Dell Closer storage to server

There will certainly be a star at the Dell Convention in Texas. At the Austin Conference Center, the protagonist is Dale. EMC conferences, Symentec Vision, Dell Conferences, NETAPP insight--These individual vendor-centric conferences give these vendors a stage to fully showcase their products. Mr Michael Dayer, the chief executive of the company, which is earning more than 30 billion dollars, has been on the scene and talked about his views on storage.

As the music of the heat rang, the audience filed, holding coffee in their hands, eager to hear how the world's largest computer maker was transformed into an end-to-end enterprise IT Solution provider. A group of microblog publishers, smartphones and notebooks are already in place, hoping to broadcast Mr. Dell's speech at a faster rate than neutrinos fleeing CERN.

Mr. Dale came to the stage with a stiff suit and no tie. Mr Dale is a frank and down-to-earth man-though he is a billionaire. Customers and channel partners quickly came up to take a photo with him: "Look, this is my photo with Mr. Dale." Dell looks friendly to every customer and channel partner and employee. The atmosphere is harmonious, there are many opportunities here. Dell is a good listener, and he brings big news. This is very exciting for all of us who are technology enthusiasts.

Modular datacenter and flash-enhanced servers

Dell spoke of a modular datacenter. This data center makes full use of power to work efficiently, minimizing the power waste in the maintenance of the architecture. He mentioned 1.04 and 1.03 pue (electric energy efficiency). These chassis-like data center modules can host 1920 servers, 138TB of RAM (random access memory) and several petabytes of storage capacity. "We believe we provide more than half of the world's modular data centers," said Dell. "Remember Sun's blackbox?" Sun's product was untimely, but it opened the door to Dell's products.

Next year, these modules will be more powerful. Michael Dayer indicates that the existing PowerEdge R910 has up to 2TB of primary memory. Next year's 12th-generation PowerEdge will have higher IO bandwidth and faster processors. They will have flash storage, "becoming part of the system architecture from the outset". These flash stores are placed directly on the server. Dell calls it 0-tier storage. He talked about Dell's fluid data architecture. This architecture extends to equallogic and compellent, extending the tiered architecture of HDD hdd (hard drive) and flash memory to servers in the array, using the technology Dell acquired from the acquisition of RNA NX. He says these flash-based servers will run database queries at 60 times times the current rate.

He mentions data center racks, which connect 1024 processors to the Force 10 switch by 10gb/sec Ethernet, and then connect them via 40gb/second Ethernet to a core switch. This rack will contain 40TB dram (dynamic random access memory) and 40TB flash memory, and each server can run "much more workloads than ever".

But there's a potential problem here. Yesterday, Dell Storage vice president and general manager Darren Thomas spoke about the problem. He says today's PCIe bus is almost as fast as Fibre Channel, which is 8gb/seconds, and Intel's next-generation processor memory will be 100 times times faster. In his view, this means that the server must wait for the speed of networked storage to follow. He says he knows how to solve the problem, but he is not ready to disclose it.

The answer should be two. Either the storage and the server's network connection speed refer to 1 to 2 orders of magnitude, either NAS (network-attached storage) and SAN (storage LAN) give in to Das (direct-attached storage) and connect directly to the server. That is, either the data is stored at a faster rate to the server or the storage is consolidated inside the server.

From this we can see that Dell's storage must adapt to faster servers, which need to get data faster. The flash memory will be used as a fast storage layer and is configured next to the server DRAM. This means that the storage array software must make changes.

Dell's storage must be adapted to the reality that faster servers need to infuse data into their memory at a faster rate.

Intel indicates that the current second-generation PCIe can be 5giga/seconds (GTF), which means that 20gb/seconds can be reached per second. The third generation of PCIe using the Romley processor in the first quarter of next year will have a speed of 8Gtf and 100gb/seconds.

We believe that the storage of the 0-tier server flash memory will have a PCIe third generation connection. As a result, most storage resources, including 1, 2, and other layers, will have to feed the flash memory and accept the write from the Flash. It can use its own PCIe third-generation interface or through a high-speed Ethernet interface (such as 10gb/Ethernet, which means that there is a 10gb/second speed between the network interface and the storage). But some people think this is still too slow, in the future will need to have 40gb/sec NIC (network interface card).

The people in the Dell Storage department did not discuss the issue openly. However, it seems clear that the compellent and equllogic Controller software will have to manage the 0-tier flash memory, while the externally connected array will become an internal-attached array, either directly via the PCIe third-generation connection, or through a NIC to the inside of the system.

An interesting idea: if the equallogic and compellent arrays become internally connected, and the server IO is performed through the PCIe third generation interface, the difference between iSCSI (Internet small computer interface) and Fibre Channel access shrinks: they are all das-- Unless the PCIe bus executes a storage network protocol.

Dell and Innovation

What we see here is that Dell uses its own resources to bridge the technology gap between servers and storage. Dell coordinates servers, networks, EqualLogic, and compellent storage to ensure that each area develops in unison.

Dell is now fully committed to innovation. This is no longer a company like me. In an era when separate servers, networks, and storage devices/islands have gone, Dell is upgrading its capabilities to challenge other companies.

Great changes are taking place in our industry. Mr Michael Dayer, the boss of Texas's biggest IT company, sees the era of big data-driven cloud computing coming, and is doing what an IT man should do. The Texas it giant is starting to shine on a new face because he knows what he should do.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)