Crossbar takes on DRAM and flash storage with super fast, super long-lasting RRAM tech

Startup Crossbar emerged from stealth mode Monday to announce its version of RRAM (resistive random-access memory), a new type of memory that could be a successor to flash storage and DRAM.

The company, founded in 2010, will make and license its RRAM, a nonvolatile memory, which will be smaller, faster and more power-efficient than NAND flash and RAM, said George Minassian, CEO of Crossbar.

"It is higher density ... and the current is much lower," Minassian said, adding that the memory's physical and power attributes make it a suitable replacement for storage in smartphones, tablets, PCs and servers.

Crossbar is claiming RRAM will deliver 20 times faster write performance, 20 times less power consumption and 10 times more durability than NAND flash. The memory chips will be stacked, and a 1TB module will be roughly half the size of a NAND flash module with similar storage, Minassian said.

He could not estimate the price of a 1TB RRAM module, but said it will cheaper than NAND flash partly because RRAM is less expensive to manufacture.

Crossbar
Crossbar will also license the technology to third parties. It could be two or three years before the memory shows up in products, but that depends on demand for the product, Minassian said.

"It's a matter of what company appears at what time," Minassian said.

RRAM differs from the way NAND flash and RAM operate. Unlike NAND flash, Crossbar's technology does not use transistors or trap a charge. Instead it uses a layered approach to store data. An RRAM cell has three layers, with a switch in the middle that helps determines whether the cell is storing a 1 or a 0. The top layer has a metallic electrode, while the lower layer has a nonmetallic electrode. The top layer passes metal ions into the switching media and into the lower layer, which creates a filament to keep the electrodes connected, what Minassian called a "short wire." Applying a negative charge breaks the wire and leaves a gap between the electrodes, which leaves no resistance, changing the status of the memory cell.

"This is not a gate you use in standard NAND and NOR. This is resistive, which is where RRAM comes from," Minassian said.

RRAM uses existing material and can be made in factories. Prototypes are being made in factories of TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.), Minassian said.

Crossbar's RRAM doesn't contain transistors, so it is easy to make as chips become smaller, Minassian said.

Crossbar
Crossbar's technology is very interesting and could be useful as manufacturing technologies improve and chips get smaller, said Jim Handy, principal analyst at Objective Analysis, in an email.

"It's generally accepted that something is going to replace NAND and DRAM someday, since these technologies have scaling issues. When that will occur is unclear," Handy said.

It is becoming more complex to make NAND and DRAM as manufacturing technology improves at a rapid rate, Handy said. Intel, which has the world's most advanced chip factories, will soon move to the 14-nanometer process to make its chips. Manufacturing smaller chips with more features requires more attention to detail, and chips could be vulnerable to a wider class of defects.

"With that in mind, and with the advent of 3D NAND as a successor to today's planar NAND, there may be another five process generations, or even more, before alternative memory technologies have a shot at replacing NAND flash. The story's probably the same for DRAM," Handy said.

Once a scaling limit has indeed been reached, technologies like Crossbar's RRAM will rapidly take away market share from the entrenched players, Handy said.

Other RRAM designs are being researched by academics and research institutions. Alternative forms of memory to NAND and DRAM also include Everspin's MRAM (magnetoresistive RAM) and PCM (phase-change memory), a memory type being pursued by Micron and Samsung Semiconductor. Hewlett-Packard is making a memory type called memristor.

Egnyte synchronises Google Drive with enterprise storage

Hybrid cloud and on-premises provider Egnyte has integrated its product with Google Drive, allowing users to access Google Drive directly from a corporate network drive.

Egnyte’s latest release provides users with access to Google Drive, Microsoft Office, CAD drawings, images and multimedia files via the cloud or on-site storage. The Egnyte product enables IT departments to control and manage visibility of these files, with centrally managed access permissions as well as real-time auditing of all file, folder and login activity.

