The SSD Flash — May 2010

The SSD-FLASH                                                                                                                                                                                                           May 2010
James E. Bagley, senior analyst
Deni Connor, principal analyst

The first month of the second calendar quarter of 2010 produced so much solid state drive (SSD) news that we were stressed to cover the briefings. A year ago it was hard to find a purpose-built appliance that used SSDs in any way. Today, it’s hard to find a new appliance that doesn’t have SSD as a critical, integrated component. In this issue we include a recap of the April Storage Networking World (SNW) conference, which was heavily attended by end-users who were there to learn the latest information about SSDs and cloud storage. Indicative of the rebound in storage purchasing, most Q1 2010 financial reporting from publicly traded companies have shown dramatic year-to-year performance as well as good sequential earnings. While several companies have been punished for being conservative about futures, we are very encouraged by the overall performance during calendar Q1.

A quick review of FLASH memory technology

Throughout this issue we will be using the term SLC for ‘Single Level Cell’ and MLC for ‘Multi Level Cell.’ A cell is a specific area on the module. SLC stuffs one bit into the cell. MLC stuffs two or more bits into each cell and divides the cost per gigabyte accordingly. SLC provides faster and longer lasting modules, while MLC promises, with proper manufacturing techniques and SSD controllers, to provide dramatic cost breakthroughs that will accelerate adoption. Most enterprise drives and appliances currently use SLC, but this year we are seeing a wave of MLC enterprise products shipping and more in the making.

Storage Networking World 2010 Spring

Despite being scheduled on top of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and Symantec Vision conferences, which made many companies’ divide forces or even skip the meeting, the end-user attendance was well up from last year. The smaller floor space footprint made it more convenient for those of us who had to run between sessions and the press room. SSD and cloud sessions were packed, and the general knowledge level of those attending seemed well advanced in these key technology areas. Amenities at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort were great and the Wi-Fi access was greatly appreciated.

IBM TPC Benchmark uses SandForce controller

SandForce and MLC just got a huge endorsement from IBM. Yes, a Tier One systems provider has reported performance of MLC-based SSDs in the latest Transaction Performance Council (TPC) benchmark. In addition to tiers of HDD, the IBM system boasted 10.5TB of MLC SSDs using SandForce SF1500 enterprise controllers. The manufacturer of the drives was not disclosed, probably because the product has not been announced.

Of great interest in the public TPC report is the cost of the MLC drive ‘package’ of which three 3.5TB units were used. The benchmark indicates the overall system is scheduled for availability in October 2010. The TPC benchmarks focus on Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) workloads at a system level.

Here is the run down on the SSDs:

- 57 drives
- Cost $294,000 (includes host bus adapters and JBOD)
- Cost per drive $5,164
- 177GB drives — (Editor’s note: Over-provisioned from 200GB?)
- Cost per GB $29

This represents a substantial cost reduction for Tier One suppliers of SSDs, who have had list prices north of $60 per GB. The lower cost allowed the benchmark to achieve a new price performance point. Here are the highlights of the tpmC (transactions per minute) C benchmark:

- IBM Power 780, eight-core, two-socket system with POWER7 technology, 4.14GHz per core
- Highest total performance of any eight-core system: 1,200,011 tpmC, which is 81% higher than the next leading system

(661,475 tpmC)
- Best price/performance of any eight-core system:  $0.69 per tpmC, which is 36% lower than the next leading system ($1.08/tpmC)
- Highest performance per CPU core of all systems benchmarks: 150,000 tpmC/CPU core, which is nearly 50% higher than then next highest score (101,116 tpmC/CPU core)

We recommend reading the executive summary at http://www.tpc.org/results/individual_results/IBM/IBM_780_TPCC_20100412_es.pdf

Micron goes for the enterprise market

We had the opportunity to meet with Micron’s Kevin Dibelius, senior product marketing manager during SNW, and it is clear that Micron is serious about their positioning as an end-product supplier in the enterprise market. Micron’s first product is based on 34 nanometer SLC and will be available in the typical 50-, 100- and 200GB models.

The RealSSD P300 features a 2.5-inch format, 6Gbit/second Serial ATA performance and is hot-pluggable. We do not have pricing at this time; shipments are scheduled for June.

We also discussed Micron’s ‘EMLC’ product line. Enterprise MLC, considered by many to be an oxymoron, is specially fabricated MLC that is further screened for better performance than typical MLC modules. Based on 34 nanometer geometry, EMLC is going into a number of end products at this writing, and Micron is leading the way with this critical development area.

Future Micron products will certainly use the 25 nanometer 8GB MLC modules coming from the Intel-Micron foundry. Stay tuned as there are several new products in the pipeline.

