EMC, pure and NetApp push new products, where are NAS flash scenarios

hardy Architect Technical Alliance

The all FLASH/SSD storage trend is overwhelming, as is the case with NAS services in the future, with many start-ups supporting all-SSD NAS storage services, including EMC Isilion, which also offers all-flash nodes. High IOPS capability in flash scenarios, corresponding to NAS should be OPS capability, such as random small file reads and writes, analytics and hotspot acceleration. On NAS support for databases, such as GPFs NAS for Purescale, Oracle support, there will be significant improvements in database performance and processing power if storage media is SSD-based.

Today we look at Purestorage's Flashblade SSD nas products, EMC Isilon all flash, and all Flash FAS a series SSD NAS products based on the traditional data ontap.

First review the Flasharray product, Flasharray//m Hardware is an upgraded version of the previous generation of FA, compared to increased capacity and performance. The Flasharray//M20 is an entry-level device that supports expansion from 5TB-40TB to 250TB of usable capacity in 3u-5u boxes, with performance up to 200,000 (32K block) iops,// The M50 box in 3u-5u supports 20TB and 176TB bare capacity and supports scaling up to 500TB usable capacity, 270,000 IOPS.

The new array in flasharray//m uses the MLC Flash chip. Purestorage believes that MLC will be the trend that he can achieve SLC the same durability level.

Flashblade is a rack-scale flash system of pure storage, with a variety of protocols to access unstructured data, and the first set of object-based, all-flash, non-structured data storage systems on the market. However, its rack size differs from EMC's DSSD rack-scale flash system, which is primarily geared toward latency-sensitive structured data. Flassharray//m is primarily oriented towards structured data, and in fact Flashblade is a complement to existing flasharray//m schemes.

Flashblade faces potentially large-scale unstructured datasets in use case design, such as IoT, log data, and machine data. It can be linked to large-scale simulation tasks, including traditional weather forecasts and airflow analysis, security threat analysis, and big data analysis, among others.

Flashblade can increase storage capacity, IO and metadata performance, transmission bandwidth, and client connectivity in non-destructive conditions by adding blade devices. The level of consistent low latency it provides should go far beyond disk-based object storage systems.

The Flashblade design uses 15 side-aligned blades in 4U space, and the device is capable of achieving petabytes of storage capacity by scaling out. The blade is a complete storage node server.

The blade contains the elastic Fabric Connector for the external 40GbitE network, supporting NAND raw storage capacity of 8 TB to-TB (similar to the flasharray//m system, using Samsung's 3D V-nand TLC), Built-in Nv-ram to provide powerful buffer storage capacity, plus an ARM CPU core with an FPGA. The inter-blade network is connected to the compute and memory card through a PCIe card-specific protocol.

The elasticity software is responsible for providing a general-purpose, scale-out object storage system that can be accessed via file NFS, CIFS, and object protocols, as well as the future new protocol adaptability, which is the upcoming HDFs.

The features of the elasticity software stack include Elastic core collaboration for end-to-end garbage collection, LDPC error recovery, snapshot functionality, replication capabilities, data reduction and deduplication, encryption and other enterprise storage functions. Elasticity has a set of namespaces and metadata addressing capabilities to create more than 100 million unique objects/files per second. It provides a set of Web GUI management interfaces and Rest API interfaces.

On Dell EMC World 2016, the Isilon all Flash product was released with the new Onefs software, which enables integrated tiering and data acceleration with older storage nodes, so Dell EMC also defines Isilon all Flash is an accelerator for the data lake.

The new all-flash Isilon does not use NVRAM to save logs, but instead uses flash memory directly. All-Flash Isilon actually has only one hardware form, placing 4 nodes in a 4U chassis. Each node supports 15 SSD disks. The capacity of the disk can be selected, there are three kinds of 1.6TB,3.2TB,15.4TB. The interconnect interface of the node must be IB or 400,000 trillion, expandable up to 100 chassis, or 400 nodes, and the capacity can be supported to 100PB.

After a series of restructurings (EF series, Flashray) and acquisitions (SolidFire) in the Flash market, NetApp released the All-Flash AFF 8000 series last year, which improves performance and data management capabilities. Improve flash performance and efficiency with software innovations such as NetApp Data ONTAP flashessentials.

Recently, NetApp launched the AFF a700s series, including A200 entry-level systems, A300 midrange systems, and a700s high-end systems. The A-series storage system provides users with the industry's highest scalable performance, with a NVME network-ready cluster architecture that is the first to support the TBSSD, 32Gb fiber, and 40Gb Ethernet connectivity capabilities.

The AFF a series fully supports complex public cloud environments. Support users to connect to a wide range of public cloud open solutions, including AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, and extended FAs scale out NAS capabilities to support different scenarios of NAS file application load. Search "Ict_architect" join the public "architect Technology Alliance" for more content.

EMC, pure and NetApp push new products, where are NAS flash scenarios