Analysis

posted on 27 June 2008 09:42

Sun believes it is sub-optimal to put flash solid state drives (SSD) in storage arrays, saying you lose a third of the potential IOPS that way. It's better to put them in servers.

Trefor Jones, director of product definition in Sun's Systems Group, said of SSD, "It's much more beneficial being inside the server than in the array."

Sun is looking at SSDs in arrays though: "That's something we're definitely looking at, across all the tiers. But it's not our main focus. The focus is closer to the processor. ... Of course there are advantages to putting SSDs in storage but it's not optimal; (there are) better bangs for your buck in other areas."

"We're looking at how we flash-enable servers. We're very aware of the Fusion-io product and HP. We'll go futher than that. All of our servers will get SSD. We're announcing in the next couple of months."

He talked of a hybrid data pool in a system and said that if SSDs were added to an X4500 Thumper system: "You could saturate the processors with six SSDs." It needs tuning.

All the processors are getting faster: AMD; Intel; and SPARC. "Having much more I/O capacity within the box is very important. You don't always need to write data to a SAN. Memory costs a lot. DIMMs are power-hungry and produce heat. It's getting to a point where you need to find other ways."

This reminds me of points made by Spansion. Is Sun thinking of reducing main memory in a server and adding a lump of SSD as a kind of tier 2 memory for servers between DRAM and the hard drives?

The Fusion-io card "is the kind of thing you could put in a legacy system. It consumes I/O slots in the server. We won't be using the Fusion-io card."

So ... we can expect Sun to use a Fusion-io card-like SSD approach to quickly boost the IOPS rates of its existing (trad) servers. But we can also expect it to introduce new servers where the flash memory is used in new ways to boost the server and its system software and applications' I/O capabilities.

We might conceive of an flash-enhanced X4500 with specific pieces of flash dedicated to specific system software operations to avoid time-consuming references to hard drives. We might envisage that such an X4500 could also have SSD as a large cache after a lower-than-current DRAM amount. Such an SSD location would not use up bus I/O slots.

A similarly flash-enhanced Honeycomb might come along too.

All will be revealed by the end of August.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}