Potential NVMe benefits spark enterprise IT interest

IT pros accustomed to SAS- and SATA-based flash storage performance are eagerly anticipating the latest NVMe technologies. Some are already using nonvolatile memory express for demanding applications, while others wait for vendor support.

NVMe-based solid-state drives (SSDs) can lower latency and boost performance, compared with the standard SAS- and SATA-based SSDs that are the norm in most IT organizations. NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) can extend the NVMe benefits across a network, between application servers and storage arrays.

Although these are early days for NVMe, some enterprises already made the jump for select application workloads that have especially high I/O requirements. Market statistics indicate those users are in the distinct minority, but adoption should start to increase as storage vendors ramp up support and enterprise NVMe-based PCI Express SSDs drop in price.

NVMe benefits for database response time

Baystate Health took the leap to NVMe-based SSDs last year to try to boost database response time. The healthcare provider, based in Springfield, Mass., uses VMware's vSAN hyper-converged infrastructure on Cisco Unified Computing System server hardware across three data centers in about a 10-mile radius.

"It's not like we want to do cool, fancy things," said Raj Subramanian, director of IT infrastructure and technology at Baystate Health. He said NVMe had become "necessary for the response time."

Subramanian said Baystate's InterSystems Caché database, in particular, requires low response time to prevent corruption and performance issues.

"Overall, NVMe improved the cache performance," Subramanian said, "but it still hasn't been determined if the performance is good enough for Caché's IOPS requirements."

Financial institutions tend to be early adopters of any new technologies that can boost performance. One technical director in infrastructure architecture said his financial services firm used Fusion-io's PCIe-based SSDs before shifting to standard NVMe-based PCIe SSDs as soon as the drives became available.

"It's definitely significantly faster. And the pricing has come down on the NVMe drives, so it's actually pretty competitive, especially in comparison to a SAS flash drive," said the technical director, who asked that neither his name nor company be identified.

The financial services firm bought @Samsung NVMe-based PCIe SSDs for its #Aerospike in-memory #NoSQL database running on @Dell servers, with plans to explore storage-class memory for its trading systems and in-memory databases. The technical director said the firm's other databases use conventional disk- and flash-based SAN storage, and the company's virtual servers connect to @Pure Storage and Dell EMC #XtremIO #allflash arrays.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/450433021/Potential-NVMe-benefits-spark-enterprise-IT-interest

This is what analysts have to say about Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) after last week.

@Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) Ratings Coverage Among 25 analysts covering Pure Storage (NYSE:PSTG), 17 have Buy rating, 0 Sell and 8 Hold. Therefore 68% are positive. Pure Storage had 40 analyst reports since October 8, 2015 according to SRatingsIntel. The stock of Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) earned “Equal-Weight” rating by Barclays Capital on Friday, August 26. The stock of Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) has “Neutral” rating given on Monday, October 19 by UBS. As per Friday, May 26, the company rating was maintained by Goldman Sachs. The firm has “Outperform” rating by Oppenheimer given on Wednesday, August 31. The rating was maintained by Pacific Crest on Friday, June 16 with “Overweight”. The firm has “Outperform” rating given on Wednesday, November 15 by Wells Fargo. The firm earned “Market Perform” rating on Friday, June 16 by Wells Fargo. Macquarie Research initiated Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) on Wednesday, June 29 with “Outperform” rating. The stock of Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) earned “Mkt Outperform” rating by JMP Securities on Wednesday, December 16. Robert W. Baird maintained the shares of PSTG in report on Friday, May 26 with “Hold” rating. Below is a list of Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) latest ratings and price target changes. 15/11/2017 Broker: Wells Fargo Rating: Outperform New Target: $22.00 Reinitiate The stock decreased 3.75% or $0.63 during the last trading session, reaching $16.15. About 3.02 million shares traded or 75.02% up from the average. Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) has declined 30.05% since December 24, 2016 and is downtrending. It has underperformed by 46.75% the S&P500. Pure Storage, Inc. engages in building a data platform that enables businesses to enhance performance and reduce complexity and costs worldwide. The company has market cap of $3.67 billion. The firm delivers its data platform through Purity Operating Environment, an optimized software for solid-state memory that offers enterprise-class storage and protocol services; FlashArray and FlashBlade optimized hardware products for solid-state memory to enhance the performance and density of flash, optimize its advanced software services, and reduce solution cost for customers; Pure1, a cloud management and support software; and FlashStack, a converged infrastructure solution. It currently has negative earnings. The Company’s data platform is used for a range of storage use cases, including database applications, large-scale analytics, private and public cloud infrastructure, Webscale applications, virtual server infrastructure, and virtual desktop infrastructure; and helps clients scale their businesses through real-time and accurate analytics, increase employee productivity, improve operational efficiency, and deliver compelling user experiences to their clients and partners. More important recent Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) news were published by: Livetradingnews.com which released: “Pure Storage Inc (NYSE:PSTG) Bullish Trend” on November 28, 2017, also Prnewswire.com published article titled: “Pure Storage Announces Third Quarter Fiscal 2018 Financial Results”, Thestreet.com published: “Corcept, Pure Storage, Nutanix, VMWare: ‘Mad Money’ Lightning Round” on December 22, 2017. More interesting news about Pure Storage, Inc. (NYSE:PSTG) was released by: Nasdaq.com and their article: “Pure Storage (PSTG) Q3 Earnings and Revenues Beat Estimates” with publication date: November 29, 2017.

