SK Hynix Announces New Enterprise SSDs with 72-Layer 512Gb 3D NAND

@SKHynix has announced they have recently completed the development of an enterprise SATA SSD, marking the company’s entrance into this high value-added market. The new enterprise drive is equipped with 72-Layer 512Gb #3DNAND #flash chips, an in-house firmware and controller, and is offered in a maximum capacity of 4TB. Performance-wise, the SSD is quoted to deliver sequential read and write speed of up to 560MB/s and 515MB/s, respectively, and claims a potential 98,000 random read IOPS and 32,000 random write IOPS coupled. The semiconductor company indicates improved read latency as well. Also announced is the completion of SK Hynix's new enterprise PCIe SSD, which uses the same 72-Layer 3D NAND and offers a capacity of 1TB. This 1TB PCIe SSD has the ability to reach upwards of 2,700MB/s sequential read and 1,100MB/s sequential write and runs random read and write performance of 230,000 IOPS and 35,000 IOPS, respectively. As a reminder, back in 2014 Violin Memory sold off their PCIe flash storage business to SK Hynix for approximately $23 million. Availability SK Hynix is sampling their new SSDs to server and data center clients in the United States.

http://www.storagereview.com/sk_hynix_announces_new_enterprise_ssds_with_72layer_512gb_3d_nand

The hard disk drive and memory chip maker saw record revenue of $5.3 billion, thanks to solid demand for enterprise and NAND based products.

@WesternDigital reported its second quarter financial results on Thursday, beating market expectations thanks to a "healthy" demand in enterprise storage and #NAND #flash. The company reported a net loss of $823 million, or $2.78 a share. Non-GAAP earnings were $3.95 per share on revenue of $5.3 billion, up from $4.9 billion from a year ago. The company said the net loss was due to a $1.6 billion repatriation tax as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Wall Street was looking for earnings of $3.79 a share on revenue of $5.29 billion.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/western-digital-q2-earnings-record-revenue/

Toshiba shareholders approve NAND flash sale

Turning #flash into a load of old #Tosh #Toshiba shareholders have approved a proposal to split off the Japanese company's prized #NAND flash memory unit. This opens the way for the sale of a majority stake or even all the business which should make up for the losses at Tosh’s US nuclear arm Westinghouse, which filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors on Wednesday. Toshiba is putting that business up for auction. The flash chip sale should raise at least $9 billion for half the company and Tosh said it believes the unit will be valued at around $18 billion. A source with knowledge of the planned sale said that about 10 potential bidders are interested. Those suitors include #WesternDigital which operates a chip plant with Toshiba in Japan, #Micron, #SKHynix and a team of financial investors. CEO Satoshi Tsunakawa and other executives faced angry questions from shareholders after managers last year described the chip and nuclear businesses as core units at the conglomerate. One shareholder was shocked that something which was supposed to be a company “pillar turned into a hole”. Another moaned that Toshiba has become a laughing stock around the world and the management does not have a clue what is going on. Toshiba expects to book one of the biggest losses in Japanese corporate history with a net loss of $9 billion this year.
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/43255-toshiba-shareholders-approve-nand-flash-sale

