Flash is the Present and future of Storage

Unity, the latest member of EMC’s all flash portfolio has put the adoption of Flash on an overdrive for Indian enterprise. Syed Masroor, Director – Flash storage, EMC, speaks to us about what this means for enterprise.

Flash storage has some limitations as far as enterprise is concerned. How does Unity counter that?

The nature of flash has some clear features- some really positive things and some necessary evils that go along with Flash. Flash is good for performance. It’s got amazing speeds, but it wears out as its starts to get used up. Second issue that flash systems has, which effects enterprise is called as Garbage collection. In flash systems, whenever you store data, either you delete it or overwrite. In hardware, if you delete, you can over write. But in Flash, you cannot. The garbage collection issue become s a problem as flash drives becomes full.

These are the two issues that Flash drives had which bothers enterprise.

With Unity Flash systems, the focus is not to add to the old flash drive but to rebuild a completely new system.

What happens here is, we do not do garbage collection at a system level and choke the system up. We try to do it at the drive level, at the same time, ensure the garbage issues are not there even at that level. Number two, the Unity systems come with a lot of RAM…with this we try to data operations in the memory itself. So we do not touch the Flash drive as much as any other system would, thus enhance the life of the flash drive.

In fact we are so confident on the architecture; we give a lifetime warranty for all the Flash drives.

These are two fundamental things Unity helps with.

For small and medium enterprises, data security is paramount. How does Unity help in that?

Data security is paramount, and particularly for SMEs. Many times, storage providers create solutions that are different between enterprise and SME markets. In Unity, it’s the same product, all the way from small to enterprise usage; it’s the same capability and same operating system. The only thing is the models differ in terms of their performance and scalability. We have a 300F, 400F and 500 F; all for different sizes of organisations. But one thing is the same; the SME gets same features as enterprise here.

Coming to Data security, we secure data at multiple levels. We have something call snapshots, which are low performance copy of the data, so if you delete a data, it will be backed up.

The second thing is Data encryption. So if you are transporting data between data center, servers and storage the data is encrypted, so no one else can read the data.

The third thing is, if there is an anti virus attack and data gets corrupted, the Unity Flash is integrated with antivirus servers- they have integration built in, so that such an eventuality does not happen. But even if it does, you have got snapshots to retrieve it.

We have built solutions to protect at systems level, at Data center level, so it has got integrated solutions to protect data at all levels.  So if there is a breach too, it is safe.

Flash is the technology of today but needs to be integrated in legacy storage systems that a large number of companies have. How is the integratability of this product?

EMC has the history of doing data storage which is one of the highest after IBM. We have been doing data storage for about 40 years now. Since the company has started with the legacy world and come to the present world, we have a very good understanding of where a customer could connect with regards to data storage. Although Flash is a modern system, it has all protocols to connect with the legacy systems. So a customer  now buys Unity Flash gets the advantage of Flash, gets the performance of Flash benefits and the advantage of all the features that we talked about, PLUS it connects to all the newer operating systems, but also the legacy systems that they might have.

What features in this product have to ensure it becomes a reliable storage technology?

Of course, Flash was originally used only to add a speed to the system. But the biggest hardware today is about 1.2 terabytes, 15k RPM drive. This drive came to the market when Mr. Vajpayee was the PM. We know how the world has changed since then, but the drive has not changed. And today, you cannot make it spin faster and you cannot do anything more with it. In fact, that is the last drive of 15k rpm, and most of the products have stopped now.

On the flash side, even 2 -3 years back we were talking about 100 GB drives, 200 GB drives. Today the Unity system is shipping with a 3.8 TB Flash drive. That’s three times bigger than a hard drive, today. In 3 months we will be shipping a 7.6 TB flash drive and by the end of this year, we will be shipping a 15 TB flash drive. So, think about it, you have a 15 TB data stored in a single 2.5 inch slot. But it gets better, because the built in Data compression, so 15 Tb can actually store up to 30TB of data.

