• An Exascale Timeline for Storage and I/O Systems

  August 16, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  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 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  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 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  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 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  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 Jeffrey Burt

  

  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 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  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 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  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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• Shiny New Open Compute Gear, And The Roadmap Ahead

  March 13, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  The Open Compute Project started by Facebook nearly five years ago is in many respects a tier one server maker a tier one server maker that just so happens to have multiple manufacturers etching motherboards and bending metal instead of one. And while that may seem like a lot of time in the computer business, those five years represent only two generations and systems and storage and the first generation of switches that bear the OCP label and espouse its open hardware philosophy.

  The OCP ecosystem is now has hundreds of companies – including end users, component suppliers, and system …

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• Flash Over The Tipping Point In The Enterprise

  February 29, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  This being leap year day, storage juggernaut EMC is having fun with puns about quantum leaps and frogs as it launches its much-anticipated DSSD all-flash arrays aimed at extreme I/O performance. But that is not the only all-flash launch the company is making. The company has also re-engineered its high-end VMAX storage arrays aimed predominantly at enterprise customers so they can be configured entirely with flash.

  The VMAX all-flash configurations offer customers a huge amount of capacity – up to 4 PB of storage with a peak of 4 million I/O operations per second across a four-rack setup – and …

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• DSSD Pushes Flash To The Performance Extremes

  February 29, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  If you want to know just how far the performance of an all-flash array can be pushed, you need look no further than the DSSD D5 array that, after years of development and mystery, is being launched by storage juggernaut EMC today. It is an extreme machine, and one that is going to find a home wherever the need for speed trumps everything, including cost.

  There are a lot of different kinds of scale that we talk about here at The Next Platform, and the DSSD D5 flash array can be thought of as a device for doing scale …

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