The Impact of Disruptive Technologies on the Professional Storage Market
by Johan De Gelas on August 5, 2013 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- SSDs
- Enterprise
- Enterprise SSDs
Fusion-IO: the Pioneer
Fusion-IO is telling everyone that wants to listen that it is much more than the vendor of extremely fast PCIe flash cards. Despite the fact that it sells quite a few cards to the storage giants like NetApp, Fusion-IO wants nothing less than to completely change and conquer the storage market.
Fusion-IO's first succesful move was to sell extremely fast ioDrives to the people who live from scale-out applications like Facebook and Apple. These companies ditched their traditional SAN environments very quickly as replacing centralized shared storage by a model where hundreds of servers have a local PCIe flash storage system gave them up to ten times more storage performance at a fraction of the cost of a high-end SAN system.
Ditching your centralized storage is not for everyone of course: your application has to handle replication and thus be able to survive the loss of many server nodes. But as we all know, that is exactly what Google, Facebook, and other scale-out companies did: build applications that replicate data between nodes so that nobody has to worry about a few failing nodes.
The Iodrive: up to 3TB, hundreds of thousands of IOPS
Although scale-out customers were extremely important to Fusion-IO, the company also went also after the virtualization market where centralized storage is king. The ioTurbine is a Hypervisor plug-in that enables server side caching on a virtualized host with a Fusion-IO flash card. The beauty is that ioTurbine does not disable the typical goodies that centralized storage offers in a virtualized environment such as vMotion and High Availability. ioTurbine works with ESXi, Windows 2012/2008 and RHEL.
Fusion-IO ION Data Accelerator is the next generation SAN: PCIe Flash cards inside any decent x86 server, like the Supermicro 6037 or the HP DL380p. ION is typically used for high-end database clusters. Fusion-IO promises that this shared storage can deliver no less than 1 million IOPs.
With the acquisition of NexGen Storage, Fusion-IO is also targeting the midrange market by offering a “flashpool” kind of product. The key difference is that NexGen Storage can use write-back caching, while most vendors do no or limited writing on the flash disks. The Fusion-IO software is also able to provision a certain amount of IOPs for each LUN.
.jpg)
But more than anything else, the Fusion-IO products are offering extreme speeds. Even a one array NexGen N5 series targeted at SMBs promise 100K-300K IOPs, more than any of the much more expensive midrange SANs can offer right now.
The fastest product, the 10TB ioDrive octal, costs around $100k and delivers 1 million IOPs. Even if those numbers are inflated, it is roughly an order of magnitude faster and cheaper (per GB) than the NetApp “Flash Cache”.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
60 Comments
View All Comments
prime2515103 - Wednesday, August 7, 2013 - link
I know, it just seems unprofessional. It's a tech article, not a chat room.FunBunny2 - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
What is always missing from such essays (and this one reads more like a 'Seeking Alpha' pump piece) is a discussion of datastore structure. If you want speed and fewer bytes and your data isn't just videos, then an industrial strength RDBMS with a Organic Normal Form™ schema gets rid of the duplicate bytes. Too bad.DukeN - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
But has there actually been any disruptions to the top dogs?EMC, NetApp, storage from HP/Dell/IBM, Hitachi all have had significant earnings increases yet again.
So maybe a couple of new startups as well as FusionIO are making money now, but some of the big guys can probably just buy them out and shelf them.
davegraham - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Look at EMC's acquisition of XtremeI/O...that's a viable competitor that EMC has already been able to integrate as a mainstream product. Oh, and they're also using Virident PCIe cards for server-side flash. ;)DukeN - Wednesday, August 7, 2013 - link
But is that really disruptive, or business as usual? These guys usually buy up smaller technologies as needed and integrate them if needed. Most of their core business (spinning disks) has remained the same.bitpushr - Friday, August 9, 2013 - link
XtremIO is still not a shipping product. It is not generally-available. So, I do not think this qualifies as "integrate as a mainstream product".Likewise their server-side Flash sales (Project Lightning) have been extremely slow.
phoenix_rizzen - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
If you ditch Windows on the desktop, you can do a lot more for a lot less.$22,000 for a Nutanix node to support a handful of virtual desktops? And you still need the VDI client systems on top of that? Pffft, for $3000 CDN we can support 200-odd diskless Linux workstations (diskless meaning they boot off the network, mount all their filesystems via NFS, and run all programs on the local system using local CPU, local RAM, local GPU, local sound, etc). The individual desktops are all under $200 (AMD Athlon-II X3 and X4, 2 GB of RAM, onboard everything; CPU fan is the only moving part) and treated like appliances (when one has issues, just swap it out for a spare).
No licensing fees for the OS, no licensing fees for 90+% of the software in use, no exorbitant markup on the hardware. And all staff and students are happy with the system. We've been running this setup in the local school district for just shy of 10 years now. Beats any thin-client/VDI setup, that's for sure.
turb0chrg - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Another vendor doing hybrid storage is Nimble Storage (http://www.nimblestorage.com/). I've looked at their solution and it is quite impressive. It's not cheap though.They also claim to be the fastest growing storage vendor!
dilidolo - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
I have 2 of them for VDI, they work fine, but I wouldn't call it enterprise storage.equals42 - Saturday, August 17, 2013 - link
It's only iSCSI so you better like that protocol.