Now, think about a single Unity system, where a couple of such drives have a petabytes storage capacity. The power used is 20% of a hard drive…no heating. There is no sound, and is basically replacing 2/3 racks. The endurance is good, and has a lifetime guarantee. That why we are talking of 2016 when primary storage will become all Flash. We are talking to companies to get only Flash because from all points of view for enterprises, it makes no more sense to buy a single hard drive now. So it’s not if it will become a solution that customers can depend upon, it’s already a solution that our customers are paying for.

How is Unity affordable when, even the most affordable SSDs could be 10 times more expensive than the cheapest SATA disks?

Like I said, in a single 2.5 inch slot, today we can put a flash drive which is probably three times the capacity of a hard drive, which will become 6 times, then 12 times in just six months. At the same time, we have compression technologies which will let you store 2-3 times that much data in the same drive. So as of today I can claim very easily, for most configurations, Flash systems from EMC are the same cost or less cost than hard drive based systems. So because we have reached that inflection point and hence Flash drives can become so large, with so much endurance, it makes sense. And another thing is, a single Flash drive has the performance of 200 hard drives.

So nothing stops you, it is 200 times  faster, it is 3-6 times in capacity, it has much higher endurance, it is much more efficient now since no moving parts, and finally, it is much better on the Green side, heating and power.

And because of these things, and because of inline compression technologies, it is actually cheaper to deploy flash drives than hard drives, today.

How do you see the storage market change with flash becoming so usable and easily available?

The storage market will be very challenging for vendors as well as customers. This is the first time storage systems are so fast they can actually overwhelm a server.  The technology that we have just launched can go into ranges of 10 million iops, performance for really big applications. The way it’s going to change is, we are going to out a lot of focus on data management, storage management, and the ownership of data on such high speed systems, the question begs- what more can I do with it? So 24X7, on demand analytics will be done by everyone. Even a local grocer will start doing it…if he has software which is sitting on the cloud, he will also be able to run analytics to understand what exactly is happening, to plan monthly inventories and all that.

I think our businesses are going to become very very fast, very niche…and customers are   becoming more discerning, this is the technology which will transform the enterprise as well as the customers.

Will it have any effect on the cloud usage?

Cloud gives you a lot of advantages but it also has some issues and if you see over the past few months, there have been businesses like Netflix and some others have suffered massive outages.

Now they are saying that while I can out some apps on the cloud, the main application, I would like my data inside my data center, not outside, because they need 99.999 % uptime, while main cloud can have 96% uptime. So with cloud, and with Flash, we are able to help customers deploy some really intense, flexible, on premise cloud solutions. It is having a huge impact on the clouds because now it can give performance to all applications. All the applications can get the same agility, because of Flash. So earlier if you wanted to do analytics, you needed to make a copy of data which would take a long time. Now because of Flash, you can take instantaneous copies and make instant decisions based on inputs you get form your analytics teams.  So flash will have an impact on cloud in a huge way. The external cloud will become more resilient in a big way and efficiencies will increase. At the same time, companies will deploy internal clouds more confidently with agility and high performance.

What is the compatibility factor between Flash storage devices and the storage and computing power needed for analytics- everyone’s favourite technology?

We have a bank as a customer for Flash, and for them analytics was a huge problem because they have a main database which was 20 Tbs.. In order to run analytics they need to make a copy. If they did that, the operations would stop, and they can’t afford that. But they made a copy and next day it was made available for the analytics team that did analytics on it. When they asked for refresh, the bank says, that cannot be refreshed for another 12 hours. So even though they were able to analytics in 2-3 days time, it was too slow.

Now, they run analytics 24X7. The analytics team has got so much flexibility because of 24X7 operations that they are able to make copies on their own. They consume much less space and time, based on extremely fast Flash drives, so they can run analytics jobs multiple times.

So, analytics has been so popular only because of flash. So you need Flash to get to the data and these kinds of features give highest performance, density and compression for highest efficiency.