• IBM Storage Rides Up Flash And NVM-Express

    February 20, 2018

    IBM’s systems hardware business finished 2017 in a stronger position than it has seen in years, due in large part to the continued growth of the company’s stalwart System z mainframes and Power platform. As we at The Next Platform noted, the last three months of last year were also the first full quarter of shipments of IBM’s new System z14 mainframes, while the first nodes of the “Summit” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the “Sierra” system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory began to ship.

    Not to be overlooked was the strong performance of the IBM’s storage …

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  • Microsoft Boosts Azure Storage With Flashy Avere

    January 8, 2018

    The future of IT is in the cloud, but it will be a hybrid cloud. And that means things will by necessity get complicated.

    Public clouds from the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and IBM offer enterprises the ability to access massive, elastic and highly scalable infrastructure environments for many of their workloads without having to pay the cost of bringing those capabilities into their on-premises environments, but there will always be applications that businesses will want to keep behind the firewall for security and efficiency reasons. That reality is driving the demand not only for the …

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  • A Purified Implementation Of NVM-Express Storage

    December 13, 2017

    NVM-Express holds the promise of accelerating the performance and lowering the latency of flash and other non-volatile storage. Every server and storage vendor we can think of is working to bring NVM-Express into the picture to get the full benefits of flash, but even six years after the first specification for the technology was released, NVM-Express is still very much a work in progress, with capabilities like stretching it over a network still a couple of years away.

    Pure Storage launched eight years ago with the idea of selling only all-flash arrays and saw NVM-Express coming many years ago, and …

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  • An Exascale Timeline for Storage and I/O Systems

    August 16, 2017

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    While exascale supercomputers mark a next step in performance capability, at the broader architectural level, the innovations that go into such machines will be the result of incremental improvements to the same components that have existed on HPC systems for several years.

    In large-scale supercomputing, many performance trends have jacked up capability and capacity—but the bottlenecks have not changed since the dawn of computing as we know it. Memory latency and memory bandwidth remain the gating factors to how fast, efficiently, and reliably big sites can run—and there is still …

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  • Hyperscaling With Consumer Flash And NVM-Express

    April 14, 2017

    There is no question that plenty of companies are shifting their storage infrastructure from giant NAS and SAN appliances to more generic file, block, and object storage running on plain vanilla X86 servers equipped with flash and disk. And similarly, companies are looking to the widespread availability of dual-ported NVM-Express drives on servers to give them screaming flash performance on those storage servers.

    But the fact remains that very few companies want to build and support their own storage servers, and moreover, there is still room for an appliance approach to these commodity components for enterprises that want to buy …

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  • Weaving Together Flash For Nearly Unlimited Scale

    March 29, 2017

    It is almost a foregone conclusion that when it comes to infrastructure, the industry will follow the lead of the big hyperscalers and cloud builders, building a foundation of standardized hardware for serving, storing, and switching and implementing as much functionality and intelligence as possible in the software on top of that to allow it to scale up and have costs come down as it does.

    The reason this works is that these companies have complete control of their environments, from the processors and memory in the supply chain to the Linux kernel and software stack maintained by hundreds to …

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  • Like Flash, 3D XPoint Enters The Datacenter As Cache

    March 20, 2017

    In the datacenter, flash memory took off first as a caching layer between processors and their cache memories and main memory and the ridiculously slow disk drives that hang off the PCI-Express bus on the systems. It wasn’t until the price of flash came way down and the capacities of flash card and drives came down that companies could think about going completely to flash for some, much less all of their workloads.

    So it will be with Intel’s Optane 3D XPoint non-volatile memory, which Intel is starting to roll out in its initial datacenter-class SSDs and will eventually deliver …

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  • Making Remote NVM-Express Flash Look Local And Fast

    March 1, 2017

    Large enterprises are embracing NVM-Express flash as the storage technology of choice for their data intensive and often highly unpredictable workloads. NVM-Express devices bring with them high performance – up to 1 million I/O operations per second – and low latency – less than 100 microseconds. And flash storage now has high capacity, too, making it a natural fit for such datacenter applications.

    As we have discussed here before, all-flash arrays are quickly becoming mainstream, particularly within larger enterprises, as an alternative to disk drives in environments where tens or hundreds of petabytes of data – rather than the …

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  • High Sticking With Flash Memory

    August 9, 2016

    Making the transition from disk storage to flash and other non-volatile media is perhaps more difficult for the makers of storage than it is for customers.

    All things being equal, storage suppliers would have preferred for disks to continue selling and flash to be incremental revenue, but IT shops have long been buying at least some of their disk spindles for performance, not for capacity, so it is not surprising that a chunk of storage in the datacenter has moved to flash and that more will migrate as flash gets denser and cheaper and the electronics and software to deal …

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  • MIT Research Pushes Latency Limits with Distributed Flash

    July 25, 2016

    We are hitting the limits of what can be crammed into DRAM in a number of application areas. As data volumes continue to mount, this limitation will be more keenly felt.

    Accordingly, there has been a great deal of work recently to look to flash to create more efficient and capable system that can accelerate deeply data-intensive problems, but few things have gotten enough traction to filter their way into big news items. With that said, there are some potential breakthroughs on this front coming out of MIT where some rather impressive performance improvements have been snagged by taking a …

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