In spite of the popularity of cloud storage, businesses rely heavily on on-premises storage to enable employees to create and share files securely. “Our hybrid approach provides a unified name space for all these files, no matter where they reside,” said Egnyte CEO Vineet Jain. 

“This new Google Drive integration provides a single, simple view into all files [that users in the enterprise] have access to, no matter where those files are located – on-premises, in the cloud, or in Google Drive,” he added.

Egnyte uses secure folders that enable files to be synchronised between on-premises network attached storage (NAS), storage area network-based (SAN) enterprise storage and cloud-based storage. Users can access the Egnyte folder from smartphones, tablets and computers connected over a local area network (LAN) to local storage or to Egnyte’s cloud.

Balfour Beatty is an Egnyte user. The construction firm, which is building a new airport terminal at Dallas Fort Worth Airport, uses Egnyte to synchronise architectural blueprints using onsite ReadNAS devices. The blueprints are distributed to site managers, who access the files via iPads.

LUN storage management for vSphere and Hyper-V

The LUN has long been a bedrock of storage configuration for physical servers with LUN storage partitions carved out from RAID groups to provide logical chunks of capacity for applications.
Now, virtual server environments can abstract the physical characteristics of a server into software and so provide increased scale and utilisation of hardware resources.

But, storage must still be provided to virtual server and virtual desktop machines, with the hypervisor taking on an important role as the virtualisation layer, abstracting physical storage resources to virtual devices.
So, what has happened to the LUN? That depends on the virtualisation environment you’re using.
Regardless of hypervisor type, the persistent retention of data needs some form of storage device, either a traditional hard drive or a solid-state disk (SSD). For block storage, VMware’s vSphere suite, including ESXi and Microsoft’s Hyper-V use fundamentally different approaches to presenting physical storage.
VSphere systems take LUNs configured on a storage array and format them with the VMware File System (VMFS). This is a proprietary file format used for storing virtual machine files that takes advantage of on-disk structures to support highly granular levels of object and block locking.
The reason this is necessary is that most vSphere deployments use a small number of very large LUNs, with each LUN holding many virtual machines. An efficient locking method is needed to ensure performance doesn’t suffer as virtual environments scale up.
A single virtual machine is comprised of many separate files, including the VMDK or Virtual machine Disk. A VMDK is analogous to a physical server hard drive, with a virtual guest on vSphere potentially having many VMDK files, depending on the number of logical drives supported, the number of snapshots in use and the type of VMDK.

For example, for thin provisioned VMDKs, where storage is allocated on demand, a guest hard drive will consist of a master VMDK file and many VMDK data files, representing the allocation units of each increment of space as the virtual machine writes more data to disk.

By contrast, Microsoft has chosen to incorporate all components of the virtual machine disk into a single file known as a VHD (virtual hard disk). VHD files are deployed onto existing Microsoft formatted file systems, either using NTFS or CIFS/SMB.

There is no separate LUN format for Hyper-V. VHD files allocated as thin volumes (known as dynamic hard disks) expand by increasing the size of the file and consuming more space on disk. Inside the VHD, Microsoft stores metadata information in the footer of fixed size VHDs and in the header and footer of dynamic VHDs.

VHDs have advantages over VMDKs and VMFS in block-based environments in that the underlying storage of the data is NTFS, Microsoft’s standard file system for storage on Windows servers. This means VHD files can easily be copied between volumes or systems by the administrator without any special tools (assuming the virtual machine isn’t running of course).

It also makes it easy to clone a virtual machine, simply by taking a copy of the VHD and using it as the source of a new virtual machine. This is particularly beneficial using the new deduplication features of Windows 2012 which can significantly reduce the amount of space consumed by virtual machines that have been cloned from a master VHD.
The aggregation of servers and desktops into virtual environments means that the I/O profile of data is very different to that of a traditional physical server. I/O workload becomes unpredictable as the individual I/O demands from virtualised servers can appear in any order and so are effectively random in nature.
This is referred to as the “I/O blender” effect and the result is that storage provisioned for virtual environments must be capable of handling large volumes of I/O and for virtual desktops, to cope with “boot storms”, which result from high I/O demand as users start their virtual PCs in the morning and close down at the end of the working day.

