Spin cycle
Channel companies have been told over and over that SSD is gaining on spinning disk. Has the wheel turned?
On 26 August, Seagate shipped its first 8TB SSD, said to provide 8TB in a single drive slot for maximum rack density within an existing footprint to address an ever-increasing amount of unstructured data in a smaller footprint. Flash monsters of 1TB and above are many times faster than a 7,200rpm HDD. Could this be a true HDD replacement?
Given the amount of hype in the market about SSD these past few years, clearly some OEMs would have both the channel and customers think the end could be nigh for HDD. Major resellers such as Computacenter have even gone to the trouble of producing marketing brochures highlighting the selling points - SSD is an entry in its Inspired Contemporary Workplace Solutions series and will "change the state of play" in storage, it reads.
Crucially, Computacenter also promotes SSD audits - a service where customers can discover where they might deploy SSD to achieve greater performance.
And that's the nub of the issue: for SSD's advantages are not as clear-cut as the marketing teams and assorted public relations types might have the news media - and by extension industry partners and customers - assume. There are different types of SSD for a start, with varied benefits and disadvantages, and that oft-quoted notion that because flash has no moving parts it cannot fail can be somewhat misleading.
It is verifiably true of course that the market for all types of SSD technology has continued to grow and expand. Joe Unsworth, research vice president in the technology and service provider group at Gartner, notes that 2013 was a great year for the SSD market, despite flash chip shortages and relatively flat pricing.
Price per GB of NAND declined 41 per cent in 2012 - but only 13 per cent in the 2013 year. The market continued to consolidate, and vendor wars intensified, but the total SSD revenue take was up 53.1 per cent on 2012.
"The PC SSD market saw a surge in shipments and sales, led by Apple and other PC OEM customers; the delivery of new SSD technologies helped entice consumers and corporations," he says.
"Revenue for e-grade SSDs in both the server and storage segments expanded, but for different reasons. Hyperscale customers drove low-cost unit volume while storage OEMs fuelled sales and margins for the higher-end drives, which benefited the select few vendors qualified."
Furthermore, the solid-state array (SSA) revenue subset rose from $237m (￡143m) in 2012 to $667m in 2013. IBM and Pure Storage took the top two positions in SSAs.
Gartner splits the SSD market into five segments: entry-level and mainstream PC SSD; and SATA, Peripheral Component Interconnect express (PCIe) and SAS enterprise or industrial SSD. PCIe-interface SSD began appearing in Apple laptops last year - potentially redrawing battle lines, Unsworth says.
"IBM soared in 2013 based on considerable traction in the SSA market for its 2012 acquisition of Texas Memory Systems (TMS), one of the pioneers of high-performance, RAM-based appliances," he adds. "IBM was able to cultivate massive sales and shipments in 2013 through its procurement power and global reach as it incentivised and educated not only its own sales force but its channel partners."
Pure Storage came to market in 2012 and unlike IBM has "compelling data management software features", Unsworth suggests.
"While Pure Storage doesn't have the highest scale-up approach, because it procures consumer PC SSDs, it does have a wide variety of capacity and price entry points that appeal to a wide range of customers with highly virtualised server, hosted virtual desktop and database environments," he says.
"Pure's use of clever and effective marketing has helped excite its channel partners, which it relies on exclusively, and it has had some of the best success of any emerging vendor in expanding globally into Europe and Asia."
Excited channel partners notwithstanding, how are individual companies faring with SSD thus far?
Noam Shendar, vice president of international sales at enterprise-storage-as-a-service provider Zadara, confirms that the Irvine, California firm uses SSAs in its customer offering and the choice gives the provider a genuine advantage. SSD handles active workloads, as well as in caching - a technique that is as common as the first but that is less talked about, he says.
"That is where the ‘just right' approach comes in; the right mix of capacity and performance for the customer," Shendar says. "We have used SSD right from the very beginning, and to be precise, our first release had SSD as direct capacity. The caching was an addition in our first major update after that initial release."
Shendar says SSD helps Zadara deliver cost effectiveness to customer analytics demands - something more businesses want to get into but are put off by the need for and expense of more capable infrastructure. Zadara's storage service enables customers to gain the benefits without necessarily shouldering all the associated IT burdens; it's a classic argument for cloud adoption.
Zadara saw a "big gap" in the market, and moved to address it: "We saw there was demand, but it was very dependent on pricing."
Shendar believes we are just at the beginning of a flash revolution in the datacentre - and in some cases it does make sense to go all-flash. However, there will continue to be a place for HDD and even tape for a long time, with hybrid offerings likely to prove best for many customers.
HP's new 3PAR StorServe 7450, for example, gives SSD price parity with 15K SAS HDD.
If database applications, for example, require many thousands of input/output operations per second (IOPS), high-capacity, multi-TB flash can cost roughly the same as HDD. With that in mind, web-scale leaders such as Amazon and Google are using more SSD, coupling performance improvements with reduced power use and hardware consolidation.
