Delivering Flash innovation now and in the future

NO ONE WORKING in the storage networking space, or even the overall ICT industry, can fail to be aware of the rapid increase in the uptake of Solid State Disk and Flash technology over the past few years.

Just as importantly, an increasing number of employees who work outside the IT department, but who are being empowered to specify and even purchase compute resource, to underpin the applications they are wanting to run, are being made aware of the benefits that Flash technology has to offer.
However, the nuances of what makes any particular Flash technology better, or at least, different, from any other, will be lost on most. So, it’s worth spending a few moments to understand how one particular Flash vendor, IBM, has sought to develop a product family – FlashSystem – that offers the very best in performance, by seeking to address some of the problems traditionally associated with this technology.
The current, unprecedented growth of concurrent users and number of transactions in many businesses means that data has become a natural resource, and making sense of this data is a business priority. Organisations need to gain insight, extract intelligence and, ultimately, gain competitive advantage from their data. For companies with such a robust data strategy, interrogating their data faster than their competitors can provide up to a two and a half times competitive edge. Bringing products to market faster, for example, or providing a better customer service experience than competitors, can improve profitability significantly.
Flash technology promises to meet this need for faster, smarter data usage, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that not all Flash technologies are created equal. In developing the FlashSystem family, IBM has sought to ensure that its Flash technology is not a performance bottleneck, rather a performance enabler.
The technical obstacles that any Flash offering has to overcome include: the fact that there’s pressure on densities to increase at the same time as there’s downward pressure on pricing; there’s more cell to cell interference; an increase in bit error rate – and common solutions to correct errors often result in more latency; there are less and less electrons on the floating gate; and data retention is becoming harder. A significant portion of IBM’s strategic billion dollar investment in FlashSystem has been dedicated to overcome these issues.
The result is the IBM FlashCore technology that underpins the FlashSystem appliances. IBM FlashCore uses industry standard interface and chip technology, alongside IBM enhanced Micron technology and the newly developed IBM MicroLatency module, to provide hardware accelerated I/O and advanced Flash Management.
Close collaboration between IBM research, software developers and FlashSystem engineers, with Micron providing an interface to the inner workings of the flash, lead to intensive hands-on research to characterise all aspects of the flash. Which, in turn lead to the development of the FlashCore technology, which provides enterprise class robustness using standard MLC technology, enhances endurance without sacrificing latency and performance and contains a hardware path specifically for flash.
IBM MicroLatency Module
One of the key differentiators between IBM Flash technology and any other is within the FlashSystem products. An innovative ECC algorithm corrects very high bit error rates (does not require additional reads). With health binning and heat segregation, FlashCore technology continually assesses health by monitoring several key parameters. The benefits of this include the fact that:
Hotter data is placed in healthier blocks
Up to 57% improvement in endurance
Write Amplification reduced by up to 45% by grouping like heat levels
The IBM and Micron collaboration provided IBM with special access to the Flash, allowing such developments as extensive characterization determined optimal read offsets to set as block ages, powerful checks on entire data path, including inside the flash modules, and Variable Stripe RAID which reduces what needs to be retired.
The benefits of the FlashCore technology include:
 Large endurance gains w/o latency
penalty
 Asymmetrical wear levelling results in
higher endurance in real life workloads
 As the part ages and the health of each
block is determined, the ideal voltage
levels are set in order to minimize errors
 Outstanding data reliability and improved
endurance
Enterprise storage at the speed of Flash
The most recent product to be developed around the FlashCore technology is the IBM FlashSystem V9000 – described as ‘the world’s first high-speed, all-flash solution with everything businesses need to power their front-line storage infrastructure’.
With the introduction of the FlashSystem V9000, IT departments and the wider enterprise have access to a complete all-flash storage solution offering both extreme performance and comprehensive, enterprise-ready functionality in one compact, fully integrated, highly manageable, and easy-to-implement package.
IBM’s newest and fastest flash storage system yet, FlashSystem V9000 delivers the microsecond response times only available from a solution designed for flash from the inside out. Yet it also comes with a rich set of enterprise storage services, including snapshotting, cloning, replication, and inline compression capable of increasing effective flash storage capacity by up to 500 percent.
FlashSystem V9000 also comes with a centralised “single pane of glass” management interface that controls all of the solution’s hardware and software—and any external storage systems that you want to virtualise into the solution too. “The same console you use to manage the all-flash layer can manage multiple tiers of disk and tape storage, regardless of manufacturer, and dynamically move data across them non-disruptively,” says Woody Hutsell, a business development manager in IBM’s FlashSystem product unit. The FlashSystem V9000 has compression, backup, and disaster recovery features that can also extend to legacy storage systems. “You get added capabilities throughout your infrastructure, not just in the flash tier, and better data protection too,” Hutsell says.
Best of all, that rich functionality comes at a price that’s lower than previous all-flash storage virtualisation solutions and no higher than comparable disk-based systems. “FlashSystem V9000 arrays provide 40 percent more capacity than earlier FlashSystem products in the same form factor,” Hutsell says. That and the solution’s state-of-theart compression technology make FlashSystem V9000 a leader among all-flash solutions in both price per performance and price per gigabyte.