To guarantee performance, typical storage deployments will use a number of options:
All-flash arrays are becoming increasingly popular for virtual environments. For virtual servers, they provide consistent, predictable performance; for virtual desktops they handle the boot-storm issue with lots of I/O bandwidth.Hybrid flash arrays use a mix of traditional spinning media and solid state, targeting active I/O at the solid-state storage using dynamic tiering technology. This provides a more attractive price point than all-flash arrays, as many deployments have large amounts of inactive VM data.Advanced features – For vSphere these include VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array Integration) and for Hyper-V ODX (Offloaded Data Transfer). Both of these features offload repetitive tasks from the hypervisor and reduce the amount of data transferred over the storage network, when performing common tasks such as replicating virtual machines or initialising file systems.

Ultimately, provisioning storage for virtual environments is all about getting the right IOPS density for the capacity of storage being deployed. This may seem difficult to estimate but can be taken from existing physical servers as part of a migration programme, or by pre-building some virtual servers and measuring IOPS demand. For virtual desktops, a good estimate is around 5-10 IOPS per desktop, scaled up across the whole VDI farm. This would require additional capacity to be built in for boot storm events.
For block devices, LUNs can be presented using Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) or iSCSI. Fibre Channel and FCoE have the benefit of using dedicated host bus adaptors (HBAs) or CNAs (Converged Network Adaptors) that make it easier to separate host IP traffic from storage network traffic. However, there are still some important design considerations even where a dedicated storage network is available.
Firstly, there’s the option to present LUNs across multiple Fibre Channel interfaces for both resiliency and performance. We’ll take resiliency as a given, as that would be standard practice for storage administrators, but for performance, multiple HBAs (or dual-port HBAs) allow physical segmentation of vSphere and Hyper-V LUNs by tier for performance purposes.
This may not seem like the most logical approach, but bear in mind LUNs presented to vSphere and Hyper-V are typically large, and so queue depth to individual LUNs can become an issue, especially with workloads of different priorities. This can be especially important where high performance all-flash devices have been deployed. For iSCSI connections, dedicated NICs should be used and multipathed for redundancy. Both Microsoft and VMware have deployment guides to show how to enable iSCSI multipathing.

While on the subject, it’s worth discussing LUN sizes. vSphere (and less so Hyper-V) are limited in the number of LUNs that can be presented to a single hypervisor. Typically, storage for these environments is presented using large LUNs (up to 2TB) to maximise the presentable capacity. As a result, the users of that LUN, which could represent many hosts, all receive the same level of performance.

Creating many LUNs of 2TB in size is quite expensive in storage terms. So, thin provisioning on the storage array presents a useful way to enable LUNs to potentially expand to their full 2TB capacity, while enabling multiple LUNs to be presented to a host to ensure I/O is distributed across as many LUNs as possible.
The grouping of storage for hypervisor guests at the LUN level represents a physical restriction on delivering quality of service to an individual virtual machine; all guests on a LUN receive the same level of performance.
Microsoft recommends using a single LUN per VM, which may be restrictive in larger systems (and certainly represents a significant management overhead), but is still possible to achieve.

VMware has stated its intention is to implement vVOLs – virtual volumes – to abstract the physical characteristics of the virtual machine storage from the storage array to the hypervisor. This would enable better granularity in terms of prioritisation of virtual machines and their I/O workload, even when they exist on the same physical array.


But while some companies focus on removing the storage array completely, it’s clear there are benefits in retaining an intelligent storage array, one that understands and can communicate with the hypervisor. 

Oracle ups memory, storage of Exalytics analytics appliance

Oracle is introducing a new generation of its Exalytics appliance for high-speed data analysis that comes with a slightly higher price tag but major increases in memory and storage capacity.

