered sequential data at 750-770MB/sec whereas the next-gen product does it at 1.5GB/sec, around two times faster.

There is an MLC version of the ioDrive 2 which comes in 365GB, 785GB and 1.2TB capacity points.

The SLC version of the larger format ioDrive 2 Duo has a 1.2TB capacity point and the MLC version 2.4TB.

ioDrive 2 Duo

How fast?

The SLC version of the ioDrive 2 Duo can deliver 900,000 write IOPS and 700,000 read IOPS, at 3GB/sec. The first-generation product did 262,000 and 261,000 respectively, at 1.5GB/sec reading and 1.1GB/sec writing speeds.

Flash product suppliers generally quote IOPS numbers using 4KB data blacks whereas Fusion typically uses 512B blocks. A 4KB block size aligns with flash’s 4KB page size but 512B blocks require a read, modify, write process. This is not necessary with Fusion-io’s products, according to Flynn.

We have one set of 4KB block IOPS numbers from Fusion: the 1.2TB, SLC ioDrive 2 Duo does 503,000 read IOPS with 4KB blocks and 664,000 write IOPS.

Flynn emphasises that the performance comes at low queue depth. Typically, he says, performance is quoted by suppliers with a high queue depth so that the parallelism in a product’s controllers can really get the data moving. But real world experience is lower queue depths, because flash responds so quickly. Here Fusion’s products speed along while competing ones, typically comprised of, he says, RAID controllers, SandForce controllers, and flash dies, start limping.

He also asserts that Fusion’s products perform very well with mixed read/write workloads, whereas other products show a bathtub effect: high numbers for pure reads and writes but much lower ones for mixed workloads.

A Fusion spokesperson said: “The cards are only now going through performance tuning. In addition, we expect Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors to have a major beneficial impact since our design is built to leverage system processor improvements.”

Better availability

Flynn said that MLC flash products makes up about 80 per cent of Fusion’s business. It actually started shipping 2Xnm-class dies some months ago on the ioDrive Octal product, a custom product generally sold direct to large customers; where 3Xnm devices could hold 5.12TB of data, 2Xnm-class kit now stores up to 10TB.

It self-heals to the point where it covers for subsequent failures ad infinitum. We don’t believe that customers should have to service anything.

The first-generation product had N+1 redundancy at the chip level. Flynn said that the next-gen product is self-healing. Its Adaptive FlashBack technology provides full chip level fault tolerance, which enables an ioDrive to repair itself after a single chip or a multi chip failure without interrupting business continuity. The repair process takes about an hour: “It self-heals to the point where it covers for subsequent failures ad infinitum. We don’t believe that customers should have to service anything.”

This idea that customers should not have to replace modules reminds us of XIO’s Hyper ISE, that sealed canister of drives with a 5-year warranty against customers ever needing an engineer to poke around inside it and replace failed components.

Flynn said Fusion-io has added endurance extending technologies to the ioDrive 2 products. There are no published endurance numbers, though we expect, given Fusion’s OEM customers, that endurance is good. Flynn said that the endurance has increased with the ioDrive 2 products.

Fusion’s competition

There are several competitors who have been waiting for this Fusion refresh: Micron, OCZ, STEC, TMS and Virident are the main ones. They use a 4KB block size for their IOPS numbers.

All we can compare are raw numbers, and hope the numbers are divergent enough to indicate meaningful relationships, even though it’s an apples and oranges comparison, apart from the 4KB numbers for the ioDrive 2 Duo SLC product.

Micron’s rocket-like P320h, a 3Xnm SLC product, does 750,000 read IOPS and 341,00 write IOPS, with 3GB/sec read and 2GB/sec write bandwidths. The read IOPS are significantly higher that the 503,000 of Fusion’s ioDrive 2 Duo SLC but significantly slower than the Fusion product’s 4KB write IOPS. With 512B blocks, the Fusion product is almost twice as fast on write IOPS though, while being a mere 50,000 IOPS slower on reads and overall faster on bandwidth. The medal goes to Fusion overall then.

Fusion-io’s ioDrive Octal

OCZ’s VeloDrive PCIe numbers are simply incomprehensible: for example, read IOPS are expressed in MB/sec for hardware RAID, while software RAID speed is quoted for compressible and incompressible data. We give up. Give the dratted thing a test drive alongside the Fusion product to make a comparison in your own shop.

