Diskicide – the death of disk

Apples and Oranges??

"... post-dedupe flash cost/GB is the same as disk."

Is that post-dedupe disk and post-compression disk? Or is it raw disk? At what size of storage array is that comparison made?

Helium: It's not about friction, it's about reducing turbulence and head vibration.

Helium is more viscous than air not less. It's also lighter. These two reasons mean laminar flow is possible at higher velocities, andturbulence is reduced, and the mass of the gas is reduced, all factors reducing head vibration. Turbulence != friction.

(While I am a physicist by training this is not my area of expertise, but the first thing I did was look it up).

The boy with his finger in the dyke succeeded.

That's the point of the story: The hole got larger and he put in his arm then his whole body. Eventually they sent out a search party, found him, and patched up the dyke.

Moral: the little we are able to do may be enough.

flash-disk-flash

the substitution process will be evolutionary and in most cases run by life cycle considerations.

VSI/VDI/OLTP/DSS clear thing. I am not so sure about backup/archive - media break as an insurance for your software defined storage (what are the flash solutions at the end of the day) is an argument---

I love that last graph

It nicely sums up how content-free the article is (after first explaining the basics of HDD and flash). It's mostly either an extended exercise in wish-fulfillment or pulled right from the nether regions. I hope flash succeeds and comes downmarket too, I'd like to be able to afford more, but even at QLC 16nm I don't see how it's likely to fully compete with a combination of iterative SMR (and eventually HAMR) tech, and potential future flash competitors (memristors, if they ever get off the ground?).

Flash has probably reached the point where it can perform nearly all of most consumers' needs, but businesses' need for storage will seemingly expand to fill as much as they can afford.

Trend Looks Correct

It certainly looks like innovation is happening mainly in the SSD side (XPoint, 16TB single drive etc). Also worth mentioning that it looks like we are rapidly running out of HDD vendors, three left, WD plus Seagate with speculation that Toshiba might want out.

HDD seem to be heading quickly towards being more specialist high volume devices, and no longer general purpose i.e. high capacity low spin rate (5400 RPM) sold as NAS drives and SMR which is just awful for random writes. HDD may very soon purely be used for high capacity long term storage and tiered storage system and just not be useful for anything else. Becoming what tapes used to be.

The may issue stopping us fully heading here is that it seems to be struggling to hit a decent price point for storage of a 1-3 TB (not even parity just reasonable). And the vendors seem to have less interest in this area as presumably, higher storage and speed targeting the 15K drive sector is where the money is. Obviously this mid-ground moves with time.

SSD do well at the few hundred GB SSD's for boot and really fast higher capacity storage disks (money is no object solutions).

I think SSD will win, but it's going to be a very long transition period.

It might always have a nice, but...

"But Nimble Storage says its hybrid arrays have replaced an IBM all-flash RamSan – because they had better sequential data access performance." - this is an important point I think. While a large part of the enterprise storage busioness is focussed on IOPs, there is a segment of storage folks (myself among them) for whom IOps matter not much but for whom massive sequential performance is what is required). Now while I appreciate all the DB, VM, et al folks out there who love their IOPs and represent the bulk of the cash to splash, it would be nice to see The Register (or any major publication) take a long, hard serious look at sequential storage workloads. For sequential workloads, disk still has its place, for now, certainly in terms of bang for buck.

As for "...flash could kick spinning rust out of the data center and disk become the new tape..." surely that begs they question, "Why does that make any sense?" Tape is already good at that role. Is that just disk fanboiism? If I'm buying bulk, a tape cart that is essentially, plastic tape, a plastic box, a spring and a plastic cog, is *always* going to have a lower cost per unit than a far more complicated to manufacture disk drive. Even factoring in the costy of the tape drives the overall solution cost shoul still be lower. Then there's the opex, which for archive will always be lower. Oh sure there's the whole MAID thing in archive, but Copan never went anywhere whith that and nobody I've yet encountered trusts disks to reliably spin up and down like that.

It will certainly be interesting to watch though.

feeling old...

...because I remember using punch cards, paper tape, mag tape and toggle switches to key in the paper tape bootloader! Nothing as strange as the oscilloscope output and rotary phone dial for input on an ancient mainframe though ;)

Yes, completely OT :)

Yes, but...

While this pean to flash may justify the salary, there are other technologies over the horizon, memristor perhaps, which will (hopefully) provide access to data at bus speeds and probably render obsolete current computer architectures which haven't really changed in concept since the stored program digital computer was initially developed.

Good Thinking! But pay attention to...

Good reasoning on flash displacing spinning media for certain use cases in the data center!

I'd encourage some thought on:

1. The server-side software stack for accessing storage. The stack we've used for 50 years, or even in its current form as the SCSI stack for 30 years or the Fibre Channel stack for 20, consumes far too many CPU cycles, far too much time to match up with what flash and emerging solid state storage technologies can do. NVMe and NVMe over Fabric are a major step here, but by no means the end of the story.

2. In the data center, the interfaces used for a storage infrastructure change glacially. An IT shop which committed to Fibre Channel 15 years ago will probably be using at least some Fibre Channel 15 years from now, even if they decide today to start phasing it out. Which leads to...

3. A lot of these new storage technologies, whether it's Object or some creative use of server integrated flash, are great for (certain) new applications, but legacy apps would have to be ported at a minimum and rearchitected/rewritten at the extreme, to use these new storage models. That means the legacy apps will be on something which emulates traditional storage for a long time.

4. "Requiescat in Pace" (sorry, the 4 years of Latin I took 40 years ago stuck, have to call the typo)

@FStevenChalmers

Failure rate

Simple stat from last year: % of storage devices becoming catastrophically defective within a year of deployment:

Disk: less than 1% (1 Disk)

SSD: 15%+

Vendors: Come back, when you have finished your homework.

Stick to the fundamentals - we've been here before

Isn't it better to acknowledge that there will always be storage media that are optimized for performance/reliability and will always carry a cost premium just as there will always be capacity optimized media that will be relatively inexpensive? It is the job of the systems vendor and IT leader to strike the right balance for that particular environment and have the ability to change over time as requirements change? Twenty-some years ago we advanced from 3,600 to 5.400 to 7,200 to 10,000 to 15,000 RPM drives. Now were going through a similar phase with different grades of flash over time.

I actually stopped caring about media about a year ago

Great - flash this, "spinning rust" that, compression, dedupe, blah, blah, blah. I really don't care any more. What I want is the major attributes of the storage presented to the user able to be independently modified without effecting any of the other attributes. On the fly. Using an automation interface. Performance (IOPS and MB/s), availability, protection level (data redundancy), versions (snapshots) frequency and retention, locking data with guaranteed integrity, encrypting data, off-site copy of data, off-line copy of data, geo-distribution of data, access permissions, metadata creation/modification, etc., etc. All of them, no exceptions and no mealy mouthed marketing bollocks.

Compare and contrast with compute. If we were having this discussion about compute it would be about the number of CPU cores, memory technology and bus speeds. The dicussions on compute are actually about containers vs. H/W virtualisation, devops, continuous integration, etc. It is time storage got out of the stone age and joined the rest of the world. Discuss.