Tag: Thunderbolt IO

What to do with 36TB on my Mac?

Posted on by Ray in Data density, Disk storage, File Storage, Strategic Inflection Points
(Back of) Western Digital's Thunderbolt Duo (from their website)
(Back of) Western Digital's Thunderbolt Duo (from their website)

Western Digital (WD) just released their new Digital MyBook Thunderbold Duo the other day and it features 2-2TB or -3TB disks and of course you can daisy chain up to 6 of these together just in case, for up to 36TB on a Mac.

I have been happy with my desktop storage which has been running about 80% full.  Plus I have a 1TB time machine external drive for online backups which I use more than I care to admit.  But what the heck am I going to do with 36TB.

Enter Apple TV

Well, now that the new Apple TV is out and it supports 1080p video that problem might be solved.   I am starting to think of transfering my entire DVD/BlueRay collection to digital format and loading it all on iTunes. That way I could use Airplay and Apple TV to play it to a TV.

This is where the 6 to 36TB of storage could come in handy.  Especially if I wasn’t interested in streaming everything off of iCloud and having a local iTunes repository onsite for all my videos.

Digital video for the iPad

Today, I don’t have a lot of videos on my desktop, mostly ones I wanted to view on my  iPad so, they are highly compressed and only take up about 1GB per video (Handbrake encoded from DVDs).

I am thinking the new 1080p iTunes encoded videos would take up more space at least 4-5GB per video but would still be considerably better than 9GB for DVD and ~36GB for BluRay, high definition videos.

Given current storage I could probably handle converting my current iPad videos over to the 1080p version (if I actually owned them in hi-def) but if I wanted to put the rest of my video library on my desktop I don’t have enough space.

Bulk storage meet the Mac

Then WD came out with their new Thunderbolt Duo drives.  It seems to have it all, Thunderbolt I/O at 10Gbps, with all the storage I could possibly need.  Presumably the 2 or 3TB drives are 5400 or 7200 SATA 3.0 drives.  But they are user swappable, so could concievably be changed out to whatever comes out next but probably in pairs.

Of course with SATA 3.0 they can only go 6Gbps to the disks, but it’s not a bad match to have 2 drives per single bi-directional Thunderbolt channel.  Although whether 6 of these  daisy chained on a single Thunderbolt cable would generate decent performance is another question.  Then again, how much performance can one Mac use?

I suppose my next steps are to upgrade my Mac to hardware that supports Thunderbolt, get Apple TV, buy a Duo drive or two and then start encoding my DVD/BluRay library.

But that’s too logical, instead maybe I’ll just get Apple TV and give iCloud a try, at least for awhile and save the WD Duo for the next evolution.  Maybe by then WD have come out with their 4TB drives, providing 8TB per Duo.

Comments?

SSD news roundup

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Data QoS, Data reduction, Ethernet, SSD storage, Storage Features, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness
The NexGen n5 Storage System (c) 2011 NexGen Storage, All Rights Reserved
The NexGen n5 Storage System (c) 2011 NexGen Storage, All Rights Reserved

NexGen comes out of stealth

NexGen Storage a local storage company came out of stealth today and is also generally available.  Their storage system has been in beta since April 2011 and is in use by a number of customers today.

Their product uses DRAM caching, PCIe NAND flash, and nearline SAS drives to provide guaranteed QoS for LUN I/O.  The system can provision IOP rate, bandwidth and (possibly) latency over a set of configured LUNs.    Such provisioning can change using policy management on a time basis to support time-based tiering. Also, one can prioritize how important the QoS is for a LUN so that it could be guaranteed or could be sacrificed to support performance for other storage system LUNs.

The NexGen storage provides a multi-tiered hybrid storage system that supports 10GBE iSCSI, and uses MLC NAND PCIe card  to boost performance for SAS nearline drives.  NexGen also supports data deduplication which is done during off-peak times to reduce data footprint.

DRAM replacing Disk!?

In a report by ARS Technica, a research group out of Stanford is attempting to gang together server DRAM to create a networked storage system.  There have been a number of attempts to use DRAM as a storage system in the past but the Stanford group is going after it in a different way by aggregating together DRAM across a gaggle of servers.  They are using standard disks or SSDs for backup purposes because DRAM is, of course, a volatile storage device but the intent is to keep all in memory to speed up performance.

I was at SNW USA a couple of weeks ago talking to a Taiwanese company that was offering a DRAM storage accelerator device which also used DRAM as a storage service. Of course, Texas Memory Systems and others have had DRAM based storage for a while now. The cost for such devices was always pretty high but the performance was commensurate.

In contrast, the Stanford group is trying to use commodity hardware (servers) with copious amounts of DRAM, to create a storage system.  The article seems to imply that the system could take advantage of unused DRAM, sitting around your server farm. But, I find it hard to believe that.  Most virtualized server environments today are running lean on memory and there shouldn’t be a lot of excess DRAM capacity hanging around.

The other achilles heel of the Stanford DRAM storage is that it is highly dependent on low latency networking.  Although Infiniband probably qualifies as low latency, it’s not low latency enough to support this systems IO workloads. As such, they believe they need even lower latency networking than Infiniband to make it work well.

OCZ ups the IOP rate on their RevoDrive3 Max series PCIe NAND storage

Speaking of PCIe NAND flash, OCZ just announced speedier storage, upping the random read IO rates up to 245K from the 230K IOPS offered in their previous PCIe NAND storage.  Unclear what they did to boost this but, it’s entirely possible that they have optimized their NAND controller to support more random reads.

OCZ announces they will ship TLC SSD storage in 2012

OCZ’s been busy.  Now that the enterprise is moving to adopt MLC and eMLC SSD storage, it seems time to introduce TLC (3-bits/cell) SSDs.  With TLC, the price should come down a bit more (see chart in article), but the endurance should also suffer significantly.  I suppose with the capacities available with TLC and enough over provisioning OCZ can make a storage device that would be reliable enough for certain applications at a more reasonable cost.

I never thought I would see MLC in enterprise storage so, I suppose at some point even TLC makes sense, but I would be even more hesitant to jump on this bandwagon for awhile yet.

Solid Fire obtains more funding

Early last week Solid Fire, another local SSD startup obtained $25M in additional funding.  Solid Fire, an all SSD storage system company,  is still technically in beta but expect general availability near the end of the year.   We haven’t talked about them before in RayOnStorage but they are focusing on cloud service providers with an all SSD solution which includes deduplication.  I promise to talk about them some more when they reach GA.

LaCIE introduces a Little Big Disk, a Thunderbolt SSD

Finally, in the highend consumer space, LaCie just released a new SSD which attaches to servers/desktops using the new Apple-Intel Thunderbolt IO interface.  Given the expense (~$900) for 128GB SSD, it seems a bit much but if you absolutely have to have the performance this may be the only way to go.

 

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Well that’s about all I could find on SSD and DRAM storage announcements. However, I am sure I missed a couple so if you know one I should have mentioned please comment.