Tag Archives: Purestorage

Xtreme future?

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EMC acquisition of XtremIO sent shockwaves across the industry. The news of the acquisition, reported costing EMC USD$430 million can be found here, here and here.

The news of EMC’s would be acquisition a few weeks ago was an open secret and rumour has it that NetApp was eyeing XtremIO as well. Looks like EMC has beaten NetApp to it yet again.

The interesting part was of course, the price. USD$430 million is a very high price to pay for a stealthy, 2-year old company which has 2 rounds of funding totaling USD$25 million. Why such a large amount?

XtremIO has a talented team of engineers; the notable ones being Yaron Segev and Shahar Frank. They have their background in InfiniBand, and Shahar Frank was the chief architect of Exanet scale-out NAS (which was acquired by Dell). However, as quoted by 451Group, XtremeIO is building an all-flash SAN array that “provides consistently high performance, high levels of flash endurance, and advanced functionality around thin provisioning, de-dupe and space-efficient snapshots“.

Furthermore, XtremeIO has developed a real-time inline deduplication engine that does not degrade performance. It does this by spreading the write I/Os over the entire array. There is little information about this deduplication engine, but I bet XtremIO has developed a real-time, inherent deduplication file system that spreads all the I/Os to balance the wear-leveling as well as having scaling performance. I bet XtremIO will dedupe everything that it stores, has a B+ tree, copy-on-write file system with a super-duper efficient hashing algorithm for address mapping (pointers) with this deduplication file system. Ok, ok, I am getting carried away here, because it is likely that I will be wrong, but I can imagine, can’t I? Continue reading →

Battle of flash racks coming soon

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The battle is probably already here. It has just begun for rack mounted flash-based or DRAM-based (or both) storage systems.

We have read in the news about the launch of EMC’s Project Lightning, and I wrote about it. EMC is already stirring up the competition, aiming its guns at FusionIO. Here’s a slide from EMC comparing their VFCache with FusionIO.

Not to be outdone, NetApp set its motion to douse the razzmatazz of EMC’s Lightning, announcing the future availability of their server-side flash software (no PCIe card) but it will work with major host-based/server-side PCIe Flash cards. (FusionIO, heads up). Ah, in Sun Tsu Art of War, this is called helping your buddy fight the bigger enemy.

NetApp threw some FUDs into the battle zone, claiming that EMC VFCache only supports 300GB while the NetApp flash software will support 2TB, NetApp multiprotocol, and VMware’s VMotion, DRS and HA. (something that VFCache does not support now).

The battle of PCIe has begun.

The next battle will be for the rackmounted flash storage systems or appliance. EMC is following it up with Project Thunder (because thunder comes after lightning), which is a flash-based storage system or appliance. Here’s a look at EMC’s preliminary information on Project Thunder.

And here’s how EMC is positioning different storage tiers in the following diagram below (courtesy of VirtualGeek), being glued together by EMC FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) technology.

But EMC is not alone, as there are already several prominent start-ups out there, already offering flash-based, rackmount storage systems.

In the battle ring, there is Kaminario K2 with the SPEAR (Scale-out Performance Storage Architecture), Violin Memory with Violin Switched Memory (VXM) architecture, Purestorage Purity Operating Environment and SolidFire’s Element OS, just to name a few. Of course, we should never discount the grand daddy of all flash-based storage – Texas Memory Systems RamSAN.

The whole motion of competition in this new arena is starting all over again and it’s exciting for me. There is so much to learn about newer, more innovative architecture and I intend to share more of these players in the coming blog entries. It is time to take notice because the SSDs are dropping in price, FAST! And in 2012, I strongly believe that this is the next battle of the storage players, both established and start-ups.

Let the battle begin!