Huawei says its NVMe arrays with NVMe drives will be out in 2017

Interview #Huawei is a believer in the use of #NVMe drives and fabric. Yet it thinks that shared array controller software and hardware will need upgrading to take full advantage of NVMe drives. It does not believe customers are ready to adopt NVMe over fabric-accessed arrays because of problem areas such as routability for #ROCE. We asked them about this in depth. El Reg Will simply moving from SAS/SATA SSDs to NVMe drives bottleneck existing array controllers? Huawei Yes, this will most likely be the case if older software stacks are used with existing arrays. Moving from SAS/SATA SSDs to NVMe drives requires basic system engineering updates such as upgrading hardware and device drivers to support NVMe drives. But, in order to get optimal performance and utilisation from these NVMe drives, array controller software should be upgraded to match the capabilities of the underlying NVMe drives and achieve optimal performance and utilisation of all resources. An example would be modifying the IO scheduling to support multiple queues for NVMe drives. El Reg Must we wait for next-generation controllers with much faster processing? Huawei The highest performance of an array can be reached after no more than 30 SSDs are configured. To improve the performance, customers can select faster CPUs or scale-out to more controllers. In addition, Huawei provides in-house critical chips to relieve the CPU pressure, so that the CPUs can provide better performance. Huawei all-flash arrays have been adopted by Volkswagen and Switzerland CSS, perfectly satisfying their business requirements. Huawei will keep promoting CPU development to bring faster CPUs to flash storage systems. El Reg Will we need affordable dual-port NVMe drives so array controllers can provide high availability? Huawei Yes. And we think dual-port NVMe drives will be affordable in H1 2017. El Reg What does affordable mean? Huawei “Affordable” means users can adopt flash storage at lower CAPEX and OPEX. Huawei is a pioneer in lowering flash storage costs. Early in Sept. 2015, Huawei had replaced all 600GB 15K HDDs with SSDs on flash storm products. The online deduplication and compression, and thin provisioning functions configured for arrays, can improve capacity utilisation by several times to provide the optimal unit storage cost. El Reg Are customers ready to adapt NVMeF array-accessing servers with new HBAs and, for ROCE, DCB switches and dealing with end-to-end congestion management? Huawei We think the answer to this question is NO. Customers are ready to accept NVMe SSDs, but not ready to accept NVMe over Fabric (NoF), because NoF requires new host connectivity. El Reg Do they need routability with ROCE? Huawei Yes. El Reg Could we cache inside the existing array controllers to augment existing RAM buffers and so drive up array performance? Huawei To maintain reliability, mainstream storage products do not support online memory expansion for storage controllers. Each Huawei storage product provides sub-models with different cache specifications. Customers can choose among the products according to performance requirements. Users can also improve system performance by adding SSDs and using SSD cache to expand the cache size. El Reg With flash DIMMs say? Or XPoint DIMMs in the future? Huawei This kind of technology is under research, but we don’t know when this will be put into production. If the media (such as XPoint) becomes mature, we can provide this kind of cache technology in the shortest time. El Reg Does having an NVMe over fabrics connection to an array which is not using NVMe drives make sense? Huawei It does make sense. NVMe is a kind of protocol for low latency, and NoF can minimise the latency of host connectivity. El Reg When will NVMeF arrays filled with NVMe drives and offering enterprise data services be ready? What is necessary for them to be ready? Huawei NVMe array with NVMe drives and enterprise data services will be ready in 2017. Affordable dual-port NVMe drives are necessary for them to be ready.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/08/how_say_huawei_about_the_nvme_highway/

The 10 Coolest Flash Storage And SSD Products Of 2016 (So Far)

#FlashStorage: It's Not All About Performance Any More Even as total spending on storage continues to fall, enterprises and other businesses are pouring money into flash storage technology. IDC recently reported that total enterprise storage systems sales reached $8.2 billion in the first quarter of 2016, down 7 percent over last year, while total worldwide external storage systems sales fell 3.6 percent year over year to $5.4 billion. During that time, however, all-flash storage array sales grew 87.4 percent during the first quarter of 2016 compared to last year. While increased sales of all-flash storage solutions have typically been driven by the falling cost and increasing performance of flash storage technology, 2016 is seeing vendors move to introduce new capabilities beyond pure performance, including software-defined solutions, better pooling of flash among multiple systems, and more enterprise features. CRN has been watching the developments carefully. Turn the page, and take a look at 10 of the coolest of those developments so far in 2016.

http://m.crn.com/slide-shows/storage/300081347/the-10-coolest-flash-storage-and-ssd-products-of-2016-so-far.htm

3D Flash Poised to Tower over the Storage Skyline

Three dimensions are better than two. I’ve read recently that the same forces that drove the amazing skylines of New York City upwards are operating in the opposite direction in hyper-dense London, driving a wave of underground home extensions and making “Swiss cheese” of the city’s most exclusive streets. I see the same forces at work on a more modest scale in my own neighborhood in California, as people add second stories to older houses. It’s basically the same phenomenon – squeezing more capacity from the same sliver of real estate. When #Samsung Electronics announced in 2013 it had begun mass production of the first three-dimensional #VerticalNAND ( #V-NAND) flash chips, many heralded this as a major breakthrough for a technology running up against severe scaling limits in the world of 2D, or planar, #NAND. Since the introduction of NAND flash products in the early ’90s, successive waves of innovation have enabled manufacturers to increase density in two dimensions of the same-sized silicon wafer while steadily lowering cost per gigabit.