It's true that few businesses much resemble Amazon, but increasing numbers of companies are seeing the potential for big data analytics projects they are struggling to know how to fund. Few IT managers really have the capacity they need, notes Shendar, and access to a hybrid storage infrastructure may assist.
"All our virtual private storage arrays are provisioned with an SSD cache that is elastic and scalable - so you can use it for hot data such as metadata, journals, or user applications for both data read and write caching," he notes.
"If you have an application such as a database or analytics that requires high and random IOPS for reads and writes, SSDs are definitely the way to go."
Where large volumes of low-priced capacity are required, HDD can be the best choice, while SSD can be added to speed up the applications. That is until the cost differential disappears - as it may eventually do for some if not all types of drive if the current price reduction trajectory continues, Shendar suggests.
Vendors are able to shine a light on the pros and cons of SSD.
Michael Letschin (pictured, right), senior product marketing manager at storage vendor Nexenta, offers a couple of recent case studies to illustrate the benefits. At the University of Sussex, a combination of Dell R720 servers, SAS cards and SSDs (with 110TB of capacity each) was used to deliver dynamic IT support that offers 15,000 students and staff seamless access to university IT no matter where they are or which device they are using.
Software-defined advantage
Reseller NAS UK put together a NexentaStor plus high-availability cluster that manages data across 200 physical servers, 200 virtual servers, and two datacentres. The university is now looking to replicate the improvements and software-defined approach in other storage systems across the campus.
In Sweden, web hoster Space2U has benefited from Nexenta storage, incorporating SSD, similarly used as part of a 20,000-IOPS solution to ever-expanding data volumes but at lower cost than other offerings, the vendor says.
"It is appearing in some upgrades, particularly when reliant on an ability to use SSD as read-and-write cache," Letschin confirms. "There are in-line data reduction improvements.
"But each SSD is obviously different. And it's not about going in and saying ‘I'm going to give you all-SSD.' It will be a dramatically different solution, depending on whether they're using one brand or another brand of SSD."
Letschin agrees with the previous remarks about price and capacity versus performance. It is an equation that has to be recalculated for every customer and situation. In that sense, SSD really is an excellent "trusted adviser" channel opportunity, and with so many different types of SSD on the market, it will probably remain so for some time.
"I think people are thinking they want SSD now, but they don't know what pieces of the solution they need," Letschin says.
Gavin McLaughlin (pictured, left), vice president of worldwide marketing at storage vendor X-IO Technologies, agrees, adding that it is "certainly an interesting time in storage" and that it is important to step back and look at all the options, even if some vendors are claiming theirs can do everything that's required.
"There are a lot of new technologies enabling all of us to do things kind of differently and take advantage of flash," he says. "The storage market started to mature about 10 years ago, and we started talking about ‘solutions' and apps, and then we seem almost to have reversed and started talking about media again."
Flash is a tool, to be fitted in where it works, to provide certain advantages. Trends such as mobility, big data and consumerisation as well as web-scale all have their role to play in pushing the market towards SSD, McLaughlin notes, and key to success is considering the characteristics of actual workloads and workflows - are they synchronous, for example, or can you get away with just having the big guns pointed in one direction?
And one should never forget that SSD, as a NAND technology, has a defined potential lifespan that should be considered in each instance. "How many write cycles does it take before it wears out?" warns McLaughlin.
"Then there's something like single-layer cell (SLC) that lasts for a very long time. Those iPhones and laptops have quite a short life time. HDD is mechanical, and people have this assumption that flash devices last longer."
That is not necessarily the case, he says, and the channel would be wise to pay attention to the length of time vendors have had their specific SSDs out in the market before believing claims of longevity.
Nick Powling, general manager for disk at storage distributor Hammer, adds: "I would say that the market for SSD is changing; certainly in the past six months or so."
Different segments of the SSD market have seen different effects but a price reduction of about 35 per cent to 40 per cent has been seen in some types of SSD offering, Powling confirms. The market knows now that prices have come down, and this has increased the attractiveness of SSD as a component in certain storage arrays or solutions, if not in every upgrade.
Upgrades from a general workplace point of view may happen in relation to the performance goals and other contributors to the infrastructure. Laptops in the workplace, for example, are often being upgraded with SSD, as are boot devices, but more generally the wider infrastructure may require consideration if full benefit is to be gained, he asserts.
A distributor such as Hammer can offer value by helping steer channel and customer through what has been and continues to be a somewhat confusing landscape for the generalist. Often the answer will be a hybrid one, Powling believes.
"It is probably hard to categorise it. It is about finding out from the customer what the application is, what performance is required, and what the intention is," he says. "You would need to know all the different tools yourselves and so many different manufacturers. There's still a lot of need for help in the market."
Top five NAND flash manufacturers in 2013
1 Samsung held onto its top spot
2 Intel once again came second
3 SanDisk - up from fifth place in 2012
4 Micron - rose from eighth spot in 2012
5 Toshiba - was ranked third in 2012
Source: Gartner analysis June 2014