Not that I planned it this way, but yesterday I wrote two articles for the IT Business Edge network, each with a neat little Green IT component.

The first is about Nicira, a startup that emerged from stealth this week despite offering a product that’s been commercially available since July 2011. But let’s not get hung up on technicalities and instead focus on the neat stuff: its virtual networking tech.

The company’s subscription-based software effectively de-couples virtual machines from the underlying physical network. That not only means truly elastic IT — workloads that contract, expand and shuffle across a network — but less networking infrastructure to buy and manage.

And with less hardware to buy — and keep powered, don’t forget — the savings can quickly add up…

As for cost savings, Nicira estimates that large data center customers (1 million VMs on 40,000 servers) can save between $15 million to $30 million on server and network hardware expenditures by avoiding over-provisioning and reducing the number of ports typically required to keep its platform operational.

Nice!

EMC follows in the footsteps of flash startups

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of flash memory. Though pricey, it consumes a lot less energy than traditional hard drive-based storage and offers screaming fast performance to boot.

A common method of employing flash memory in data centers is to outfit computer servers with SSDs. A startup called Fusion-io takes things one step further by packing flash chips onto a PCIe card and slotting it into a server’s the motherboard to act as a caching system for frequently accessed data.

EMC seems so enamored by the idea that its “Project Lightning” product, now officially called VFCache, employs the same basic design. Hey, why re-invent the wheel? But EMC’s not done looking to flash startups for inspiration.

Rumor has it that “Project Thunder” is similarly inspired by Violin Memory.

Surprise, surprise…

A little war of words is brewing over solid-state drives (SSDs) and their market ascendancy in 2012. SanDisk, a company best known for making memory cards — the kind that goes in cameras and other gadgets — says that its “small form-factor client SSD” business is going gangbusters. Moreover, this is the year that the storage tech will really take off, posing a serious threat to traditional hard drives.

A lot of factors are going into the company’s rosy outlook. Certainly, plummeting prices contribute to this view, but also a PC market that’s warming to SSDs. The impending avalanche of Ultrabooks, thin and light laptops that are practically tailored for SSD drives, is expected accelerate the trend.

Not so fast, says Western Digital, a maker of said traditional hard drives.

Though it won’t be able to resume normal hard drive production until the third quarter, as result of crippling floods in Thailand, the company doubts that SSDs will have much of an impact. The company feels that most consumers will continue to opt for hard drives and hybrid drives (part hard drive, part flash memory) as the storage medium of choice for their Ultrabooks.

Many geeks, including this one, would beg to differ. What’s your take?

Image credit: SanDisk

Later this year, solid-state drives (SSDs) are expected to drop beneath that magical barrier that really spurs adoption: $1 per gigabyte (GB) from a relatively lofty $1.56 in 2011. According to IDC, SSDs will reach this milestone in the second half of 2012. (Pro tip: hold off on that upgrade ’til then.)

Mind you, SSDs are still way more expensive than traditional hard drives and will likely remain that way for a while – average HDD prices hovered round 7.5 cents per GB in 2011. But SSD prices are falling faster, an encouraging sign for PC users that want to take advantage of the performance perks and energy savings that the storage tech offers.

IDC pegs 2011 worldwide solid state storage industry revenue at $5 billion in 2011, a 105 percent increase over 2010′s $2.4 billion haul.  The research firm also forecasts a 51.5 percent compound annual growth rate for worldwide SSD shipments from 2010 to 2015.

HDD manufacturing hit hard by Thailand floods

Part of the reason prices will fall in the near term are the floods in Thailand, which have drastically reduced  hard drive manufacturing output. Analysts expect shipments in Q1 2012 to fall short of Q4 2011′s 95 million unit mark by roughly 11 percent.

The expected shortages will nudge PC makers into the direction of SSDs. Judging by the slew of Ultrabooks announced at CES — a form factor that practically requires SDD storage — that’s already happening. Microsoft’s SSD-friendly Windows 8 OS also gets a shout-out as a driver for increased SSD sales in 2012.

Enterprises dig SSDs

Enterprise-wise, SSDs have been enjoying increased popularity thanks to web-facing companies that value the performance edge and thriftier power requirements that SSDs offer.

Startups like Fusion-io, Violin Memory and SolidFire have been turning big companies on to SSDs in the data center. For instance, Fusion-io counts Facebook among its customers and signed Dell as an OEM. Meanwhile, Violin nabbed some rack space at Microsoft, AOL and HP.

SSD maker OCZ Technology is watching its fortunes improve due to interest from enterprises. CEO Ryan Peterson had this to say during yesterday’s earnings call:

“Taking a look at revenue by product classification, the largest sequential revenue gains this quarter were generated from our enterprise and high-performance server products. Enterprise-class SSD revenue increased approximately 50% sequentially and was about 21% of SSD sales. This is our third consecutive quarter of 50%-plus sequential growth within our enterprise products.”

