Big Data Flash - a new storage category?

According to IDC, the market for flash-based arrays—both All Flash Arrays (AFA) and Hybrid Flash Arrays (HFA)—exhibited strong double digit growth over the past five years for a combined market that in 2014 was over $11.3B in size. This growth is largely being driven by rapid migration to 3rd platform computing infrastructure, resulting from the massive storage, compute power and scalability requirements of an increasingly mobile workforce, social media, big data analytics, and cloud computing.

InfiniFlash is the next generation storage platform. Available in three different configurations (IF100, IF500 and IF700), this breakthrough offering provides 5x the density, 50x the performance and 4x the reliability, while consuming 80 percent less power – as compared to traditional hard disk drive (HDD) arrays – and far surpasses the capabilities of existing all-flash arrays which focus solely on performance. InfiniFlash also delivers breakthrough pricing for an all-flash hardware solution at less than $1 per gigabyte (GB), and breaks the $2 per GB barrier for an all-flash system without requiring compression or de-duplication technologies.

“Building on our long history of industry-defining innovation, we are very excited to bring our first all flash array storage system to market in the form of a category-defining product that we expect will drive flash into big-data workloads at massive scale,” said Sumit Sadana, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, SanDisk. “By offering InfiniFlash below $2/GB before compression and de-duplication, we are changing the industry dynamics in favor of dramatically broader flash adoption in new hyperscale and enterprise workloads.”

Through the disaggregation of compute, switching and storage capabilities, InfiniFlash enables the use of flash for primary and secondary storage with new benchmarks in low total acquisition costs and extremely compelling total cost of ownership (TCO). The InfiniFlash system is configured with up to 64 specially-designed, hot-swappable cards, each providing an unprecedented 8TB of flash capacity. Together, the cards deliver half a petabyte (PB) (512 terabytes (TB)) of raw flash storage in a 3-rack-unit (3U) enclosure, which is able to connect with up to eight off-the-shelf servers.

The InfiniFlash system’s modular storage design supports various operating system and storage stack offerings. It includes the award-winning, performance-optimized SanDisk ION Accelerator™ software stack, from Fusion-io, for block storage applications. For scale-out block and object storage workloads, InfiniFlash utilises the ‘flash-intelligent’, open source CEPH platform to deliver enterprise-class data services. These offerings include development libraries and a software development kit (SDK) that allow customers to optimise applications for use with the system in order to obtain even better performance, efficiency and TCO.

SanDisk continues to work with its OEM partners to bring innovative flash solutions to market. SanDisk will also leverage its relationships with channel partners, value-added resellers and system integrators to deploy InfiniFlash and other SanDisk flash-powered solutions for enterprise and hyperscale customers. InfiniFlash system service, maintenance, and support are also provided by SanDisk and its go-to-market partners.

“At Dell, our enterprise and Big Data customers are increasingly demanding higher performance, higher capacity solutions that are delivered in a rapid, reliable, open and cost-effective fashion,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of engineered solutions, Dell. “Solution and appliance innovations such as InfiniFlash not only address these critical customer success metrics but also deliver on the promise that big data insights can drive differentiated business results.”

Targeting New and Big Data Workloads

Today’s highly visual, social, analytics-driven society continues to crave higher performance, max-capacity storage solutions to fuel both new business insights and personal interactions. InfiniFlash is designed to address diverse enterprise and hyperscale workloads including:

Big Data Analytics—InfiniFlash delivers both the capacity and performance needed to mine information stores for patterns that translate into business insights for workloads such as Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB, as well as delivers timely analysis of in-memory databases.

Content Repositories—High-definition content repositories, such as social media sites, require blazingly fast read capabilities in order to deliver a delightful user experience. InfiniFlash provides quick and easy access to high-definition content 24x7.

Media Streaming—InfiniFlash supports the high data transfer rates needed for capturing and delivering rich media content such as movies, music, and video surveillance, that it can then rapidly analyse and deliver for viewing.

“The creation of the new storage category of Big Data Flash will be a welcome development for 3rd platform computing customers that are struggling to meet the requirements of hyperscale environments with legacy HDD technologies,” said Eric Burgener, research director of IDC’s Storage Practice. “Big Data Flash solutions consistently deliver sub-millisecond latencies, scale to hundreds of PBs, exhibit enterprise class reliability, availability, and serviceability, and bring the secondary economic benefits of flash deployment at scale to big data applications – all at a $/GB price point comparable to that of 15K RPM HDD systems. We believe products like InfiniFlash that offer an aggressively compelling price alternative to current scale-out HDD based architectures currently being used for big data applications, will succeed.”