SanDisk Invents Just a Bunch of Flash
External 3U SAS box with 512TB on MLC NAND flash cards, $1/GB
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on March 5, 2015 at 2:54 pmSanDisk Corporation unveiled an all-flash storage platform that creates a new category for the IT industry, termed by IDC as ‘Big Data Flash.’
Built using open source software, SanDisk’s InfiniFlash storage system delivers capacity, performance, and reliability to big data and hyperscale workloads, while reducing data center complexity and costs.
According to IDC, the market for flash-based arrays-both All Flash Arrays (AFA) and Hybrid Flash Arrays (HFA) exhibited strong double digit growth over the past five years for a combined market that in 2014 was over $11.3B in size. This growth is largely being driven by rapid migration to 3rd platform computing infrastructure, resulting from the massive storage, compute power and scalability requirements of an increasingly mobile workforce, social media, big data analytics, and cloud computing.
InfiniFlash is a next generation storage platform. Available in three different configurations (IF100, IF500 and IF700), this offering provides 5x the density, 50x the performance and 4x the reliability, while consuming 80% less power – as compared to traditional HDD drive arrays – and surpasses the capabilities of existing all-flash arrays which focus solely on performance.
It also delivers breakthrough pricing for an all-flash hardware solution at less than $1 per gigabyte, and breaks the $2 per gigabyte barrier for an all-flash system without requiring compression or de-duplication technologies.
“Building on our long history of industry-defining innovation, we are very excited to bring our first all flash array storage system to market in the form of a category-defining product that we expect will drive flash into big-data workloads at massive scale,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and chief strategy officer, SanDisk. “By offering InfiniFlash below $2/GB before compression and de-duplication, we are changing the industry dynamics in favor of dramatically broader flash adoption in new hyperscale and enterprise workloads.“
Through the disaggregation of compute, switching and storage capabilities, InfiniFlash enables the use of flash for primary and secondary storage with new benchmarks in low total acquisition costs and compelling TCO. The InfiniFlash system is configured with up to 64 specially-designed, hot-swappable cards, each providing 8TB of flash capacity. Together, the cards deliver 512TB of raw flash storage in a 3U enclosure, which is able to connect with up to eight servers.
The InfiniFlash system’s modular storage design supports various OS and storage stack offerings. It includes the performance-optimized SanDisk ION Accelerator software stack, from Fusion-iohttp://www.fusionio.com/, for block storage applications. For scale-out block and object storage workloads, InfiniFlash utilizes the ‘flash-intelligent’, open source CEPH platform to deliver enterprise data services. These offerings include development libraries and a SDK that allow customers to optimize applications for use with the system in order to obtain better performance, efficiency and TCO.
SanDisk continues to work with its OEM partners to innovative flash solutions to market. It will also leverage its relationships with channel partners, value-added resellers and system integrators to deploy InfiniFlash and other SanDisk flash-powered solutions for enterprise and hyperscale customers. InfiniFlash system service, maintenance, and support are also provided by SanDisk and its partners.
“At Dell, our enterprise and big data customers are increasingly demanding higher performance, higher capacity solutions that are delivered in a rapid, reliable, open and cost-effective fashion,” said Jim Ganthier, VP and GM of engineered solutions, Dell, Inc. “Solution and appliance innovations such as InfiniFlash not only address these critical customer success metrics but also deliver on the promise that big data insights can drive differentiated business results.”
Targeting New and Big Data Workloads
Today’s highly visual, social, analytics-driven society continues to crave higher performance, max-capacity storage solutions to fuel both new business insights and personal interactions. InfiniFlash is designed to address diverse enterprise and hyperscale workloads including:
- Big Data Analytics – InfiniFlash delivers both the capacity and performance needed to mine information stores for patterns that translate into business insights for workloads such as Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB, as well as delivers timely analysis of in-memory databases.
- Content Repositories – High-definition content repositories, such as social media sites, require blazingly fast read capabilities in order to deliver an user experience. InfiniFlash provides quick and easy access to high-definition content 24×7.
- Media Streaming – InfiniFlash supports the high data transfer rates needed for capturing and delivering rich media content such as movies, music, and video surveillance, that it can then rapidly analyze and deliver for viewing.