It all adds up to a good year for SSD companies, according to IDC’s data storage guru Jeff Janukowicz Janukowicz. He writes, “The increasing use of flash in enterprise solutions, explosive growth of mobile client devices, and lower SSD pricing is creating a perfect storm for increased SSD shipments and revenue over our forecast.”

This year’s devastating floods in Thailand have upended lives. They also illustrate the interconnected nature of the global economy. Take, for instance, Toyota. The Japanese automaker expects parts shortages in the region to clip its profitability and result in “230,000 vehicles in lost production this business year,” according to this Reuters report.

The effect on several technology companies has been similarly profound, if not more so. Hard drive manufacturers are feeling the pinch too. Stockpiles are expected to run out this quarter, which will crimp PC shipments in Q1 2012.

George Crump of InformationWeek predicts that solid-state storage technologies are poised to make huge inroads as tight hard drive production creates openings for SSDs like the SanDisk model pictured above.

As this next decade closes, there will still be large farms of hard drive-based data centers, but these may be limited to specific use cases: cloud storage providers and extremely big data analytics are two good examples. It’s reasonable to assume though, that the typical organizational data center will be predominantly based on solid-state for its storage infrastructure. As we’ve discussed in the past, those data centers are likely to include multiple levels of solid-state technology. Clearly the move is on. The current hard drive shortage is adding fuel to the fire and significantly speeds up this transition.

When the cost of hard drives start rising past near-impulse buy status, you can also expect consumers to get savvy about storage and embrace the cloud variety for backups and the sort. They’ll learn to ‘live’ with the capacity constraints of SSDs versus hard drives.

It’s a trade-off, but one that’s counterbalanced by snappy performance and energy savings. Not a bad compromise.

Source: InformationWeek

Brisk VC activity surrounding makers of flash storage systems continues apace. The latest funding success is Solid Fire, which just added $25 million to its bank account.

It’s not hard to see why it was able to pry open those checkbooks. The Boulder, Colo.-based startup combines two of the hottest trends in IT, SSDs (solid state drive) and cloud computing. You guessed it, the firm specializes in SSD storage systems for cloud providers like the SF3010 Storage Node pictured above.

SolidFire takes aim at storage underutilization (a symptom of big, power hungry storage infrastructures that only use a percentage of their total capacity), and the performance penalties therein, with all-SSD primary storage arrays.

SSDs, by and large, outpace traditional hard drives when it comes to performance — a compelling selling point for companies that value fast and responsive cloud services. Oh, and since they lack moving parts, they’re energy efficient too.

In a blog post, SolidFire’s VP of Sales & Marketing, Jay Prassl explains what the company’s tech means for cloud providers, along with an impressive list of interested parties (future acquirers?).

Currently there are a number of world-class cloud service providers evaluating over 500TB of SolidFire’s all-SSD storage technology. They are evaluating the solution technically, but also evaluating it from a business perspective as well. …These IaaS providers are now able to invite new mission critical and performance sensitive applications into their cloud, and build new revenue streams and customer value around guaranteed performance. There is a very good reason that 3Par, EMC, and NetApp customers have all joined our Early Access program.

This all seems to have impressed investors that include New Enterprise Associates, Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle. The money will go towards “investing in our sales and marketing teams to broaden our reach, and will be accelerating our technical development as well,” blogs Prassl.

To date, SolidFire has attracted $37 million. It joins other startups like Violin Memory and Pure Storage is in bagging tens of millions in flash storage funding this year. Who’s next?

Image credit: SolidFire

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are pretty energy efficient, but there are those in the industry that feel that they can do a lot better and are partnering on developing a new standard called SATA DEVSLP.

Who are they?

They’re SanDisk, Samsung, Intel and Microsoft SanDisk. It’s important to note that three out of four of those produce SSDs. And Microsoft? Well, any tech that helps its Windows 8 OS — which was met with a warm, yet cautious reception at Build this week — eke out extra battery life is worth pursuing especially since Microsoft envisions it on several types of computing devices including tablets and ultrabooks.

IDC’s research director for solid-state drives, Jeff Janukowicz, echoes the sentiment in a statement. “Mobile computing platforms such as Ultrabook devices and tablets are challenged to deliver the high performance and long battery life demanded by consumers. The intent of this initiative is to extend the SATA high-performance standard to better address these low power mobile applications,” he states.

What the companies hope to do is radically cut SSD power consumption by baking SATA DEVSLP into SSDs, chipsets and OSes. The aim is to drop energy use from 50 mW, the benchmark for SSD energy efficiency today, to a mere 5 mW by, in part, keeping SSDs in a low power state for longer. Neat!

