0.061: swinging from the sidelines

He Hu Shall Not Be Named has returned from his vacation in Aloha-land to learn that EMC has announced something of which he knows nothing about. Predictably, he has wasted no time demonstrating his total lack of knowledge about enterprise flash drives in his latest blog post.

Makes me wonder what the "CTO of Hitachi Data Systems" really does, since he obviously isn't following emerging new storage technologies all that closely.

Nor did he even take the time to do any research before posting, choosing instead to throw wildly uninformed punches at the technology in an attempt to defend Hitachi being caught flat-footed.

Not surprisingly, HHSNBN even manages to drag virtualization into the discussion. Now, is it just me, or does it seems like he can't write a post without using the V-word? I'm beginning to think he must use a customized version of the Ergonomic Keyboard for Pirates that has been making the rounds of late (pictured at right). On his version, though, the "Avast" key types "Virtualization."

<Shift>VIRTUALIZATION<Space>RRRR<shift>!!!<Enter>

Swinging from the sidelines

Clearly lacking a relevant clue about the the technology (and unable to buy a vowel), HHSNBN alleges that anything NAND can do, DRAM can do better and faster. Which is true, I guess, if you include consuming your IT budget in that comparison. Because as expensive as SLC NAND flash is today, it's already an order of magnitude or two cheaper than high-performance DDR2 SDRAM. Must be that Hitachi Math thing again.

So I'll just tack that one on the bulletin board right alongside "Intermixing, slower, less reliable SATA or FATA disks in tier 1 storage systems will impact that system’s performance and availability", which was HHSNBN's excuse for not supporting SATA in the USP. Right up until Hitachi Japan added SATA support to the USP-V at the end of last year, that is.

Some words of advice seem appropriate here:

It is far better to remain silent and be thought a fool
than to speak out and remove all doubt.

(the debate rages over who actually said this first)

the truth about enterprise flash drives

For the record, the enterprise flash drives that EMC announced last week are not the same as the consumer flash drives that is going into Airbooks, laptops and IBM blade servers. And they won't silently lose data (they'd be pretty useless if they did) - like disk drives they remap suspected bad blocks before they cause a problem. They'll probably outlive the practical life of the storage array before they wear out - the nominal operating life of SLC NAND flash typically far exceeds the rated minimal 100,000 writes per cell, and when you add in wear leveling across nearly 2x extra capacity within the drive, they will outlive all but the pathological 100% write forever use case.

Yes, enterprise flash drives use SDRAM buffers to accelerate writes, with both internal and Symmetrix-supplied backup power to protect that memory against unexpected loss of power, be it momentary or an extended outage. They are shielded from electrical and mechanical interference in a disk-drive form factor. And they do indeed provide extensive status reporting (basically the Fibre Channel & SCSI equivalent of S.M.A.R.T.), affording the array the ability to be proactive in protecting customer data.

And you don't have to take my word on that.

Thankfully, the folks over at Wikibon have taken a much more thoughtful approach at evaluating last week's Symmetrix announcements. After what was obviously a lot of actual research, they today presented a comprehensive review of enterprise-class flash drives, the customer benefits they can deliver and the practical implications that they will likely have on the entire storage industry over the coming years. I encourage you to read and comment on their review.

Oh - it's aptly titled EMC Lands a Haymaker.

Comments

[Barry Whyte]

Hehe. I did read it and thought to myself he obviously hadn't seen or heard of STEC and how he was preaching from an out of date prayer book.

PS. I like the quote - made me chuckle

[Speedy G]

"Because as expensive as SLC NAND flash is today, it's already an order of magnitude or two cheaper than high-performance DDR2 SDRAM."

Actually, SLC is not even close to an order of magnitude cheaper, it is on average about 60% the cost of DDR2. So, it's not even half the cost much less 10 or 100 times less expensive.

[the storage anarchist]

OK, so I mangled that one.

But still, on a SYSTEM level, I'm pretty sure that an SDRAM-based SSD with battery backup and persistent storage will run you about 10x what an equivalently-sized enterprise-class SLC NAND Flash Drive will cost you.

[Speedy G]

No biggie, everyone lets one slip by every now and then.

Regarding system costs, that might be the case for DRAM-based SSDs on the market right now, but to make a SLC-based SSD with enterprise-class performance and reliability the cost advantage can get eroded even when factoring in battery backup and persistent storage that dram-based SSDs use.