The major storage manufacturers are all chasing the cloud storage market. The private cloud storage market makes a lot of sense to me. Clients adopting private cloud methodologies have additional, often more advanced, storage requirements. This will frequently require a storage rearchitecture and may dictate changing storage platforms to meet the new requirements. The public cloud storage market outlook is much less clear to me.

If public cloud services are as successful as the analysts, media, and vendors are suggesting they will be, then cloud providers will become massive storage buyers at a scale that dwarfs today’s corporate consumers. Whether the public cloud storage is part of an overall architecture that includes compute and capacity or a pure storage solution, the issue is the same. This is not about 1 or 2PB. The large cloud providers could easily be orders of magnitude larger than that.

Huge storage consumers are exactly what the storage manufacturers are looking for, right? Let me suggest something that may sound counterintuitive. Enormous success of cloud providers will be terrible news for today’s mainstream storage manufacturers. Read more…

I received several questions about the performance of the Oracle/Sun F20 flash card I used in my previous post about block alignment, so I put together a quick overview of the card’s performance capabilities. The following results are from testing the card in a dual socket 2.93Ghz Nehalem (x5570) system running Solaris x64. This is similar to the server platform Oracle uses in the ExaData 2 platform.

The F20 card is a SAS controller with 4 x 24GB flash modules attached to it. You can find more info on the flash modules on Adam Leventhal’s blog and the official Oracle product page has the F20 details.

All of my tests used 100% random 4KB blocks. I focused on random operations, because in most cases it is not cost effective to use SSD for sequential operations. These tests were run with a variety of different thread counts to give an idea of how the card scales with multiple threads. The first test compared the performance of a single 24GB flash module to the performance of all 4 modules. Read more…

I spoke at TechForum in New York earlier this week. Here is a copy of my presentation for anyone who is interested. The official title is “Rethinking Storage Strategies: How Virtualization is Transforming Storage.” At a high level, I spoke about the current trends in storage and how they play together with server virtualization. I do not think it will have the same impact without the running commentary, so feel free to comment here or drop me a line if you have any questions.

  Storage Trends and Server Virtualization (199.0 KiB)