“This thing is a beast”

STEC’s Kronos BiTurbo PCIe SSA holds up to 3.9TB of MLC and, in SLC form, does 440,000 read IOPS, 400,000 write IOPS and boasts a 4GB/sec bandwidth. The Kronos Turbo on its own does 220,000 read IOPS, 200,000 write IOPS and shifts 2GB/sec. Fusion has that one whipped it seems, apart from the bandwidth number.

TMS’ RamSan-70, based on 3Xnm Toshiba SLC NAND, does 330,000 read IOPS, 600,000 in burst mode, and 400,000 write IOPS to heave 2GB/sec. On the raw number basis Fusion has it beat as well. We note that a CSCS analysis had this TMS product way-outperform a first-generation ioDrive product from Fusion though.

Virident’s SLC TachION delivers a claimed (see CSCS analysis above) 300,000 IOPS with a mixed read/write workload and a peak 1.4GB/sec bandwidth. Fusion appears to have it whipped too.

The verdict

The verdict is pretty clear. On headline raw numbers Fusion-io’s ioDrive 2 products generally leave the competition in the dust, except for Micron, but the P320h is let down by poor write IOPS numbers.

Of course all these PCIe cards won’t compete in a uniform PCIe market; it being split up into various sectors each with their own workload and price/performance characteristics.

Fusion is hoping that, with its wide spread of capacity points and performance levels, it can compete in as many of these sectors as possible, while focussing on mainstream pure enterprise business and not the flash web businesses. Its mainstream enterprise customers buy kit from Dell, HP and IBM and look for that level of reliability, performance, value and support.

Our first reaction is that, with this launch, Fusion-io has, in El Reg’s opinion, cemented its position as the PCIe flash card leader.

All the products will ship in November. Prices start from $5,950. ®

FIO POST-IPO ANALYSIS: MUST READING

(repost from bobdark @ seeking alpha)

Regarding your comment:

“And yes, it’s true that FIO has sold 12,000 server cards in the last two years, at $3,000 per card. And it’s true that Dell (DELL), IBM (IBM) and HP (HPQ) ship nine million servers per year, but that’s a different business”

Dell and HP both provide the Fusion-io cards as options for most of their server offerings. I think you are underestimating the revenue that this will generate as companies increasingly will opt for the built-in cards.

Its tempting to think that all IPOs are overpriced like Linked-In and don’t have a future, but before making a call on this, it is important to investigate the technology involved with this and the direction for data storage and what Fusion-io will be able to do in terms of research and moving ahead of the competition with this cash injection. There is an awful lot of potential here when considering the inevitable replacement of millions of platter-based storage in Enterprise data centers as the Infiniband and ISCSI networking along with the energy costs will make traditional storage obsolete in the same way that LCDs made monitors obsolete – the price/performance/space curve for flash is moving faster than mechanical disk storage.

Unlike Linked-In and many of the “tech” IPOs, Fusion-IO is a hard-core technology company based on sophisticated engineering rather than just an Internet store front with clever marketing. This means that the bulk of retail investors probably don’t understand the implications of the technology as it is not simple to understand the differentiation of Fusion-IO from the other SSD vendors who are mostly encumbered by a much slower bus architecture (i.e. SATA III at 6 Gbps (0.75 GBps) vs PCIE-at up to 16 GBps for an Octal card (over 20 times faster). It’s a good thing in that it keeps the IPO from being a bubble due to lack of interest, although it does mean it may take some time before it really takes off.

The most successful IPOs are not necessarily the most well-known when launched, just the most innovative and the most profitable over the long-haul. The focus of Fusion-io to this point has not been on profitability but on gaining market share and building a reputation. I speak from experience as a database developer that they have established a reputation for amazing performance with very large databases enabling real-time simulation and data-analysis applications with a few cards that simply are not possible with hundreds of mechanical disks.

No doubt in mind that they will be extremely profitable and more large customers will come. I suspect that Google may be looking at Fusion-IO as they utilize a distributed database architecture using thousands of servers like MySpace and Facebook. Fusion-IO is also developing technology to leverage the higher speed PCIE SSD across Infiniband which will support high-availability network storage for large database servers and virtualization data centers in the Cloud.

Fusion-IO has established a very good reputation and is the leader in PCIE-SSD, with the capital from the IPO, they have a good chance of staying one step ahead of the competition and their partnership with the hardware and storage vendors also gives them an edge.

FUSION-IO UPDATE: LAST POST BEFORE IPO THURSDAY

from SEEKING ALPHA (repost)

Backed by venture firms NEA and Lightspeed, Fusion-io (FIO) markets a next generation storage memory platform that boosts data access speeds. The company plans to raise $209 million in its IPO by offering 12.3 million shares at a proposed price range of $16 and $18; it had originally filed to offer shares at $13 to $15 before boosting the price range by 21% in a sign of strong deal demand.