Exalytics In-Memory Machine X3-4, which was announced Monday, includes 2TB of RAM, 2.4TB of flash storage as well as 5.4TB of traditional disk storage. As with the first incarnation, released last year, the Exalytics box is certified for a range of integrated Oracle software, including BI Foundation Suite, the TimesTen in-memory cache, Hyperion Essbase and Endeca Information Discovery.

OracleOracle Exalytics Business Intelligence machine
All of those software products were recently updated as well, said Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management for Oracle Business Intelligence.

The initial version of Exalytics, X2-4, had only 1TB of RAM and 3.6TB of raw disk, although Oracle already introduced a 2.4TB flash expansion pack option.

Oracle has also maintained the same level processing power, including four 10-core processors in the rack. The company is planning to offer X2-4 users the ability to add more RAM to their machines, Rodwick said.

X3-4’s hardware lists for $175,000, compared to $135,000 for X2-4, according to an official price schedule.

Exalytics works in conjunction with Oracle’s original “engineered system,” Exadata, although the latter can run both transactional and analytic workloads in the same box.

Exadata is the most popular so far of Oracle’s engineered systems, but the company is now seeing customers buy multiple Exalytics machines at once as well as make subsequent purchases, according to Rodwick. He declined to provide current sales totals.

Oracle is betting big on the engineered system strategy. Officials have defended steadily-falling hardware revenues since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, arguing that the company is focusing on higher-margin products like Exadata and Exalytics, which also carry plenty of lucrative software licenses, rather than commodity servers.

Exalytics was linked to Oracle’s decision to cut the price of BI Foundation Suite significantly, from $450,000 per processor to $300,000, according to Rodwick. By doing so, Oracle hopes customers will be more inclined to license the software for every processor in an Exalytics box, as well as multiple boxes, he said.

“Companies run Oracle BI in mission-critical fashion,” he said. “There’s more and more interest in high availability for analytics. When the system is down, the company is essentially blind.”

Oracle is running into many companies that want to set up redundant Exalytics environments in order to ensure continuous access to analytics, he said.

Slow storage market hits Brocade revenues

Brocade has announced a drop in revenues in its second quarter results, blaming “slowing in the storage market” and issues with some of its original equipment manufacturers.

The Silicon Valley firm, which specialises in networking equipment, reported an 8% decline in revenues in the three-month period compared with the previous quarter, bringing in a total figure of $538.8m. Revenues were also slightly down on the same quarter in 2012, when it recorded revenues of $543m.

The storage area networking (SAN) division gave the worst performance, with revenues down 6% year on year and 10% quarter on quarter. Product revenues alone recorded a 7% yearly decline and 12% compared with the second quarter of 2012.

Lloyd Carney, CEO of Brocade – who has only been in the job since January – blamed wider market issues for the slowdown.

"Our storage area networking revenues did not meet our original expectations for Q2 due to short-term slowing in the storage market and execution challenges at certain of our large OEM partners,” he said.

“I believe the longer-term market opportunity for our SAN products continues to be favourable, supported by the fact that our Gen 5 (16Gbps) Fibre Channel products exceeded 50% of our shipments of directors and switches in the quarter.”

Brocade’s IP networking division presented more positive figures. Although revenues fell 4% quarter on quarter, the $164.4m result was up 15% on the second quarter of 2012 due to a 34% boost in routing revenues and 13% in Ethernet switches.

Carney continued to be positive about the direction of the company, and believed by narrowing down the technology it offers it could hone in on profitable business.

“Following a thorough inspection of the business during my first four months as CEO, I believe that Brocade is well-positioned to be a leader in the new era of networking,” he said. “To do so, we need to be more focused as a company and deliver consistent, profitable growth.

“We intend to improve our execution by aligning our business and focusing our team on fewer, but larger opportunities, such as datacentre networking, where we can leverage our expertise and reputation for innovation and quality.”