Cost-effectiveness is just one of FlashSystem V9000’s winning attributes, however. It’s also extremely fast. “FlashSystem V9000 delivers a minimum 5x performance improvement over what you’re experiencing now,” Hutsell says. “Pretty much every application you have is going to run faster on it.”
FlashSystem V9000 enables growth in storage infrastructure as quickly as the business grows and matures, thanks to its scalability. “You can start with as little as 2 TB of capacity and scale that up to 456 TB,” Hutsell says. Depending on the compressibility of the data, moreover, FlashSystem V9000 can turn that 456 TB of physical capacity into as much as 2.2 PB of effective capacity. The solution can scale out as well as up, too, by deploying as many as seven additional FlashSystem V9000 enclosures, and then managing them all as one.
Furthermore, FlashSystem V9000’s integrated backup and disaster recovery functionality keeps data safe, and its redundant data paths and hardware components make it continuously available. “Data is one of a business’s most valuable assets,” Hutsell observes. “FlashSystem V9000 helps you make sure users always have secure access to that information.” And it provides that access with unparalleled efficiency. Solid-state solutions like FlashSystem V9000 consume significantly less power than disk-based products with moving parts, and also require less cooling and floor space. “The TCO advantages that come with an all-flash infrastructure can be very dramatic,” Hutsell says.
Plus, FlashSystem V9000’s ‘exceptional’ density and extensive software-defined storage functionality allow businesses to consolidate a mix of workloads on a single virtualised storage architecture. Its centralised management console then makes administering those workloads significantly easier, and can even help improve storage utilisation. “Many companies have lots of siloed storage systems, which makes it really easy to lose track of what storage is available where,” Hutsell says. FlashSystem V9000’s management interface shows exactly where unused capacity is across all storage tiers, so nothing goes to waste.
Just as significantly from a bottom-line perspective, FlashSystem V9000’s ability to incorporate multiple systems from multiple vendors in a single virtualised storage infrastructure helps companies get maximum return on their prior storage investments. “Most businesses have lots of legacy storage systems,” Hutsell notes. “They don’t want to throw them all away and do a forklift upgrade.” By enabling IT organisations to manage both their new and old storage systems centrally and shift data among them easily, FlashSystem V9000 renders such “rip and replace” deployments a costly thing of the past.
Easy to install
Alongside the ‘traditional’ and more obvious benefits of implementing Flash storage technology, it’s worth noting that IBM’s FlashSystems are easy to install - a significant contributory factor to a fast ROI. For Paddy Power, the six-week order/implementation cycle meant that the company was soon appreciating the 1000 percent performance improvement that was experienced within 12 hours of the system going live. For Coca-Cola Bottling Co., installing the FlashSystem technology took ‘just an hour or so’.
Paddy Power makes a safe bet
The Paddy Power organisation has become a big fan of FlashSystem, as Shane Sweeney, Head of Engineering at the company explains:
“Paddy Power is one of the UK and Ireland’s online gaming companies, it specialises in sports betting, and casino games, we’ve had an online presence since 2001, we predominately deal in the retail space, where we have over 550 shops we have over 350 technology staff, from development teams through to operations and we’re always trying to build the next version of what our customers will want to be doing on the Internet.
“Every year we’re seeing on average 25 to 30 percent growth, but for the peak events like Cheltenham and the Grand National, we’ve have to deal with 60-65 percent year on year growth, and it has been consistent for about 10 or 12years. We had begun our annual preparations around the Grand National and Cheltenham preparations and as part of the work that we did last year, the analysis and the outputs from last year we had identified that our storage unit was not going to be able to keep up without doing a substantial upgrade to it. Working with the IBM team, they had advised us that the best thing to do was not to upgrade our old storage unit, that’s why we ended up looking at an alternative storage approach around the FlashSystem where you no longer have to deal with upgrading of power drives or cache, the box is in itself is an entirely cache friendly unit and with no moving parts there’s very little that can go wrong with it.
“It took less than six weeks from time of order to get it into production, we work reasonable quickly here at Paddy Power, we’re an agile organisation, we have to be able to change our direction quite quickly, and from the moment that we put it in, within that six weeks, I would say that within
12 hours we were already saw 1000 per cent performance improvement, 10x across the board. We had jobs that were taking 18-20 hours that are now taking an hour and a half to two hours.
“The business benefits range from overall system performance, to stability, the speed in which our business intelligence applications and data warehouse now moves, our reports get delivered faster and on time and the collation of many of the ad hoc reporting capabilities that might be needed to check the current status of an event in the middle of the day, all that now happens far faster. There’s more efficiencies being created inside of the business.
“We looked at a number of different options around the ROI for the product and, based on just power, heat and data centre space, this was going to have all its costs covered in 18 months. Just because we’re going from something that’s really large that takes a large amount of power to something that’s really small, which has no real power requirements over and above a standard pizza box server. The rest of the business case around the platform, we didn’t have to deal with efficiencies inside of the business, it was pure technology saving with technology, which is a big plus for the rest of the organisation.