http://weeklyregister.com/this-is-what-analysts-have-to-say-about-pure-storage-inc-nysepstg-after-last-week/

What to Do with Legacy Assets in a Flash Storage World

“Legacy” is an interesting word. Aided by #Gartner, #Microsoft managed to convince the world in the mid-nineties that anything that wasn’t a Windows-based server was old and hence “legacy.” Who have thought just a few years ago that anything not flash would earn the very same moniker? Yet here we are. #Allflash arrays and #hybridstorage arrays have established themselves as the standard. Storage areas networks ( #SAN s) and network attached storage ( #NAS ) using hard disk drives (HDDs), so long a staple of data storage, are now being sidelined as legacy. So what should you be doing with all those antiques that are littering the data center?
http://mobile.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/what-to-do-with-legacy-assets-in-a-flash-storage-world.html

Dell EMC Pushing Ahead With Overlapping Midrange Storage Lines, Offers Capacity Guarantee

#DELLEMC is doubling down on its decision to maintain two of its only demonstrably overlapping product lines, arguing its legacy #Dell SC #Compellent series and #EMC 's #Unity midrange storage lines are thriving side-by-side rather than cannibalizing each other. "We are fully committed to our entire midrange product family including Dell EMC Unity and the Dell EMC SC Series," Craig Bernero, Dell EMC senior vice president of product development, said in a recent blog. "Each product solves different customer problems and is suited for different environments."  Bernero notes that Dell EMC's midrange storage revenue grew 32.8 percent between the third quarter – the first period Dell and EMC lines were combined after the early September acquisition of EMC by Dell – and the fourth quarter, according to statistics from research firm IDC. [Related: Head-To-Head: Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 Vs. Microsoft Surface Pro 4] Bernero also said internal Dell EMC numbers indicate the company booked double-digit quarter-over-quarter revenue increases in both SC and Unity and saw a "substantial increase" in total customers for both lines in the fourth quarter. However, IDC combined Dell and EMC's pre-acquisition numbers, and the resulting year-over-year comparison shows a more than 17 percent decline in fourth-quarter storage systems revenue to $2.1 billion from $2.6 billion a year prior. Dell EMC has a commanding market share position, finishing the fourth quarter with market share of slightly less than 33 percent compared with nearly 37 percent a year earlier, according to EMC. The more-is-better strategy fits with Dell EMC's commitment to openness and customer choice, but the company doesn't get especially specific when it comes to which customers and environments are better suited to SC Series or Unity storage solutions. The SC Series, Dell EMC says, is the value-priced line aimed at small and midsize businesses, especially when those businesses are already using Dell servers. Unity is being marketed to midsize customers as a general-purpose offering for block and file storage. SC comes in all-flash, disk only and hybrid configurations. Unity is available in configurations for all-flash, converged, hybrid and virtual deployments. Bernero said Dell EMC is launching a new program called the All-Flash Storage Efficiency Guarantee, which guarantees that XtremIO, VMAX All Flash, Unity and SC series all-flash configurations can get a logical storage capacity of at least four times the physical capacity of the drives in their new array, allowing them to cram more data into less space and less management. Michael Pearson, president of DSA Technologies, an Elk Grove, Calif., solution provider that works with Dell EMC, said the vendor's strategy around the SC series and Unity has been consistent and DSA sees distinct paths to selling each line. "We definitely see them as both being viable options in the enterprise space," Pearson said. "Dell EMC needs a competitive all-flash array to compete with both Nimble [Storage} and Pure [Storage], so they're hoping to have that with Unity. Compellent competes with the more traditional storage plays and does that very well."