He concluded: “Our strategy is to deliver solutions that allow customers to increase returns from their information technology investments in traditional datacentre architectures, as well as highly virtualised, cloud-enabled networks where enterprises and service providers are looking for improved performance at a lower cost of ownership. With a commitment to increasing profitability, managing expenses and improving cash flow, I believe we can increase shareholder value."

Hitachi brings high-end flash to midrange HUS VM storage line

Enterprises are gaining the ability to turn existing storage platforms over to flash even as solid-state media remains mostly a tool for caching and for applications with special requirements.

On Wednesday, Hitachi Data Systems is bringing flash technology from its high-end storage platform to its midrange Hitachi Unified Storage Virtualization Machine (HUS VM) system and introducing software for the system that will allow it to be used as a high-performance, all-flash array. Other vendors are also entering the all-flash arena, including Hewlett-Packard, which announced the 3Par StoreServ 7450 Storage system less than a month ago.

Hitachi is taking the Hitachi Accelerated Flash Modulefrom its Virtual Storage Platform and offering it for the HUS VM, a midrange array designed for smaller enterprises with less need for scale. The new, flash-optimized software included in Wednesday’s announcement will roughly double the potential throughput of the system, and another software release later this year will double it again to 1 million IOPS (I/O operations per second), the company said.

The HUS VM, introduced last year, fits in between the VSP platform for large enterprises and the HUS 100 family, Hitachi’s entry-level line. Customers can now outfit an HUS VM entirely with SSDs (solid-state drives) or mix those components with spinning hard drives.

The flash module packs 1.6TB of capacity onto a card that goes deeper into a standard 19-inch rack unit than a typical SSD would, making more efficient use of space, according to Roberto Basilio, vice president of infrastructure platforms product management at Hitachi. The module also uses multilevel cell flash, which has higher density than the single-level cell type used in many enterprise SSDs.

But speed is at the heart of solid-state adoption and of Hitachi’s enhancements to the HUS VM. Each Hitachi Accelerated Flash module has its own multicore, multithreaded controller chip that can carry out functions such as compression and wear-leveling without affecting read and write performance, Basilio said.

To go along with the new flash module performance that this design brings, Hitachi has introduced software improvements to the HUS VM that can double its overall throughput. The HUS jumps from 250,000 IOPS (I/O operations per second) to 500,000 IOPS. Another optional software upgrade, coming in the fourth quarter, will double that yet again, to 1 million IOPS, according to Hitachi.

The rapid read and write performance of flash can help speed up enterprise applications where needed, though it will coexist with hard disk drives for the forseeable future, said Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Terri McClure.

“Judicious use of some level of solid-state storage at every layer of the stack is going to become the norm, over time,” McClure said.

The key is good data-management software to control how the two types of media work together, she said. This software has improved since the introduction of flash storage, and Hitachi’s capabilities there are strong, she said.

Enterprises will be able to fit 12 flash modules on each tray in the HUS VM, with a full eight-tray system holding more than 150TB of capacity. That will double by the end of this year, as the company plans to come out with a 3.2TB module.

The flash modules are available now for $28,427 each, and an all-flash HUS VM with 8TB of flash capacity costs about $300,000, including the Base Operating System and three years of maintenance.

EMC battles rogue backups, pushes storage convergence

With a new set of hardware and software releases, EMC is promising to simplify its customers’ storage infrastructure by combining different types of operation into a single EMC system.

“We see this convergence of storage with modern systems, where you can think about backup, archiving and disaster recovery as an integrated process, rather than three separate processes,” said David Goulden, president and chief operating officer of EMC.

On Wednesday, the company will unveil a new midrange tier of Data Domain storage systems, updates to its Avamar and NetWorker backup software, and an update to its Mozy data storage service. The updates are part of a new approach to storage EMC is developing, one it says will allow its customers to use their primary storage systems to execute backup, archiving and disaster recovery functions as well.

