Actually, I think you’re missing the entire point of the article.

It’s not at all attacking the fact the fast lab box can do 1 million 8K read IOPS.

Indeed, I was complimentary of that.

I also won’t comment on our own lab gear. We don’t take the same stance as EMC regarding showing lab stuff (whether I agree with our practice or not is a different matter, there’s something to be said for showmanship and I applaud EMC’s).

By EMC’s own admission during the demo, the VNX7500 does about 170,000 8K reads, that’s the shipping box and that’s what we’ll compare to.

And, of course, we’re not limited to 2 controllers for block protocols, but rather 8 and 64TB cache…

D

I am glad we agree that Parallelization is key. That is exactly what the demo showed. What you did seem not catch on to here is the NEW core efficiency needed for FLASH. A small group of SSDs can easily swamp a single CPU core. And to remain relevant in the array business, we need to scale to large numbers of SSDs. In fact, EMC has NO LIMITS beyond the drive slots on our platforms as to how many SSDs a customer can deploy on a given array model.

The very point of the demo was that when you drive say 96 modern SSDs, the pressure on the storage processors are dramatically increased. Which in turn exposes older software stacks that was written for HDDs. Older architectures were static multi-core. MCX(tm) is DYNAMIC multi-core. And as demonstrated takes full advantage of 32 cores.

The EMC demo showed 1M 8K read-through IOPS across 32 cores of CPU. That equates to 31,250 8K IOPS per core.

Netapp has 24 cores in the new FAS6290. So what is your 8K read through IOPS from 96 SSDs? How many IOPS per core? What is NetApp’s core efficiency?

I think the real winners here will be the established storage players who can successfully optimise and integrate the flash technology of the day into their existing platforms … NAND is already basically at end of life in terms of scaling and core technology. the longer term non volatile memory technologies will appear in a year or so – and these will quickly replace NAND… hence will the NAND optimised products of today be able to easily accomodate the newer resistive memory or phase change memory NVM technologies??

Lastly, remember, an Orchestra needs a lot more than a violin to be successful… hence, don’t forget about the rich data services which are taken for granted and expected in our data centers.

I’d also note that many of the products that people use on top of the storage layer also offer compression, ranging from btrfs doing compression in the file system through to Oracle doing compression in the database. If you already have compression in your application layer somewhere, then clearly a storage subsystem with built-in compression is going to add little incremental value – so make sure you know whether your application is already compressing before you waste your money.

Dimitris – sorry for the random post, not attempting to stir the pot, I’m usually just an observer of your blog, however I had a two hour presentation from Pure that left me with more questions and less answers. I hadn’t even considered your original point about designing an OS around a NAND type, which is a pretty good point.

Apologies for my oversight on the last reply. My intent for my original post was to point out that there do exist products that address some of the pitfalls you identified in your blog post. There are some flash-based storage products that do suffer from the shortsightedness you describe, but not all. That said, I’m pleased to see you and I are on the same page with respect to this market (it is still evolving) and no one storage product can meet everyone’s needs. Looking forward to hearing more about FlashRay as things become publicly available and competing with NTAP in 2014!

Mike