It is said that world travel gives one perspective not otherwise achieved, seeing customers and the industry from a global view. So, on my current trip to South Africa and the UK, I took the time to catch up on my reading, in particular some thoughts on ‘Flash and Trash’ – i.e. the idea that the use of only two media – SSD and SATA – is going to dominate the future of storage. My take – not so fast.
Count me as Niels Bohr, when he said “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” While the flash & trash thesis is interesting, I believe there is and always will be a place for high-speed, non-ATA (e.g. FC, SAS) media in both the cloud and internal datacenter. Having said that, I do understand why the proponents of flash & trash think as they do – because they don’t see the trend towards 2.5″ drives in enterprise, or perhaps don’t want to see it. This is, in my opinion, the trend to watch in storage.
Having said that, it’s vitally important to understand that enclosing and controlling 2.5″ drives is far different than our long-time friend, the 3.5″ drive. Nearly all of the current arrays, both small and large, cannot handle smaller drives due to their inherent speed and vibration. A 2.5″ 15K drive is a very innovative piece of electro-mechanical work, but most array vendors want nothing to do with it.
Xiotech, however, not only welcomes the 2.5″ FC/SAS drive technology but embraces it. I personally believe that in the near future – 2 years at most – we, as a company, will sell more 2.5″ datapacs than 3.5″. The work being done by the drive industry for use in high-speed, high-capacity 2.5″ datapacs is nothing short of outstanding.
There is little doubt that a datapac of 2.5″ drives – 20 per pac, 40 per 3U ISE – will form the large ‘middle’ for enterprise storage. While is it certainly convenient to believe the world will settle into flash & trash for storage, it is also certainly ignoring the very real factor of the datapac and its evolution into the world of very small, very fast drives. We will also likely see the 10,000 SPC-1 IOPS/3U (over a surface of tens of TB) barrier broken with this evolution.
Just as the 14″ drive gave way to 8″, and to 5.25″, and to 3.5″, we are now in the 2.5″ era for rotating storage. While flash has its place (small-capacity random-read-dominant workloads) and trash also has its place (deep-capacity, low-performance where data integrity is not important – since ATA technology does not support the ANSI Data Integrity Field standard) there is no denying the importance of the continued evolution of rotating magnetic storage.
Shortly, I will travel back to the States and home. It’s always wonderful to come home, of course, but looking at the world through a larger lens – and seeing the common thread worldwide for the need for efficient storage – is a great experience. If you get the chance, I urge you to do the same.
(See http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Niels_Bohr/ for more Bohr quotes – a good read)
What Price Storage?
Posted by Jim McDonald
Mar
02
2010
Chargeback models are becoming a common requirement for modern information technology (IT) operations. As businesses have sought to not only control their costs for existing IT infrastructure but to understand them for future initiative planning, the model of IT operations providing hardware is giving way to that of them providing a service. In this model, the tools of engagement are contracts rather than datasheets, service levels rather than hardware specifications.
Many IT organizations within existing companies are doing very well to adapt to this change, and those that aren’t are proving a fertile ground for takeover by managed service providers. But IT organizations are having to fight continual and unnecessary battles as they attempt to match their customers’ new-style demands with their vendors’ old-style offerings.
Chief amongst these in the storage industry is the habit by storage vendors to provide costs in terms of raw terabytes (TB). This is advantageous to storage vendors because it allows them to avoid talking about the “hidden” requirements for storage. Commonly, these include:
And there can be additional items such as space reserved for snapshots, asynchronous replication queues and the like. Taking the best-case of each of the above, and remembering that the above numbers stack, this puts usable TB at 54% of raw TB (the worst, but not unusual, case puts you at less than 30%). In other words, a purchase of 100TB of raw storage results in 54TB of usable storage. Or to put it another way, if you are purchasing based on cost per raw TB, then chances are your storage is at least twice as expensive as you thought it was.
It is not so surprising that most storage vendors participate in the practice of quoting the far better-looking raw numbers and ignoring the real costs, but it is very surprising that so many customers allow them to do so. If you’re looking to buy storage you should ask the following questions of your vendor:
With straight answers to the above questions, you will have two metrics, cost per usable TB and cost per IOPS, which you can use as a basis for comparing different vendors’ products to understand what you are getting for your money. Additional metrics, such as capacity per U (unit of rack space) and performance per U may also be interesting for space-constrained environments, and GB per Watt and IOPS per Watt are useful for power-constrained environments.
Using cost per usable TB and cost per IOPS will enable far more accurate product comparisons than cost per raw TB, and provide you with the ability to build a true service-based model for your customers. And if you are serious about a service-based approach, one additional question will allow you to understand if your storage vendor can really provide you with a scalable storage model or just a bunch of products:
If your vendor’s answer isn’t, “You’ll get 50% more usable capacity and performance, and it will cost you 50% more,” then you need to consider how you can provide a single service cost to your customers depending on the capacity and performance that they require rather than the specifics of the particular hardware solution which you are purchasing at that point in time.
There is little doubt that your customer requires cost per usable TB and cost per IOPS metrics to be able to manage their existing storage and project the cost of their future storage requirements. The question is: what is your storage vendor hiding by not providing them to you?
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