The first to implement SATA DEVSLP into its drives is SanDisk, according to the company.

Image credit: SanDisk

Let’s get it out of the way, solid-state drives (SSDs) like Toshiba’s enterprise-class unit pictured above are expensive when you compare them to regular, magnetic hard drives. Old news, but it’s still a huge roadblock toward massive, widespread adoption. But those that are in the platter-free data storage camp are finding benefits that far outweigh huge sticker prices.

That’s the idea that sparked an interesting conversation at Slashdot yesterday. It all started with an article in Computerworld by Lucas Mearian. In it, he recounted the story of Dan Marbes, a systems engineer for Associated Bank in Green Bay, Wis.

Long story short, with the strategic installation of three SSDs, he saw a huge performance gain on a business intelligence apps on his SAN. How huge? “The flash storage outperformed 60 15,000-rpm Fibre Channel disk drives when it came to small-block reads.”

Pretty eye-opening in and of itself, but leave it to the Slashdot community to dig deeper and add some nuance, backed in some cases with real world experience, to the eternal SSD vs. HDD (hard disk drive) debate.

Here’s an example from user Raleel:

I moved a small 4TB database from 24x 256G 15k SAS drives to 24x 240G OCZ Vertex 3 SATA3 drives. I ran a few queries on the old and the new. same data, same parameters, same amount of data pulled. Both were hooked up via PCIe 8x slots.

The SSD crushed the SAS. Not just a mere 2x or 3x crushing. A _FIFTEEN TIMES FASTER_ crushing. This was pulling about a million rows out. 12 seconds (SSD) vs 189 seconds (spindles)

Cost difference? under $50 per drive more expensive for SSD. I think our actual rate was around $10 per drive more. However, the system as a whole (array+drives+computer) was $12k less. No contest… for our particular application, SSD hands down makes it actually work.

Counterpoint? Sure! Here’s a sobering analysis from user demonbug of Marbes’ experience as it relates to HDDs in certain use cases:

The only mildly surprising part is that part about the HDDs winning for all writes, but I guess that really depends on how the test is set up – unless you are actually writing to random parts of the HDD, it is basically a straight-up write operation, so only throughput matters – and again, 60x HDDs are going to beat 3x SSDs (though it is important to note that SSDs are significantly slower at writing than reading in general, although still much faster than an HDD on an individual basis).

It all underscores the point that SSDs have enormous benefits that justify their lofty prices. The performance boost and energy savings certainly help tip the scales in SSD’s favor. And judging by Raleel’s example, cost isn’t even a concern. But don’t make the mistake of counting hard drives out. At least, not yet.

Every organization has a unique set of storage requirements and implementations. And realistically speaking, the wholesale replacement of HDDs with SSDs is a non-starter. As the examples above show, the key to start enjoying the advantages of SSDs now is to start deploying them in parts of your storage infrastructure that play to their strengths.

To help you figure out how, I encourage you to hit up Slashdot’s thread on the topic for some enlightening insights from both sides of the fence.

In recent years, the data storage part of the IT energy efficiency equation has been getting a ton of attention. From deduplication drama to a white-hot flash startup scene, where our data’s stored and how it’s managed have become big priorities.

The good news is that when it comes to architecting an efficient storage infrastructure and management platform, the tech’s all there. But you can’t achieve it without some guidance on dealing with digital waste .

Luckily, Johns Hopkins University computer scientists Ragib Hasan and Randal Burns (that’s them on the right) have put together a paper, The Life and Death of Unwanted Bits: Toward Proactive Waste Data Management in Digital Ecosystems (PDF), with a plan that echoes the tricks we use to deal with waste in meatspace: reduce, reuse, recycle, recover and dispose.

Their strategy for dealing with resource-hogging digital waste, which they describe as data that ranges from aged, barely-used files to completely useless data, is concisely summarized in the pyramid below:

Here are some suggestions from the Hasan and Burns:

Reduce: At the top of the pyramid, the most preferred option is to cut back on the amount of waste data that flows into a computer to begin with. This can be done, the Johns Hopkins researchers say, by encouraging software makers to design their programs to leave fewer unneeded files behind after a program is installed. To coax the software makers to comply, computers could be set up to “punish” programs that do excessive data dumping; such programs would be forced to run more slowly.

Reuse: Software makers also could break their complex strings of code into smaller modules that could serve double-duty. If two programs are found to utilize identical modules, one might be eliminated in a process called “data deduplication.” This the second-best option in the waste-management pyramid, the researchers said.