“The creation of the new storage category of big data Flash will be a welcome development for 3rd platform computing customers that are struggling to meet the requirements of hyperscale environments with legacy HDD technologies,” said Eric Burgener, research director of IDC’s storage practice. “Big Data Flash solutions consistently deliver sub-millisecond latencies, scale to hundreds of petabytes, exhibit enterprise reliability, availability, and serviceability, and bring the secondary economic benefits of flash deployment at scale to big data applications – all at a $/GB price point comparable to that of 15,000rpm HDD systems. We believe products like InfiniFlash that offer an aggressively compelling price alternative to current scale-out HDD based architectures currently being used for big data applications, will succeed.”
Focus on Storage Systems and Software Solutions
Over the last three years, SanDisk has built an enterprise portfolio of storage and software solutions, augmented most recently by its acquisition of Fusion-io. Under the leadership of SanDisk VP and GM, Ravi Swaminathan, the company supports a growing enterprise portfolio of system and software solutions, which includes the SanDisk ION Accelerator flash-appliance, FlashSoft server caching software, and ZetaScale flash-acceleration software.
InfiniFlash is available from SanDisk for interested customers.
Comments
The new idea of SanDisk, entering into flash subsystems, was existing since decades for HDDs: JBOD or Just a Bunch Of Disks, an architecture involving multiple SATA drives, while making them accessible for servers through an external port either as independent devices, or as a combined (spanned) single logical volume with no RAID functionality and no security to get large capacity at low price. If a disk is dead, you lose the data, just the other ones remaining available. But it is possible to add RAID capability with software.
IF100
InfiniFlash IF100 is about the same but the box is full of 8TB MLC NAND flash - with its own chips - hot-swappable cards packed with chips with a proprietary design (not PCIe), meaning you are obliged to go through SanDisk only to replace a card. 8TB is also the highest capacity available on much larger 3.5-inch HDDs. The 3U unit at 100 pounds (45kg) acccepts 64 cards for a total 512TB capacity at "less than $1/GB" or around half million dollar. A similar capacity in an HDD JBOD with high-capacity nearline magnetic rotating devices would cost around five times less, but with flash, you gain of course a lot in performance, volume and power consumption. IDC analyst Eric Burgener wrote in a hite paper: "On a dollar per gigabyte, that is roughly 2X the cost of 15,000rpm HDDs on an acquisition cost basis today." That's why the market of these expansive HDDs will go down, aggressively attacked by SSDs.
8TB MLC NAND flash card
IF100 capacity could double next year with the arrival of 16TB cards.
It has nothing to do with all-flash subsystems with lot of software currently on the market. It's just a not intelligent box to connect to up to 8 servers through 6Gb SAS external ports. SanDisk claimed 1ms latency, 780.000 IO/s and 7GB/s throughput. MTFB is 1.5 million hours, like a regular unique hard disk drive.
IDC found a new name for this new type of device: Big Data Flash. We prefer JBOF as, for us, Big Data is already a marketing word not really clear to designate datawarehouse and data analytics.
With this new storage building block, SanDisk is not going to compete with its all-flash and hybrid customers, the better example being Dell supporting the product. It will also address companies in software-defined object software to build global infrastructure, but there is no Ethernet or FC connection. We have heard that Scality already looked at it.
There is no de-dupe or compression integrated into InfiniFlash. It will cost a little more but to add that, but imagine that you could get five times the capacity into the total system for a small premium.
There are two more expansive options ($2/GB) of the product: IF500 et IF700:
- IF500, Ceph-based, provides unified block, object, and file support with features including snapshots, replication, and thin provisioning for
organizations wanting to deploy large-scale Hadoop on object storage, with the benefits of disaggregated compute and storage. - IF700 includes ION Accelarator software designed by Fusio-io, start-up acquired by SanDisk, for NoSQL workloads that required extreme performance with petabyte capacity.
JBOF was also the a concept of Virident Solutions 2.0 with 16 PCIe cards for 38TB from HGST and lauched last September. Seagate could be another player in this field in the future.
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