Everything was coming up SSDs last week. Major solid state drive (SSD) manufacturer STEC announced last week that it was entering the PCIe-based SSD fray with an advanced drive that supports both Single-Level Cell and Multi-Level Cell (SLC and MLC) configurations and a caching solution that can greatly increase the performance of servers accessing direct attached or shared storage.
While the STEC PCIe drive has been rumored for some time, the caching software was a surprise. A number of companies have been developing caching software, but this is the first PCIe SSD from a major SSD manufacturer that has an integrated cache solution supporting both read and write cache functions.
The new Kronos PCIe is advertised as a high-endurance enterprise class SSD that currently comes in four versions, with two more on the horizon. The Kronos SLC version supports 240GB and 480GB capacities, 110K random read and 100K random write IOPs (4KB) and 1.1GBps bandwidth for both sequential reads and writes. The Kronos Turbo supports 480GB SLC capacity and 980GB MLC capacity with 220K random read IOPs (4KB) and 200K random write IOPs, and 2.2GBps bandwidth for sequential reads and writes. Both models have a five-year warranty with provisos of 30x capacity writes per day (SLC) and 10x capacity writes per day (MLC).
These are serious performance numbers and are exemplar of STEC’s long experience in advanced controller development. Unlike some PCIe implementations, the STEC approach uses a lightweight block-io server driver with all flash control functions performed by the silicon on the PCIe board. The MLC Kronos target MSRP is a low $10 per GB, putting STEC into a very aggressive pricing position, which is appropriate considering the competitive landscape in the PCIe market.
The EnhanceIO SSD Cache solution supports VMware, Hyper-V and Linux implementations. Unlike some cache solutions, EnhanceIO supports both write-through read caching and write caching, with power failure backup provided by super-capacitor implementations directly on the PCIe board. While EnhanceIO is a companion product to the Kronos line, it is SSD agnostic and can drop into an environment with products from other manufacturers.
The Kronos line and cache software rounds out what can be argued is the most complete enterprise SSD line in the industry, which includes the ZeusRAM DRAM SSD, the Kronos PCIe drive, the ZeusIOPs 6Gb SAS drives (now available in both SLC and MLC configurations), the ZeusIOPs Fibre Channel drives, which led the way for SSD implementations in mainstream enterprise storage, the MACH16 SATA drives and a line of embedded products that are used in military and aerospace applications.
Solid state storage system manufacturer Nimbus also announced a deployment of more than 100 TB of solid state storage at eBay. The installation uses that latest version of the Nimbus Sustainable Storage system that provides a very close integration with VMware and provides 10Gbps iSCSI Ethernet connectivity and reduces VM provisioning time from 40 minutes to just three minutes.
When comparing costs with Nimbus’ major storage competitors, eBay found that the all solid-state solution actually cost less than a storage system built up from 15K RPM hard drives. This is all done at a 78% reduction in energy costs and half the rackspace. Much has been written about the relative cost per GB of rotating media vs. SSD. In the configuration analyzed by eBay, the final system cost for 15K RPM drives was $13.20, while the Numbus cost per GB was $12.65, after RAID overhead, file system overhead, licensing and support costs are factored in.
Storage smackdown: Hard drives vs. SSDs
Advanced software features supported by Nimbus include both SAN and NAS functionality, and connectivity can be 8Gb Fibre Channel, 10Gb Ethernet or 40Gb Infiniband. The Halo operating system has its own file system and support both block IO and NFS/CIFS NAS operations. Data protection includes snapshots, replication and synchronous mirroring to a second Nimbus system. Block-based inline deduplication, thin provisioning and data-at-rest encryption round out the enterprise storage features built into the system. Application support includes Microsoft Exchange, SQL and SharePoint, VMware and Citrix hypervisor support and Oracle 11g/RAC/ASM are also supported. Administration includes a Command Line Interface and administrative functions from mobile devices are available.
Our take: Nimbus launched with a very aggressive pricing and product plan about a little over one year ago. With impressive customer use cases and increasingly capable system functions, it looks like the competitive plan is working well.
And finally OCZ last week announced the release of its latest entry in the PCIe form factor SSD race. The new entry has phenomenal performance as demonstrated at recent trade shows. The performance is a result of the combination of OCZ’s Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) and multiple flash control processors on the PCIe board.
The Z-Drive R4 is designed for enterprise server applications with the use of the standard SCSI command set over the PCIe Gen. 2×8. Using what OCZ has dubbed a SuperScale storage controller, which interfaces with the VCA virtualization software layer and distributes data over the individual MLC NAND flash dies via SAS physical interfaces with queue balancing algorithms to boost performance and minimize burden on the host CPU.
The R4 is available in half-height form factor with up to 1.2TB of flash and four SandForce enterprise flash processors, as well as a full-height form factor with up to 3.2TB of flash and eight (count ’em) SandForce processors. Maximum performance is 1.2 million IOPs (4K random writes) and 5,600 MBps sequential writes.
OCZ products are generally available when announced. Custom versions can be ordered with specific configurations of either SLC or MLC NAND.
The Z-Drive R4 announcement comes on the heels of the announcement of the third generation RevoDrive, a PCIe product target specifically for high performance workstations and applications like CAD and media development.
With the addition of the new Z-Drive R4, OCZ can easily claim the broadest line of PCIe products for enterprise and workstation applications.
Our take: Recent product announcements by Micron, Texas Memory and STEC have added substantial competitive pressure and customer options in the PCIe market. With the experience of OCZ and aggressive pricing that we expect, OCZ is bound to take a nice share of the market that some analysts expect to exceed HDD form factor products in the enterprise sector over the next five years.