Recycle: Just as discarded plastic can be refashioned into new soda bottles, some files could be repurposed. For example, when old software is about to be removed, the computer could look for useful pieces of the program that could be put to work in other applications.

Recover: Even when waste data can’t be reused or recycled, these digital leftovers might yield information worth studying after private identification details are removed. In their paper, the researchers suggest that “obsolete data can also be mined to gather patterns about historical trends.”

Dispose: Sitting at the bottom of the pyramid, this is the least desirable option, the researchers say, and the messiest, when you consider the energy used to completely eliminate old files or the real-world pollution created when one destroys an old hard drive or other form of storage media. However, the scientists say, one solution could be a “digital landfill.” This could be accomplished with a “semi-volatile storage device” that would provide a temporary home to data that is designed to automatically fade away over time, freeing up space for the next tenants.

The idea of penalizing software that heaps crappy data onto your system is an interesting one, but good luck getting developers on board. You’ll also see that data deduplication factors into the plan as do shades of business intelligence (to glean useful data from old stores) and tiered storage systems.

Like I said, the tech is there. For efficient storage, it’s just a matter of putting it to work. The “think green” strategy outlined by Ragib Hasan and Randal Burns should help in not only prioritizing your IT storage budget, but driving storage energy efficiency as well.

Download: The Life and Death of Unwanted Bits: Toward Proactive Waste Data Management in Digital Ecosystems (PDF)

Hot on the heals of flash storage all-stars Fusion-io and Violion Memory, comes Pure Storage, a startup that’s making some bold claims about its tech, particularly surrounding costs.

Pure Storage, which just emerged out of stealth, has attracted $55 million in funding, including $30 million in a just-announced series-C round of funding led by Redpoint Ventures and backed up by Samsung Venture Investment (VC arm of the world’s top flash chip supplier). The company makes two all-flash storage arrays with capacities of up to 11 TB and 22 TB that promise to bring the cost of flash-based storage in line with enterprise hard drive-based hardware, with huge space and energy savings (10x reductions in both) to boot.

I know, you’re thinking that’s quite the feat considering that solid-state drives have yet to achieve price parity with platter-based hard drives. And you’re right. But Pure is making a price/performance argument that CIOs may find themselves receptive to, particularly if their businesses are getting squeezed by the constraints of their current storage systems.

What if there’s an alternative that can eliminate mechanically-induced bottlenecks — solid-state chips shuttle data faster than spinning platters and read-write arms — to better keep up with ever-faster server processors? And what if there’s less data to store (via data deduplication, of course)? Does the picture become more attractive? Yes, according to Pure’s CEO, Scott Dietzen.

Arik Hesseldahl of All Things D, has the details.

But deduplication is expensive on hard drives, and really doesn’t make sense. Because the mechanical arm in a hard drive is always searching around for where its next needed block of data is to be found, if you employ deduplication, you end up with a bunch of reference signs telling the arm where to go, [CEO Scott] Dietzen says. The end result is that the disk has to spin more, not less. Flash memory chips don’t have that problem. “We make that process fast, because there’s no performance hit to the deduping process,” he says.

On top of that, Pure has created some algorithms that make the process a lot more granular than on hard-disk-based systems, by working with smaller disk-sector sizes. How small? He wouldn’t say exactly.

Combined with flash’s inherent performance edge, Pure’s FlashArray can bring costs down to $5 per gigabyte and less — in line with that of hard drives, according to the company. We’ll see…

Image Credit: Pure Storage

The past couple of years have been good for startups that specialize in flash memory storage systems for data centers.

Though they peddle pricey wares, flash chip-based data storage and SSD makers are giving data centers a performance edge with energy savings boot. And in an era that’s unkind to pokey cloud performance and is marked by new-found environmental awareness, these attributes have helped capture the attention — and checkbooks — of VCs. Recently, Fusion-io and Violin Memory have been making big funding news. Today, the former is a Wall St. darling while the latter is undoubtedly pondering its next move.

Three months after filing its IPO, Fusion-io’s shares are available on the open market. And on its first day, the market is embracing the tech company, which employs Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, by pushing its price up 30 percent to $24.84 (from its $19 offering price) and placing it just shy of a $2 billion valuation — a nice payoff for early investors. (As of this writing, FIO is trading at $22.75.) It certainly doesn’t hurt that Facebook is Fusion-io’s largest customer, and we all know big and fast the social media giant is growing.

As for that other flash storage play, one has to wonder how this affects Violin’s plans…

Here are a couple more hand-picked links on Fusion-io’s Wall St. debut:

Fusion-io’s IPO went well; who wins – GigaOM
Fusion-io I.P.O. Surges – NYT Dealbook
Today’s Fusion-io IPO Leads Wave of Fundings – Data Center Knowledge