http://m.crn.com/news/data-center/300084748/dell-emc-pushing-ahead-with-overlapping-midrange-storage-lines-offers-capacity-guarantee.htm

A new study found that some enterprises are experiencing significant benefits by converting their entire data centers to all-flash arrays.

Adding small amounts of flash as cache or dedicated storage is certainly a good way to accelerate a key application or two, but enterprises are increasingly adopting shared #all-flash arrays to increase performance for every primary workload in the data center.

Flash is now competitively priced. All-flash array operations are simpler than when managing mixed storage, and the performance acceleration across-the-board produces visible business impact.

However, recent @TanejaGroup field research on all-flash data center adoption shows that successfully replacing traditional primary storage architectures with all-flash in the enterprise data center boils down to ensuring two key things: flash-specific storage engineering and mature enterprise-class storage features.

When looking for the best storage performance return on investment (ROI), it simply doesn’t work to replace HDDs with SSDs in existing traditional legacy storage arrays. Even though older generation arrays can be made faster in spots by inserting large amounts of underlying flash storage, there will be too many newly exposed overall performance bottlenecks to make it a worthwhile investment. After all, consistent IO performance (latency, IOPs, bandwidth) for all workloads is what makes all-flash a winning data center solution. It’s clear that to leverage a flash storage investment, IT requires flash-engineered designs that support flash IO speeds and volumes.

http://mobile.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-hardware/enterprise-ssds-the-case-for-all-flash-data-centers.html

All-Flash Storage Array Sales Soar In First Quarter, Enterprise Storage Sales Stumble Badly

According to a newly released report by market analyst firm IDC, the first quarter of 2016 was an unusual time for storage sales:

It was a quarter in which only one major vendor showed actual year-over-year growth, and in which a surprise legacy vendor completely blew the doors off its competitors in terms of all-flash storage growth.It was a quarter in which storage vendor revenue declined, as is typical, while the amount of capacity sold also declined, which is atypical.The quarter also saw server-based storage sales grow while external storage systems sales fell.

CRN looks behind the numbers from IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker to help shed light on what is happening as the storage industry shifts from legacy hard disk-based solutions to flash storage and an emphasis on software-defined storage.

http://m.crn.com/slide-shows/storage/300081101/idc-all-flash-storage-array-sales-soar-in-first-quarter-enterprise-storage-sales-stumble-badly.htm?itc=hp_tax_storage

2016 is the 'Year of All-Flash' for primary storage, says EMC

#EMC Corporation has announced a quantum leap forward in its enterprise storage strategy with major additions to its #allflashstorage solutions.

The digital transformation sweeping across Asia is spawning an urgent need for businesses to make faster, smarter decisions driven by predictive and actionable insights. According to IDC,  Asia/Pacific organizations that are able to analyze all relevant data and deliver actionable information will achieve an extra US$65 billion in productivity benefits over their less analytically-oriented peers by 2020.