At the midpoint of the upwardly revised range, Fusion-io would be valued at $1.7 billion. Fusion-io plans to price today (Wednesday) after the market close and list on the NYSE on Thursday under the ticker symbol FIO. Goldman, Sachs & Co., Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan are the lead underwriters on the deal, which is one of three deals scheduled to price on this week’s US IPO calendar.

Background

Fusion-io seeks to address what it refers to as the “data supply problem,” or low levels of server utilization caused by the widening gap between processing and storage performance. It markets a data decentralization platform that helps enterprises improve processing capabilities by relocating “active” data from centralized storage to servers, thereby improving processing capabilities by up to 10x and significantly reducing costs. Its platform, which bundles proprietary hardware and software, has been shipped to over 1,500 end users since inception, including companies such as Facebook and Apple (AAPL), as well as OEMs like Dell (DELL), HP (HPQ) and IBM (IBM).

Financials

Fusion-io booked $126 million in the nine months ended March 30, 2011, quadrupling the $25 million generated in the year-ago period. Facebook accounted for 47% of revenue, while its ten largest customers accounted for 91%. The company turned profitable with $7 million in EBITDA but remained cash flow negative (-$2 million) due to increasing levels of inventory. It expects to drive further growth by adding software capabilities, deepening customer relationships, growing its sales force and expanding internationally (18%).

Risks

Fusion-io has experienced rapid growth throughout its relatively short operating history, highlighting the value of its first-to-market data storage platform. That said, it carries execution risk as a small company with an accumulated deficit of $70 million. Furthermore, most of its business is derived from large-scale data storage installation projects rather than repeat purchases, resulting in highly volatile financial results, which is magnified by its high degree of customer concentration. For example, Fusion-io expects revenue to fall sequentially in the FY4Q11 following large orders by Facebook in the 3Q. Lastly, it competes with traditional storage/software vendors, as well as various privately held companies that are developing similar technology.

Outlook

With a unique product and massive addressable market opportunity, Fusion-io should spark investor interest, especially in the wake of acquisitions of fast-growing storage and networking companies such as Compellent, Isilon, Netezza and 3PAR. Fusion-io may also benefit from its connection with Facebook amidst ongoing buzz in the social media space following Groupon’s (GRPN) recent IPO filing.

FUSION-IO UPDATE: IPO WEEK OF JUNE 9 (Quote, Dow Jones, Bloomberg)

QUOTE.COM

Back to Calendar Week of Expected Pricing 06/09/2011
Company Name Fusion-io,Inc.
Proposed Ticker FIO
CUSIP 36112J107
Business Description A next generation storage memory platform for data decentralization.
Lead Underwriter Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC,Goldman, Sachs & Co, J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated.
Co-Managers N/A
Initial Shares 12300000
Revised Initial Shares
Initial Price $13.0
Revised Price
Final Price
Final Ticker

DOW JONES

DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

Fusion-io Inc. unveiled estimated terms for a bigger-sized initial public offering of its stock to raise funds for expansion.

The data company expects to offer at least 12.3 million shares at an estimated price of $13 to $15 each, according to its filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Fusion-io plans to offer at least 10.8 million shares, while selling shareholders intend to offer at least 1.5 million shares.

The company in March initially had filed plans for an IPO of up to an estimated $150 million.

Fusion-io specializes in data decentralization, which it said improves the processing capability of a data center by moving active data to the server where it is being processed from centralized storage.

The tech sector–and particularly the data storage field–has benefited of late from increased information-technology spending by businesses.

The company reported that its loss narrowed to $1.2 million in the nine months ended March 31 as revenue soared to $125.5 million amid stronger volume. Fusion-io said revenue from its 10 largest customers accounted for 91% of its revenue in the latest period, with Facebook Inc. accounting for 47% of the total.

Prior to the quarter ended March 31, the company has posted quarterly losses since its inception. The company, which was founded in December 2005, sold its first products in April 2007.

Fusion-io shares have been approved for listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol FIO

BLOOMBERG

Fusion-io Inc., a maker of flash- memory technology for companies including Facebook Inc., plans to sell shares in its initial public offering for $13 to $15 apiece, valuing the company at as much as $1.17 billion.

Fusion-io said it will sell 10.8 million shares along with an additional 1.54 million to be sold by other stockholders, according to a regulatory filing today. The stock will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker FIO.