An interview with Pliant’s Mike Chenery

Pliant’s history was the primary topic discussed at SNW with Mike Chenery, Pliant’s president. We enjoy technology discussions with engineers, and Mike’s story of the creation of Pliant is a good example of going for the pre-emptive technology against all the conventional wisdom. Mike’s team at Fujitsu had completed the HDD product planning through 2010 in 2006 and he was adamant that the next generation of drives had to include SSD technology.  Spurned by management, Mike decided to start Pliant as a way to bring SSDs to market. Mike was not able to attract venture capital, but he was able to get help from a major technology partner that was better than money. They ‘loaned’ him an engineering team, so he didn’t have to recruit, organize and train them, clearly jump-starting the process.

The performance of the Pliant SSDs, covered in our recent Delta Report proves the results of the overall engineering that went into the product: http://www.ssg-now.com/pliant-lightning-ls-300s-enterprise-flash-drive-sets-new-performance-standard/

While we can’t discuss futures, we are confident that Pliant will lead the way in terms of superior price-performance. See our story about Solid Access (in this issue of The SSD Flash) as a recent deployment. Nowadays, with venture capital and hedge funds begging for a piece of the action, Mike certainly must enjoy ignoring them while Pliant continues to pile up design wins.

STEC’s rollercoaster ride

Lost in the analysis of the roller coaster ride in STEC’s publicly traded stock, is the innovation that STEC brought to the enterprise market. STEC remains the only drive format manufacturer that supports Fibre Channel, and has introduced a Serial ATA product that implies future offerings in the Serial Attached

SCSI (SAS) space. We caught up with STEC’s product marketing manager, Scott Shadley, at SNW. We discussed the pending dogfight between fab owners (Samsung, Toshiba and Intel-Micron) in the client space, and how that would impact STEC. The OEM customers of STEC are worried about dealing with foundry owners, for good reason. Getting locked into a single foundry owner could create supply problems which can be smoothed out with an intermediary capable of buying commodity flash memories on the open market. This is the ‘Achilles heel’ of foundry direct products. History is strewn with Intel and Micron end products that have been abandoned, notwithstanding the current robust end product offerings of Samsung, Intel and Micron, with more on the way.

LSI extends its SSD leadership

LSI’s DNA continues to permeate this space. We had the opportunity of meeting with Robin Wagner, sr. director of marketing for storage products, and her team during SNW. We love it when benchmarks are available in a hands-on environment, and we were not disappointed.

Demonstrations included LSI’s recently announced SSS6200 SAS PCIe drive that uses six 50GB Seagate SSD modules to demonstrate sustained reads at over 1,000MB/sec., and writes at 900MB/sec. and IOPs at 144,000 for 4KB random reads and 100,000 for 4KB random writes. This was accomplished on a system that was set up in their suite. Better performance will be achieved on a higher-performing configuration like the one used in the Pliant benchmarks.

Also demonstrated were LSI’s new software offerings that run on their MegaRAID 6Gbit/sec. SAS controller. CacheCade and FastPath are designed to operate with an array of HDDs and any manufacturer’s SSDs. CacheCade, like Adaptec’s MaxIQ, keeps a copy of the hottest data on the SSD as well as the HDD, and can boost read-intensive applications by 50x with a relatively small amount of SSD as compared to the HDD capacity. FastPath I/O acceleration software tunes the adapter for SSD arrays. Performance of random reads is increased by about 70% for 4KB random reads, writes and OLTP (transaction processing) workloads.

NextIO uses Texas Memory and Fusion-io for SLC and MLC appliances

We caught up with Mike Heumann, marketing vice president, and DaWane Wanek, sales vice president of NextIO during SNW. They have two versions of their vSTOR 3U SSD appliances. The vSTOR Extreme appliance has a capacity of up to 5TB of SLC and 170,000 IOPs. The vSTOR Standard has up to 7TB of MLC and 6.4GB/sec. of bandwidth. Both models have up to 5×8 PCIe server connections with 20Gbit/sec. data rate per server connection.

Nimbus unveils advanced SSD storage and aggressive pricing

Tom Isakovich, CEO of startup Nimbus Data, has ambitious plans. He wants to replace all of the world’s HDD systems with his brand new ‘Sustainable Storage’ Platform.

Featuring up to 504 redundant NAND flash blades and HALO storage operating system, the S-class offers lower energy costs, greater IO performance and on-demand scalability to 100 TB of solid state storage in a modular package with a full set of software features including thin provisioning and in-line deduplication and compression. The Nimbus S-class offers industry-standard 10 GbE and GbE connectivity, unified iSCSI, NFS and CIFS support, and proven data protection software. Available now and starting under $25,000, the Nimbus S-class is a drop-in alternative to traditional HDD arrays.

Built from off-the-shelf components, the software features provide a basis for strong differentiation against competitive storage systems. Tom discussed a Nimbus deployment of a proprietary flash drive using Micron EMLC, very clever and ambitious.

