'Writing is on the wall for spinning rust': IBM joins Pure Storage in claiming disk drives will go the way of the dodo in enterprises
'Writing is on the wall for spinning rust': IBM joins Pure Storage in claiming disk drives will go the way of the dodo in enterprises
IBM wants to replace HDDs with its FlashSystem C200 storage system
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Wouldn't a HDD based system be like 1/10th the price? I don't know if HDDs are going away any time soon.
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Spinning platter capacity can't keep up with SSDs. HDDs are just starting to break the 30TB mark and SSDs are shipping 50+. The cost delta per TB is closing fast. You can also have always on compression and dedupe in most cases with flash, so you get better utilization.
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You can also have always on compression and dedupe in most cases with flash
As you can with spinning disks. Nothing about flash makes this a special feature.
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The difference is you can use inline compression and dedupe in a high performance environment. HDDs suck at random IO.
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See for example the storage systems from Vast or Pure. You can increase window size for compression and dedup far smaller blocks. Fast random IO also allows you to do that ”online” in the background. In the case of Vast, you also have multiple readers on the same SSD doing that compression and dedup.
So the feature isn’t that special. What you can do with it in practice changes drastically.
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The disk cost is about a 3 fold difference, rather than order of magnitude now.
These disks didn't make up as much of the costs of these solutions as you'd think, so a disk based solution with similar capacity might be more like 40% cheaper rather than 90% cheaper.
The market for pure capacity play storage is well served by spinning platters, for now. But there's little reason to iterate on your storage subsystem design, the same design you had in 2018 can keep up with modern platters. Compared to SSD where form factor has evolved and the interface indicates revision for every pcie generation.
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For servers physical space is also a huge concern. 2.5” drives cap out at like 6tb I think, while you can easily find an 8tb 2.5” SSD anywhere. We have 16tb drives in one of our servers at work and they weren’t even that expensive. (Relatively)
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You can put multiple 8 gig m.2 ssds into 2.5" slot.
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It's losing cost advantages as time goes. Long term storage is still on tape (and that's actively developed too!), and flash is getting cheaper, and spinning disks have inherent bandwidth and latency limits. It's probably not going away entirely, but it's main usecases are being squeezed on both ends
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