1. Extreme Tiered Storage:Flash, Disk, and Cloud Stephen Foskett Storage Expo NL, November 2009

2. Abstract The explosion of digital media and unstructured data is flooding modern storage systems. Although per-GB cost has dropped, enterprise storage costs remain high. Tiered storage has not reduced the costs fast enough, but a new concept holds promise. By leveraging the extreme performance of flash, the low cost of cloud, and advanced data movement technologies, extreme tiered storage can deliver the reduction in storage costs demanded by business. This session presents the business and technical issues and an architecture to address them.

3. You Have an Impossible Mission! Reduce budgets Improve performance Meet business demands 3

4. Storage Is Supposed To Be Getting Cheaper! Disk cost is dropping rapidly $250 buys: 1994: 2 GB 1999: 20 GB 2004: 200 GB 2009: 2000 GB But enterprise storage costs keep rising! 4

5. Tiered Storage to the Rescue! Storage capacity just keeps expanding… Larger files + More files = Growing volume of data IT responded by… Consolidating on networked storage (SAN and NAS) Experimenting with HSM and ILM Tiered storage But… Storage systems getting more complex and expensive Management effort keeps growing Cost savings aren’t materializing 5

6. Where Is The Cost? Hardware and software make up a small percentage of total enterprise storage spending… …and hard disk drive capacity makes up a small percentage of that! Data center/environmental, administrative personnel, maintenance, and data protection are much bigger The biggest opportunity is inefficiency, but this has always been hard to tackle 6

7. What If Disk Capacity Was Free? A thought experiment: What if disk space was free? The cost of hard disk drives drops to zero tomorrow - How will your usage patterns change? Will you use more or less? Will you manage capacity better or worse? Will your storage budget shrink or grow? Surprise! The cost of disk capacity is almost irrelevant to enterprise storage budgets! Even free disk capacity would not help save money, and it might even make things worse Massive capacity growth is making free disk capacity a reality! 7

8. Let’s Get Real! We need to tackle the real issues in storage: Focus scarce management resources Reduce budgets by tackling capacity utilization (finally!) Improve data protection What’s stopping us? Data just keeps growing Mainstream technology hasn’t changed Performance bottlenecks limit effectiveness Always firefighting, never rebuilding 8

9. Fulfilling The Promise of Tiered Storage Tiered disk storage has not yet lived up to its promise Small cost and performance differential between FC and SATA disk TCO is very close SSD gives extreme performance at high cost Cloud storage gives massive capacity at low cost Tiered Storage Performance and Cost Capacity 9 Tiered Storage SSD FC Disk SATA Cloud

10. Flash! The new (old) buzz RAM vs. NAND flash vs. disk EMC was first with “tier-0” Sun, HP, NetApp adding flash to as a cache Gear6 caches NAS with RAM “Flash will replace high-speed disk” But… Are they reliable? Do they really perform that well? Will you be able to use them? Is the 10x-30x cost justified? Do they really save power?

11. Is Flash Reliable Enough? Notes: 1 – No one writes this fast 24x7 2 – Manufacturers claim 2x to 10x better endurance

12. Does Flash Perform? Flash offers unique performance characteristics Pro: Very fast random read with low latency and high consistency Low power consumption and heat, low weight, compact size High mechanical reliability Con: Slower write performance, especially random Write performance declines with use and capacity 12

13. Flash Is Not A Disk Flash must be carefully engineered and integrated Cache and intelligence to offset write penalty Automatic block-level data placement to maximize ROI IF a system can do this, everything else improves Overall system performance Utilization of disk capacity Space and power efficiency Even system cost can improve! 13

14. Then There’s Cloud Storage Like flash, cloud is currently over-hyped but also rapidly being adopted in the enterprise Like flash, cloud has unique performance characteristics and economics Managed service versus purchased system High-latency internet/HTTP access Object store versus conventional NAS Like flash, cloud can make tiered storage a success Powerful economics from fully-managed service and pay-for-used pricing 14

15. Public Cloud Storage Economics Just-in-Time Provisioning Plan/buy for usage and not for peak capacity Fully Managed Storage Managed GB = Power, space, cabling, racks, monitoring, software, hardware, migration to new media… all included Enterprise Purchasing and Pricing Model Flat, bundled price starts at $0.25/GB/month, $3K/TB/year Enterprise sales, engineering, and support staff Consulting and strategy available 15

16. Data Types Suitable for Cloud Storage 16

17. Paths to the Cloud

18. Bringing Flash and Cloud to Disk Combining flash, cloud, and disk is radical but yields massive benefits Each helps offset the shortcomings of the other and magnify the overall result Integrated products are starting to appear but none are yet complete Major disk vendors adding solid state disks and automating volume-level tiering Smaller companies are introducing integrated flash caching and block-level tiering Data movement vendors are adding cloud as a tier 18

19. What’s Next? Flash and disk tiering will be fully integrated Wide striping, thin provisioning, multi-parity, etc will kill conventional RAID High-performance hard disk drives will disappear VMware-specific storage systems will be on the cutting edge of flash/disk integration Higher-level applications (archiving, content management) will get integrated cloud storage first Fully-realized extreme tiered storage will be available within three years 19

20. Thank You! Stephen Foskett stephen@fosketts.net twitter.com/sfoskett +1(508)451-9532 blog.fosketts.net GestaltIT.com bit.ly/ESSBlog 20