The Salt Lake City-based company aims to raise as much as $212.2 million, up from the $150 million offering announced in March. The increase follows last week’s IPO of LinkedIn Corp., which more than doubled in value on its first day of trading, even after raising the per-share price. Founded in 2005, Fusion- io is benefiting from a shift among corporations to flash memory from traditional storage drives.

Flash has no moving parts and can access data more quickly than disks, which rely on spinning platters to hold information. Facebook, owner of the world’s biggest social network, is Fusion-io’s largest customer, accounting for 47 percent of revenue in the nine months ended March 31.

Fusion-io has raised more than $110 million in venture capital, and it counts Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak among its top executives.

Sales Surge

Sales in the first quarter surged fivefold to $67.3 million, from $13.4 million a year earlier, according to the filing. Assuming the same revenue over the next three quarters and a $1.17 billion valuation, Fusion-io will be valued at 4.35 times sales, compared with a price-to-sales ratio of about 11 for LinkedIn when its shares started trading.

Fusion-io turned profitable in the first quarter, reporting net income of $7.04 million, compared with a $6.71 million loss a year earlier.

The company’s biggest shareholder is venture firm New Enterprise Associates, which owns 39 percent of the company. Lightspeed Venture Partners holds 13 percent, and Chief Executive Officer David Flynn controls 10 percent.

Fusion-io said in January that it’s shipped more than 15 petabytes of flash memory to corporations in the past year — enough to hold more than 199 years’ worth of continuously played high-definition video. Fusion-io combines software and memory chips to speed the rate that server computers can access data.

Its products are sold through Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) and Dell Inc. The bulk of Fusion-io’s purchases come from a limited number of partners, with the 10 largest customers accounting for 91 percent of revenue in the nine months ended March 31.

“As a consequence of our limited number of customers and the concentrated nature of their purchases, our quarterly revenue and operating results may fluctuate from quarter to quarter and are difficult to estimate,” the company said in today’s filing.

Steve Sicola: SUPERSTAR!!

 

CRN unveiled its 2010 class of Storage Superstars spotlighting 10 “individuals and groups that made the modern storage industry what it is today.” And among the visionaries honored was Xiotech CTO Steve Sicola.

The “driving force on several generations of storage arrays and architectures,” Steve was recognized for his nearly 40 patents, tenure at Compaq and DEC, and as VP of Seagate’s Advanced Storage Architecture (ASA) Group. Informally known as the “Skunk Works” – an homage to Lockheed Martin’s legendary engineering team – the ASA Group was acquired by Xiotech in 2007 and architected ISE.

“Steve embodies the passion, commitment and innovative thinking – all hallmarks of Xiotech – that serve as the foundation of this company and have fueled the revolution that is ISE,” said Xiotech President and CEO Alan Atkinson. “With Steve overseeing our Storage Fellows Program, we look forward to his (and others’) continued contributions to the industry and Xiotech – including the next-generation of ISE.”

Congratulations Steve!

Too good to be true? Make me prove it…

  

Taking disruptive technology to early adoption is in my DNA — the very fabric of who I am.  I’ve had the privilege to engage with great technologists — many of whom remain colleagues today.  As many of you know, I am recently on board at Xiotech, some of which was part of Seagate until a few years ago and is still an integral part of our ownership and our IP.  The messaging in the storage space can be confusing — here are some ideas that may help break through the noise.  So here’s your challenge:

 

Q:  What do IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, NetApp, 3Par, Compellent and Xiotech have in common?

A:  We all use disk drives manufactured by Seagate.

No matter which storage vendor you deploy, Seagate drives are at the heart of the technology.  Now let me share with you Xiotech’s Integrated Storage Element (ISE).  We take the very same Seagate technology to the next level — after all, we know these drives better than any other storage vendor.

Example:

PLAN #1:  Deploy 100 $20k storage subsystems of [INSERT YOUR BRAND HERE] each costing  15% to keep under maintenance in years 4 & 5 (assuming 3 year warranty) = $600,000. 

PLAN #2:  Acquire xiotech ISE @ 30% less initial acquistion cost/space/energy to produce the same performance (or better) and pay $0 in hardware maintenance over 5 years. 

          or – use the comparable acquisition cost to get 30% more performance from the start

          or – use the NPV of the maintenance to get more performance/density

If you’re a former client from FileTek, Agilis, Sensar, Verity, Immersion or Fusion-io, you’ve seen what I’ve seen:  disruptive technology making a significant difference – and Xiotech ISE is no different.

Don’t believe me?  MAKE ME PROVE IT!