http://www.enterprisetech.com/2016/07/12/3d-flash-poised-tower-storage-skyline/

2016 Industry Trends and Predictions from DDN

While there has been a lot of disagreement about the slowing of Moore’s Law as of late, it is clear that the industry is looking at new ways to speed up #HPC by focusing on the data side of the equation. With the advent of burst buffers, co-design architectures, and new memory hierarchies, the one connecting theme we’re seeing is that Moving Data is a Sin.
In terms of storage, which technologies will take hold in the coming year? DDN offers us these 2016 Industry Trends & Predictions:
#Hyperconvergedstorage solutions will gain market traction. The new components that drive speed and density are advancing quickly but today’s solutions aren’t keeping pace. Storage and server architectures based on decade-old technologies, retrofitted to include next-generation processors, interconnects and technologies are rife with performance bottlenecks, reliability challenges, complexity and an inherent need for over provisioning. In 2016, storage will take the lead on converging the newest components into a “hyper-converged” infrastructure platform that takes full advantage of advanced technologies to drive the highest performance and lowest latency in a form factor that is extremely efficient, easy to maintain and that will scale without bound.
Optimized storage hardware will come back in fashion. Flash is being used to increase performance for many enterprise workloads. A lot of end users are embracing this flash based solution, while ignoring the cost efficiency side of the equation. Maximizing efficiency and performance of flash requires the optimization of hardware as well as software. In 2016 organizations will increasingly recognize the importance and necessity of purpose-built architectures to encompass greater efficiency and exploit the full capabilities of their expensive flash investments.
HPC technologies will continue to move into commercial, enterprise environments. Storage, data management and application acceleration technologies from the high performance computing (HPC) industry will continue being tapped at even a higher rate in 2016 to meet the evolving requirements of performance and scale and will replace traditional IT infrastructures at even a higher rate. As large scale commercial enterprises learn ever more from the successes of early pioneers in the adoption of HPC technology into enterprise to solve a myriad of challenges including rapidly growing data sets, “Big Data” democratization, analytics initiatives, and data sharing across geographies, they will accelerate their adoption of storage solutions that historically have almost exclusively been deployed in supercomputing labs.
End-to-end, consolidated storage systems will be deployed at even higher rates. As storage buyers look to achieve performance, capacity and cost objectives they increasingly do so by consolidating storage silos into much larger, shared data depots or data lakes. These will be automated, tiered systems that will handle data across a wide and increasingly varied set of applications, including the ability to ingest, process and archive data from multiple locations in a single, unified namespace. Environments where this preference will be particularly pronounced include Finance, Life Science, Manufacturing, Video Surveillance and Oil & Gas.
The storage industry landscape will continue to collapse and converge. Convergence is not just about hardware and software merging – IT suppliers will be consolidating more as well in 2016 into more super behemoths. This consolidation and convergence of companies will have a negative impact on their existing customers – for this reason 2016 will see privately-owned, cutting edge storage companies take a much bigger mindshare as they provide more focus, innovation and value to buyers.
Flash will blur the line between caching and storage. Flash will increasingly be placed outside of the storage array and closer to compute to further reduce latency and increase application performance by orders of magnitude. This move will further blur the line between caching and storage, as the flash layer will naturally become more persistent as performance-intensive applications rely upon this ultra-fast tier to deliver results at speeds that outpace their competition.
Flash media types will proliferate and more emphasis will be placed on architectures that support and optimize them. Organizations are deploying flash to accelerate application and I/O performance. Storage vendors will have to look beyond applications and accelerate entire workflows – which means selecting very specific flash media, whether that be NVM, PCIe, SSD, etc.

http://insidehpc.com/2015/12/2016trends/

Apple just banned some versions of Adobe Flash from its computers

With his “Thoughts on Flash” letter back in early 2010, late #Apple CEO @SteveJobs waged a war on #Adobe that the media couldn’t get enough of. Beyond the hype, however, #AdobeFlash platform really had become a resource hog that was a terrible burden on developers, and that wreaked havoc on PC performance. Thanks to the war Jobs waged, two things have happened in recent years: Flash has become far less popular as better technologies moved in to replace it, and the Flash platform has improved.

http://bgr.com/2015/10/21/adobe-flash-player-for-mac-safari-download-blocked/