“You can’t just keep backing up data the way you did before. You need more intelligence in the backup system,” Goulden said. “Backup software is moving up a level, and is becoming more of a catalogue and journaling of all the things in the protection storage tier.”

When it comes to storage, many organizations have what Goulden calls an “accidental architecture.” Part of the problem stems from how organizations run their backup networks separately from their storage networks, Goulden said. The backup systems have their own policies about when they back up material and how quickly they provide a copy when the original is compromised.

Many program managers have opted to create their own backup systems, either in the cloud or using an additional on-premise system. As a result, many organizations have, in effect, rogue backup systems that can drive up IT costs and potentially create architectural complexity and security issues.

EMC’s pitch is to integrate the backup and archiving functions within the storage infrastructure itself, rather than to run each as a stand-alone system, Goulden explained.

Most organizations have used EMC storage for their primary storage. The company is now working to provide controls for widely used third-party applications that would allow administrators to manage backups from directly within the applications themselves.

“We see that traditional backup industry transitioning. Backup is becoming a feature, not a product,” Goulden said.

As part of this week’s launch, EMC has introduced the Data Domain DD2500, DD4200, DD4500 and DD7200 systems. For this set of Data Domain releases, EMC has developed plug-ins for SAP HANA and Oracle Exadata systems that would offer administrators of these programs the option of backing them up to Data Domain. The company has also created integration points with archiving applications from OpenText, IBM and Dell.

While tape backups are often seen as a less expensive alternative to disks, Goulden argued that disk-based systems can bring a return on the additional investment. Data Domain systems, for instance, have deduplication technologies that can cut storage requirements by as much as 30 percent. An organization can also use the disk backups as the basis of a disaster recovery system, which would eliminate the cost of running a separate system for that functionality, Goulden said.

Overall, the new systems are four times as fast and 10 times as scalable as the midrange EMC platforms they replace, according to the company. A DD7200 system can serve up to 26 terabytes per hour using the company’s DD Boost protocol. The system can store up to 428 terabytes, or 1.7 petabytes in a clustered configuration. These systems can support up to 540 data streams, a threefold increase from earlier iterations. Overall, they provide a 38 percent lower cost per gigabyte, EMC claims.

EMC has sold more than 36,000 Data Domain systems since its launch in 2003, the company said.

The new version of EMC’s Avamar software product brings new backup capabilities to virtualized environments. A new feature in Avamar 7, VM Instant Access, allows a VMware-based virtual machine (VM) to be booted from an EMC Data Domain system in under two minutes. It also now offers a VMware vSphere client so that administrators can back up their VMs directly from the VMware management console. Avamar can also now back up Isilon network-attached storage (NAS) arrays.

The EMC NetWorker backup and recovery software has been updated as well. NetWorker can now deliver backups to Data Domain systems through Fibre Channel, cutting the time of backing up material by potentially as much as 50 percent. Restoring data can be made two-and-a-half times as fast with this setup as well. Version 8.1 comes with a new Wizard-style interface.

EMC acquired both Avamar and NetWorker technologies in separate company purchases: Avamar in 2006 and Legato in 2003. Over time, EMC will downplay the brand names and offer both products as components under the Data Protection Suite, Goulden said.

“The products will increasingly come together,” he said. “No enterprise has only one app, so you need a suite of tools. So essentially what we are saying is, license this suite and as your needs change, you can use more of one piece than another.”

EMC has also updated its Mozy storage backup service to make it easier for enterprises to use. The service now allows organizations to manage multiple accounts in storage pools. Rather than each account getting its own storage quota, an organization can pool all the accounts into one single quota, which means individual users won’t have to spend as much time worrying about how much storage they’ve used. A new form of activation will allow users to sign on to the service without an authentication key, which EMC says could cut activation time considerably.

EMC will provide more details about the new products at a webcast launch to be held Wednesday.

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