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
NetApp: Automatic Tiering and More Flash Goodness
Most vendors did not do much better than NetApp as they used an advocated automatic tiering, meaning that hot data was moved from the slow magnetic disks to the flash disk. Although it sounds nice, the reality was that it did not solve some performance bottlenecks. As the process was not real-time, you could be hitting the disks a lot for a piece of data before the data was finally moved towards the flash tier. Also migrating data around is not very energy friendly as it wastes a lot of processing and storage bandwidth.
To sum it up: NetApp's Flash Cache did better than the "automatic flash tier" of other vendors, but the flash cache performance/dollar ratio was not exactly something to write home about.
Last year, NetApp went a step further. The storage arrays could be expanded with a “flash pool”, a storage pool consisting of a RAID group of SSDs (100, 200, or 800GB) that caches the random reads and writes of the volumes inside a magnetic hard disk pool. All writes are first written to the NVRAM and then flushed to the disks. However, an overwrite of random write is written to the flash pool. This greatly improves performance when you update the same data over and over again in a small time period because the update is only propagated to the disks when the data is not changed for some time. Sequential writes and reads are still sent to the disks, which is an intelligent way to make the most of your SSDs. Also, the flash pool is an LRU (Least Recently Used) cache.
It is ironic to notice that NetApp quotes customers who reported 100s of ms for critical requests in case studies. While the case studies did make the flash based SAN shine, they also show how a few years ago, SAN arrays were expensive and not delivering. Luckily, those customers now report that flash pools reduced the response time to 5 ms. It is good that the newest NetApp technology has accelerated this, but it is also a clear example that even high-end SANs failed to deliver good performance to customers just a year ago.
But flash pool and flash cache do not give the performance benefits that server side flash cache delivered with Fusion-IO. So something really interesting happened: NetApp announced Flash Accel, making sure its SANs could work together with server side flash caches. Even more interesting is that NetApp is not charging anything for this software, probably to make sure that the current NetApp customers do not get lured away by other server side storage solutions.
Existing customers can simply download the ESXi 5.0/Windows 2008 agent. Each VM needs to get an agent and an ESXi host, so Flash Accel works at the moment with only a limited number of configurations. However, it's quite disruptive to witness a typical SAN vendor promoting server side caching. Just a year ago, most SAN vendors were downplaying this trend.
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pjkenned - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Hi Johan, one thing to be clear about is that the dollars you are quoting in this article are off by a huge margin. Enterprise storage is one of the most highly discounted areas of technology. Happy to chat more on this subject. Patrick @STHname99 - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Ahh, the never-ending whine of the Enterprise sale man, who desperately wants to have it both ways --- to be able to charge a fortune and simultaneously to claim that he's not charging a fortune. Good luck with that --- there is, after all, a sucker born every minute.But let's get one thing straight here. If your organization refuses to publish the actual prices at which it sells, then you STFU when people report the prices that ARE published, not the magic secret prices that you claim exist but neither you nor anyone else are ever allowed to actually mention them. You don't get to have it both ways.
AnandTech and similar blogs are not in the business of sustaining your obsolete business model and its never-ending lies about price...
enealDC - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
Thank you!!! lolJohanAnandtech - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
You can not blame a company to do whatever they can to protect their business model, but your comment is on target. The list versus street price models reminds of techniques of salesman on the street in touristic areas: they charge 3 times too much, and you end up with a 50% discount. The end result is that you are still ripped off unless you have intimate knowledge.nafhan - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
My experience with stuff like this is that the low prices are geared towards locking you into their products and getting themselves in the door. As soon as these companies feel certain that changing to a different storage tech would be prohibitively expensive for you, the contract renewal price will go through the roof.In other words, that initial price may actually be very good and very competitive. Just don't expect to get the same deal when things come up for contract renewal.
equals42 - Saturday, August 17, 2013 - link
You shouldn't be making enterprise purchasing decisions unless you have intimate knowledge and have done the necessary research.pjkenned - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
So three perspectives:First - I have been advocating open storage projects for years. I do think we are moving to 90%+ of the market being 4TB drives and SSDs and SDS is a clear step in this direction. I don't sell storage but have been using open platforms for years precisely because of the value I can extract through the effort of sizing the underlying hardware.
Second - Most of the big vendors are public companies. It isn't hard to look at gross margin and figure out ballpark what average discounts are. Most organizations purchasing this type of storage have other needs. The market could push for lower margins so my sense is that the companies buying this class of storage are not just paying for raw storage.
Third - vendors are moving the direction of lower discounts at the low end. Published list prices there are much closer to actual as the discounting trend in the industry is towards lower list prices.
Not to say that pricing is just or logical, but then again, it is a large industry that is poised for a disruptive change. One key thing here is that I believe you can get pricing if you just get a quote. This is the same as other enterprise segments such as the ERP market.
equals42 - Saturday, August 17, 2013 - link
I'll not ask you to STFU as you eloquently abbreviated it. Though in general I believe people ultimately charge what they believe the market will pay.Yes, list prices are generously overpriced in the IT industry. But to ask EMC or IBM to tell you how much they really charge for things is stupid. That's a negotiated rate between them and their customer. BofA or WalMart isn't going to disclose how much they pay for services. Their low negotiated price helps drive efficiencies to better compete with rivals. Heck, ask Kelloggs how much Target pays per box for cereal vs WalMart. No way in hell they're going to tell you. You think a SMB is going to get the same price as Savvis or Bank of America? They can ask for it but good luck. I sense some naiveté in your response.
In essence you're complaining about how inflated the list is vs what the average customer pays. That's a game played out based on supply and demand, market expectations and the blended costs of delivering products.
prime2515103 - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
"Note that the study does not mention the percentage customer stuck in denial :-)."I don't mean to be a jerk or anything, but I can't believe I just read that on Anandtech. It's not the grammar either. A smiley? Good grief...
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, August 6, 2013 - link
I fixed the sentence, but left the smiley in there. My prerogative ;-)