Sun Adding Flash Storage to Most of Its Servers 113
BobB-nw writes "Sun will release a 32GB flash storage drive this year and make flash storage an option for nearly every server the vendor produces, Sun officials are announcing Wednesday. Like EMC, Sun is predicting big things for flash. While flash storage is far more expensive than disk on a per-gigabyte basis, Sun argues that flash is cheaper for high-performance applications that rely on fast I/O Operations Per Second speeds."
We are going to have two layers of storage (Score:4, Interesting)
But most of what makes up the volume on current computers (log files, backups, video/audio) can be committed to a regular hard drive.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Samsung 256GB Flash Drive (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? What other top 5 computer manufacturer has been putting flash drives in SERVERS? I've seen a few laptops, but I haven't seen any used in servers or storage systems. (EMC and a few others have announced plans to do it, but haven't released anything AFAK)
Also, their "thumper" server has 48 drives in it. Would you want to pay around $1000 per drive to fill that up?
This will even further ZFS (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm surprised that it is big enough to talk about. (Score:5, Interesting)
If Sun expects to sell a decent number of flash disks, or is looking at making changes to their systems based on the expectation that flash disks will be used, then it is interesting news; but otherwise it just isn't all that dramatic. While flash and HDDs are very different in technical terms, the present incarnations of both technologies are virtually identical from a system integration perspective. This sort of announcement just doesn't mean much at all without some idea of expected volume.
Re:We are going to have two layers of storage (Score:4, Interesting)
In addition, assume that 90% of ram-drive accesses go to 10% of the storage, you can see that effectively you are burning a lot of energy with zero gain. Multiply by up-time.
Flash has the potential of greatly improving performance/watt for most servers.
Re:This will even further ZFS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:We are going to have two layers of storage (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, DRAM burns ~8W/GB (more if FB-DIMMS), Flash burns only 0.01W/GB. Thus swapping inactive pages to Flash allows you to use your DRAM more effectively, improving your performance/W.
From a different perspective: you have a datacenter and you are energy constrained. Most applications use 10% of the DRAM 90% of the time. It may be an attractive proposition to give the applications less DRAM (at a slight performance loss) and let them swap to Flash (with a significant reduction in power). Multiply by 10000 servers, even a 20W reduction per server becomes significant.
Re:This will even further ZFS (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been actively researching a vendor who will supply this type of device. Currently we're testing with Gigabyte i-Ram cards, connected in through a separate SATA interface. (Note: Gigabyte are battery backed SDRAM
Fusion-IO is a vendor who is making a board for Linux - but as near as I can tell the cards aren't available yet, and when they are - they won't work with Solaris anyway!
The product which Neil Perrin did his testing with (umem/micromemory) with their 5425CN card doesn't work with current builds of Solaris. Umem is also a pain to work with
I hope Sun lets me buy these cards separately for my HP proliant servers. Of course if they didn't, this is one thing that might make me consider switching to Sun Hardware! (Hey HP/Dell - are you reading this??)
Re:Samsung 256GB Flash Drive (Score:1, Interesting)
This problem hasn't been solved by the drive manufs, although their marketing depts have convinced many!
Re:We are going to have two layers of storage (Score:5, Interesting)
I was thinking about this at Fry's the other day when trying to decide whether I could trust the replacement Seagate laptop drive similar to the one that crashed on me Sunday, and I concluded that the place I most want to see flash deployed is in laptops. Eventually, HDDs should be replaced with SSDs for obvious reliability reasons, particularly in laptops. However, in the short term, even just a few gigs of flash could dramatically improve hard drive reliability and battery life for a fairly negligible increase in the per-unit cost of the machines.
Basically, my idea is a lot like the Robson cache idea, but with a less absurd caching policy. Instead of uselessly making tasks like booting faster (I basically only boot after an OS update, and a stale boot cache won't help that any), the cache policy should be to try to make the hard drive spin less frequently and to provide protection of the most important data from drive failures. This means three things:
That last part is the best part. As data gets written to the hard drive, if the disk is not already spinning, the data would be written to the flash. The drive would spin up and get flushed to disk on shutdown to ensure that if you yank the drive out and put it into another machine, you don't get stale data. It would also be flushed whenever the disk has to spin up for some other activity (e.g. reading a block that isn't in the cache). The cache should also probably be flushed periodically (say once an hour) to minimize data loss in the event of a motherboard failure. If the computer crashes, the data would be flushed on the next boot. (Of course this means that unless the computer had boot-firmware-level support for reading data through such a cache, the OS would presumably need to flush the cache and disable write caching while updating or reinstalling the OS to avoid the risk of an unbootable system and/or data loss.)
As a result of such a design, the hard drive would rarely spin up except for reads, and any data frequently read would presumably come out of the in-kernel disk cache, so basically the hard drive should stay spun down until the user explicitly opened a file or launched a new application. This would eliminate the nearly constant spin-ups of the system drive resulting from relatively unimportant activity like registry/preference file writes, log data writes, etc. By being non-volatile, it would do so in a safe way.
This is similar to what some vendors already do, I know, but integrating it with the OS's buffer cache to make the caching more intelligent and giving the user the ability to request backups of certain data seem like useful enhancements.
Thoughts? Besides wondering what kind of person thinks through this while staring at a wall of hard drives at Fry's? :-)
Power consumption and heat dissipation (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.stec-inc.com/green/storage_casestudy.php [stec-inc.com]
http://www.stec-inc.com/green/green_ssdsavings.php [stec-inc.com] (You have to request the whitepaper to see this one.)
Re:We are going to have two layers of storage (Score:1, Interesting)
Sun is Afraid of THIS! (Score:3, Interesting)
The perfect thing for serving media, where you don't need a few GB per customer, you need the same few GB served out to 1000's or millions of users concurrently. So while $/GB stored stinks, $/GB streamed is fantastic.