xflash

all flash is the race car whereas hyrids are the souped up production vehicle

All flash arrays have lower consistent latency - the variance of the IO in a well designed all-flash array is always very low. In hybrid systems some of the IO comes from disk - by design the variance is high. High activity DBs love low variance.

At the end of the day, the how is less relevant that the what. CIO will care for technology which gives best $/GB/s and best $/IO/s because workloads have varied profiles

@dvellante I respectfully disagree on your car analogy. It is only a matter of the design of the hybrid. Posche Cayenne is a 4WD with the heart of a sports car and same can be done for hybrid arrays.

@dvellante Dloyer calls its xflash, I call it IME (Infinite Memory Engine) but yes in the end it is about giving a memory semantic and hide the ugliness of disk protocols and limitations

@dvellante It does not change designs but it evolves with the app. If app is uses file/block semantic, it looks like file/block but if app is true in-memory then it uses a memory semantic mmap() for example

so describe in more detail - what exactly is x-flash?

xFlash is treating flash as an eXtension of DRAM - instead of going though the traditional SCSI stack multiple time to commit a write, Atomic writes do that only once and very quickly.

Dave V - yes - no multi-phase disk protocols. The write can be completed in sub-microsecond time - down to 100 nanoseconds (not allowing for load on the system).

there are a number of solutions (@pernixdata @qlogic @proximaldata) that network flash, how is this different?

Do you anticipate future application designs will intelligently leverage a relatively small pool of high performance storage and bulk tier of storage with rich data services?

It seems a great opportunity for app vendors to optimize data placement since the app can intelligently anticipate needs

traditional databases or new key value stores?

Both - traditional databases have great locking challenges and will need low latency quicker - KV stores will have greater transaction capability but have other constraints

In the Algorithm Era applications will be replacing most operational human decisions - those algorithms will be looking a vast amounts of data to make decisions (e.g., real time pricing). Increased data and history will mean better decisions!

article posted today from @VMwareStorage discussing EMC ScaleIO with VMware http://cormachogan.com/2013/12/05/a-closer-look-at-emc-scaleio/

@virtualswede posted a good series of ScaleiO architecture and performance with virtualization http://purevirtual.eu/2013/11/29/microsoft-sql-server-testing-with-scaleio-on-vmware/

The business driver towards high performance systems will be applications that can radically lower the cost of doing business. Imagine you are OpenTable and you want to provide special offers to customers near a client restaurant. You have <1 sec!...