To help organizations succeed in their digital transformation journey, EMC is announcing two latest innovations designed to meet the demands of the Modern Data Center: the #VMAX All Flash and #DSSDD5.

VMAX All Flash is built to address mission-critical systems and applications, VMAX All Flash is the first-to-market all-flash storage array that delivers maximum processing speed at world-class availability and reliability. VMAX All Flash also helps businesses stay agile and scalable, leveraging on the #VBrick ‘building block’ architecture.

DSSD D5 is a rack-scale flash designed for the most data-intensive applications requiring extreme levels of performance and microseconds latency. This include real-time analytics and simulation, genome research and financial modelling. DSSD D5 benefits organizations across diverse industries currently limited by traditional architectures that were not designed for the extreme performance needs of their business critical applications

The announcement complements all-flash portfolio, purpose-built to address virtually any environment, workload and application. As both the technology and market evolution of SSDs make all-flash arrays cost-effective for general purpose data storage, EMC estimates that by 2020, all storage used for production applications will be flash-based. The company says it will continue to leverage a variety of flash media in its all-flash products to address customer needs for performance, reliability and rich data services at competitive price points.

http://www.networksasia.net/article/2016-year-all-flash-primary-storage-says-emc.1457485603

Weak Strategies Afflict Shares Of Nimble Storage, Pure Storage

As my former boss, #HBS strategy guru Michael Porter explained in Competitive Advantage, if you want to earn better profits than your rivals, you have two strategies from which to choose:

Low cost producer – set your prices lower than rivals and get your costs well-below the price; or
Differentiation — give customers such great product benefits that they’re willing to pay you a higher price than rivals’ — and your costs.

Unfortunately, two rivals in the data storage industry — #NimbleStorage, provider of flash/disk data storage hybrids and data management software as a service and #PureStorage, a maker of all-flash arrays — are pursuing strategies in which they slash their prices below their costs.

The level of price cutting in the $40 billion storage industry is so intense, that it is difficult to see how either of these companies will ever make money.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2015/11/22/weak-strategies-afflict-shares-of-nimble-storage-pure-storage/

DCIG puts out new flash array guide – wonder where EMC is this time?

Analyst group #DCIG has produced another report ranking hyper-converged infrastructure appliance vendors based on documented features and questionnaire answers.

A canned quote by Tim Anderson, research analyst and co-author of the DCIG 2015-16 #AllFlash Array Buyer’s Guide, said: "We are confident this [guide] will give customers an easy to use and powerful tool to shortlist solutions they will want to bring in-house to test.”

His team looked at 58 offerings from 17 companies, includimg #Cisco, #IBM, #Nutanix, #Simplivity, SimpliVity, and #Supermicro.

After a 100-question initial survey containing more than 100 questions was completed, product capabilities were assessed based on data provided by the vendor, prior DCIG research, and information available in the public domain. Systems were ranked, as usual with DCIG guides, Recommended, Excellent, Good, or Basic.

Nutanix's #NX-8000 and #NX-9000-Series and Simplivity's OmniCube #CN-5000 were given Recommended rankings, because of features they shared:

Have duplication and/or compression
Provide replication and snapshot functionality
Scale up to 64 nodes (plus or minus) in size
Have OEM agreements with server hardware suppliers (#Dell for Nutanix - and #Lenovo now, Cisco for Simplivity)
Support multiple hypervisors with Nutanix supporting three and Simplivity two
Data protection capabilities including creating application-consistent snapshots with the use of VSS
No product testing was involved to produce this guide.

A previous DCIG guide on all-flash arrays (AFA) has been criticised as being unrealistic, as it placed market leader EMC's #XTremIO product in the bottom category. Senior #EMC sources told us they did not engage with so-called pay-for-play analyst reports and refused to pay DCIG any money for the AFA guide's production.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/dcig_doc_rates_hcias_docs/