3PAR, Riverbed and LSI/Seagate roll out solid state drives

Developments of the week in storage

In the past month 3PAR, Riverbed and LSI/Seagate introduced solid state drives into their existing product lines.

2010 solid stat drive forces and trends

The newest 3PAR InServ software option, coupled with enterprise class SSDs from STEC, lets 3PAR customers take advantage of the SSD speed by adding a relatively small amount of SSD to an existing array. 3PAR Adaptive Optimization software is a new product option that requires 3PAR System Reporter software, Version 2.7 or above. The algorithms intelligently monitor sub-volume-level performance in context with configurable policies to distribute storage workload across tiers and adapt to changing application demands.

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In the past month 3PAR, Riverbed and LSI/Seagate introduced solid state drives into their existing product lines.

2010 solid stat drive forces and trends

The newest 3PAR InServ software option, coupled with enterprise class SSDs from STEC, lets 3PAR customers take advantage of the SSD speed by adding a relatively small amount of SSD to an existing array. 3PAR Adaptive Optimization software is a new product option that requires 3PAR System Reporter software, Version 2.7 or above. The algorithms intelligently monitor sub-volume-level performance in context with configurable policies to distribute storage workload across tiers and adapt to changing application demands.

3PAR uses the STEC MACH8 SSD in 50GB drive capacities. InServ takes advantage of the parallelization of multiple drives applied to each volume within the array, and can more easily spread SSD capacity across more ports and CPU resources with the smaller capacity drive. SSDs can be added in eight drive (400GB) increments to any InServ F-Class and T-Class Server Storage Array. A small amount of SSD goes a long way.

3PAR analysis shows that 2% to 5% of total storage in SSD provides an optimal boost in storage performance.

Riverbed became the first WAN optimization appliance provider to integrate SSDs by providing a Fault Tolerent System (FTS) in its Steelhead 7050 product line. The Steelhead 7050L optimizes up to 75,000 concurrent TCP connections and is equipped with 14 SSDs. The Steelhead 7050M optimizes up to 100,000 concurrent TCP connections and is equipped with 28 SSDs.

In-line data reduction and WAN optimization can be highly reliant on the speed of storage and the access latency of the attached storage. By providing appliances that are configured for optimal performance and fault tolerance, Riverbed has set a new benchmark for throughput and fault tolerance.

The approach to SSD management is called FTS. Data is striped across the SSD arrays (160GB per drive) and the system will automatically heal in case of failure of multiple SSDs.

The system disk consists of a pair of 500GB HDDs which use a RAID implementation. Each Steelhead 7050L has 2.24TB of SSD capacity, and the 7050M has 4.4TB of SSD. The appliances are in a 3U format and can be scaled as needed for WAN and LAN optimization.

And, finally LSI announced a new entry for bus-attached storage with its new LSISSS6200 PCIe flash card. Teaming with Seagate, the new card leverages LSI's long-term commitment to Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and its new 6Gbps controller technology to provide extreme performance in a variety of high performance computer and data warehousing applications.

The bi-directional SAS interface talks to up to six individual Seagate Pulsar 50GB single-Level Cell (SLC) drive modules via Serial Attached ATA (SATA). The Seagate modules have interface and performance characteristics which look a lot like that provided by the SandForce controller. LSI is one of SandForce's major investors.

Multipathing to the individual modules is done within the 6Gb SAS interface, coupled with PCIe 2.0 bandwidth provides the highest performance characteristics of PCIe attached devices. If all six modules are included, a total capacity of 300GB is supported. LSI claims 200,000 4K sequential I/Os per second (IOPS) and up to 150,000 4K random IOPS. The LSI release shows bandwidth of 1,500MBps sustained sequential I/O and 1,200MBps sustained random I/O, regardless of read/write mix. End user MSRP in the $35 to $40 per gigabyte range is expected. The boards are in sample now with general availability expected in Q2.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.