In my last post I displayed the following image which describes how EMC's Flash Strategy cuts across an enterprise IT infrastructure that manages structured, unstructured, and consumer data.
From an EMC product perspective, flash technology has moved through the following progression:
- It's been more than 5 years since the first shipments of Enterprise Flash Drives within an array that also supports spinning disk drives. High-end, latency-critical applications were the first set of workloads that drove the introduction of EFDs into Symmetrix. The company has subsequently embarked on an initiative to drive flash technology further and further down-market.
- As part of this initiative, CLARiiON and Celerra (now known as VNX) subsequently added Flash drive support and the term hybrid array was officially in vogue.
- Hybrid arrays containing flash technology were followed by EMC's introduction of flash in the server layer. This technology is known as XtremSF.
- At EMC World last month Zahid covered the status of EMC's All-Flash array, XtremIO.
This flash product set, according to EMC CTO John Roese, also serves as a strategic bridge that enables existing enterprise customers to support IDC's vision of a 3rd platform architecture (supporting mobile, social, cloud, and big data). IDC's third platform comes with a new class of applications that expect sub-millisecond response times from the storage ecosystem.
How can customers deploy flash in a strategic way that supports the traditional workloads as well as the new ones?
David Goulden answered that question recently at the Strategic Forum hosted by EMC and VMware. What I found interesting about his presentation was that that that the hybrid array has evolved into a central arbiter for the "hot edge" of application data and the "cold core" of less-frequently accessed data. The following graphic paints a great picture of this strategy:
Up until now, hybrid arrays have allowed applications to keep the "hot edge" of their data set (the most recently accessed and performance-critical data) on flash, and the "colder core" (the data that is less frequently accessed) on spinning disk and/or archival/backup tiers.
For next generation data-centers (e.g. IDC's third platform vision), the hybrid array is still used, but DC architects can deploy a comprehensive flash strategy to handle workload variety using the following steps:
- Create a storage pool at the server level by deploying XtremSF capabilities in a set of servers. Storage allocated from this pool will typically be assigned to the workloads with the most performance-intensive requirements.
- The XtremSW suite will be leveraged to accomplish this pooling. Note that XtremSW can also be leveraged to aggregate and pool third party flash storage as well, offering choice to data center admins.
- Create an XtremIO all-flash pool for those workloads that have similar high-performance requirements, but also demand higher availability, resiliency, and service levels.
- Deploy the hybrid array technology and use FAST as the tiering mechanism that senses shifting workload traffic and transfers the data between the all-flash pools and the hybrid array.
- Rely on the hybrid-array's existing FAST capability to move data between internal flash drives and the variety of spinning disk tiers within the hybrid array.
- Deploy object-based pools and/or backup pools as targets for the "cold core" (less frequently accessed data)
- Rely on the hybrid array to move less frequently used data to the "cold core" pools.
One final point about this flash strategy for third platform architectures: you'll notice that the first three pools are "block-based". The server flash is a block interface, the all-flash array is block-based, and the hybrid array is block-based.
What about flash support for workloads generating file, object, or HDFS output?
In the end, all of these protocols bubble down to a block-based interface supporting bit persistence and resiliency. Therefore the flash strategy cuts across workloads that leverage any and all of the protocols listed above.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Fellow
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