What will MLC SSD’s do to enterprise storage margins?

While mark-up is expected from Tier One suppliers, they would rather not talk about their SSD manufacturers. A 100% markup on a $400 HDD only yields $400 of contribution margin. But a 10% markup on a $20,000 drive yields $2,000 in contribution margin. No wonder Tier One suppliers have been happy to sell the very expensive STEC Zeus and Mach drives.

Once you are into MLC, the gross margin for Tier One suppliers will come under more scrutiny by enterprise IT buyers who can get street prices on drives quickly, and get in-depth product reviews at: http://www.andandtech.com

Anand Shimpi has become the go-to source for product reviews in the client and emerging enterprise SSD space and has validated the performance of the SandForce SF1200 client controller from both Corsair and OCZ (both discussed in this report) and the SF1500 enterprise controller from OCZ. Interestingly enough, the performance of the controllers are the same as that predicted by SandForce in our Snapshot Report published a year ago. We love consistency.  So SandForce has made good on its promises, although the SF1500 production firmware release has not occurred as of this writing. See a following discussion for more on this subject.

OCZ discusses product roadmap

We caught up with Daryl Lang, director of storage product management for OCZ. They had a busy month, which included the launch of a PCIe-based SSD and the listing of their stock on the NASDAQ. Long a supplier of client SSDs, OCZ is looking to SandForce as a way to extend its reach into the enterprise. While the first PCIe entry from OCZ uses a single path LSI SAS interface and an Indilynx controller, a future version will look a lot like the LSI SSS6200. OCZ has several products ready to go when SandForce has a production version of its SF1500 controller.

They are also looking to Micron for EMLC as a way to improve enterprise price-performance. Daryl also mentioned that Whiptail Technologies, who pioneered in the use of MLC in an enterprise appliance, is using their products.

When discussing the burgeoning dogfight between foundry owners Samsung, Toshiba and Intel-Micron, Daryl echoed STEC’s view that OEMs are not too excited about getting committed to a single flash provider. Watch OCZ closely as these new products come online. With experienced quick-turn engineering and production facilities in Taiwan, they are a pure play SSD manufacturer trading at under $5.00 per share. They could be a big winner on Wall Street. Or not (we do technology, not financial analysis).

SandForce firmware release process

SandForce uses a practice similar to organizations that deploy thousands of complex products at a whack (like barcode readers and mobile phones) and provides pre-release firmware for evaluation and testing prior to production release. These phases are critical to the debugging and pre-launch activity for any mass deployed product. SandForce uses the designation of ‘Beta’ for early releases that do not include all features and have major known and probably unknown problems. Release Candidate, or ‘RC’ versions contain full features but may have minor known and unknown problems. Mass Production, or MP, releases are basically a bug-fixed version of the RC. SandForce is currently at MP level for their SF1200 Client Controller and RC level for the SF1500 Enterprise Controller. While the chip used in the controller versions is identical, the firmware is very different in both features and testing required.

Corsair releases Force SSD line

Corsair, an experienced manufacturer of client SSDs has released its ‘Force’ line of SSDs that use the SandForce SF1200 controller. Available in 50-100-200GB versions, the 200GB model goes for $720 at Tiger Direct. While some may refer to this as ‘premium pricing,’ $3.60 per gig for this performance will turn heads at the enterprise client level.

Solid Access chooses Pliant

We had the chance to speak with Chas Chesler of Solid Access, based in New Hampshire. Hardly a start-up, Solid Access has been building high-end DRAM-based SSD appliances since 2002. Their new product called UNAS, which will operate in both block and namespace modes, has 10GbE connectivity and comes in 1.2TB and 2.4TB configurations using the Pliant EFD. Given the experience level of both companies, and the HPC customer base of Solid Access, this will be huge performance boost to the HPC market, and another important design win for Pliant.

The battle for enterprise SSD-DAS via PCIe heats up

We had the opportunity to get an update from the Texas Memory team at SNW regarding the approaches going into the PCIe market. According to Jamon Bowen, director of sales engineering, Texas Memory uses open source drivers, which use all of the power of the server’s bandwidth to push data. Fusion-io uses proprietary drivers. LSI and new entrant OCZ use silicon SAS controllers and have multi-operating system standard controller support. So the trade-offs get very interesting.

We recently completed an analysis of benchmark data from Emulex and QLogic regarding Fibre Channel over Ethernet controllers. While the Emulex driver-intensive approach achieved higher IOPs at certain workloads, the server CPU utilization was very high, due to driver-intensive processing. We found that IOPs and bandwidth need to be measured in context with CPU utilization. See our Delta Report at:

http://www.ssg-now.com/cna-performance-testing-your-mileage-may-vary/

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