“So, we in Paddy Power have a very heavy reliance on a lot of technology and IBM is in the core part of our systems. Our website is running on IBM Informix and because of that we felt that if we aligned our software products and our hardware products to the one vendor it meant that we got a seamless, straightforward support process in the event of something going wrong. The joined up thinking that seems to exist in IBM around both the hardware and from the software point of view means that we can get all of the benefits of a full IBM solution, as opposed to just getting a number of product and having to do with the integration, and the piecing together of a very complicated puzzle.”
Bottling up Flash success
Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (CCBCC) is the largest independent producer and distributor of Coca-Cola Company products in the United States. With an annual turnover of around USD 1.5 billion, the company produces 150 million cases of product per week, which it ships from 47 distribution centres to customers across the south east of the country.
To satisfy massive customer demand for its Coca-Cola Company products, CCBCC’s manufacturing operations run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The company is constantly looking for innovative ways to reduce the risk of missed sales opportunities, to maximize profitability.
As Tom DeJuneas, Infrastructure Manager at Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, explains: “With operations on our scale, the ability to accurately anticipate customer demand is vital. Because our manufacturing processes are rolling 24/7, we need to refresh our demand forecasts early every morning to ensure that we’re creating the optimal amount of each product, and that those products can be transported to the correct distribution center in time to fill the anticipated customer orders.”
“If we were unable to forecast demand precisely enough, then we would be at risk of missing out on sales opportunities - either because we had too little of a certain product to fill all of the day’s orders, or too much of a certain product taking up valuable space in our warehouses.”
To help predict customer demand, CCBCC uses a specialised supply chain forecasting application running on IBM AIX, the storage component of which is hosted on IBM XIV Storage System. Originally, the application offered customer demand insights down to the regional level – and when an upgrade to the software that offered store-level insights became available, CCBCC was quick to deploy it.
“The finer the granularity of our insights, the more accurately we can anticipate demand and plan our manufacturing and logistics processes,” says DeJuneas. “Being able to anticipate customer demand down to the level of individual stores is a fantastic business benefit – but it comes at a price. After we upgraded our supply chain forecasting application, we needed to crunch about 20 times more data than before.”
Large data volumes threaten efficiency
With so much additional sales forecasting data to process, CCBCC’s nightly batch processes began to overrun – threatening to reduce the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of its supply chain processes, and to cause the IT team to miss its SLA targets.
“At end-of-day, we process the previous day’s sales to plan production and delivery for the following morning,” says DeJuneas. “After the forecasting application upgrade, our nightly batch processing time grew to 14 hours. This forced us to make a choice – either to delay the batch processing until all of the day’s sales had been posted to our SAP ERP system, or start the batch before we had all of the day’s sales data.”
“The earlier in the day that we can schedule our deliveries, the less we pay for the service, so delaying our batch runs reduced the cost-effectiveness of our logistics processes. Conversely, if we started the batch run early, our forecasts would be based on incomplete information – increasing the risk that production and delivery schedules would be based on inaccurate forecasts.”
Choosing IBM FlashSystem
To get the full benefits of its upgraded supply chain forecasting application and to ensure adherence to SLA requirements, CCBCC needed to reduce the time required to complete its nightly batch runs.
“When we heard about IBM FlashSystem, we immediately recognised its potential to accelerate our batch runs,” says DeJuneas.
“Working with the IBM Flash Centers of Competency (CoC), we ran an onsite proof-of-concept [POC] exercise, and we were extremely impressed with the results. Using IBM FlashSystem, we saw a significant drop in the time it took to run batch workloads. Based on this positive experience, we were convinced that IBM FlashSystem had the balance of performance and price that we needed to meet our goal.”
Following the success of the POC, CCBCC worked with the IBM Systems Lab Services team to augment its enterprise storage landscape, based on XIV, with an IBM FlashSystem 820 with 10 TB of capacity. To ensure resiliency of its mission-critical data, the company deployed IBM SAN Volume Controller software to automatically mirror data from IBM FlashSystem to the XIV environment. The Lab Services team used IBM AIX LVM host mirroring to migrate production servers to the new storage landscape, and provided extensive skills and knowledge transfer to the CCBCC technical team.
“Installing the FlashSystem technology itself took just an hour or so – it really is a plug-and-play solution,” says DeJuneas. “Even after working with IBM for more than 14 years, we are still impressed by their commitment to the success of our business. Every time we have had a need, we have been able to reach out to IBM and work with them to come up with a solution that was a win-win for our business and IBM’s business.”

By deploying the IBM FlashSystem 820 behind IBM SAN Volume Controller, CCBCC enjoys a winning mix of leading-edge performance, high availability, optimal virtualisation, and extreme manageability. CCBCC also uses the XIV flash caching option to cut latency by 40 percent – from
5 ms to 3 ms – across diverse workloads that run on its multiple XIV machines. DeJuneas comments: “Using SAN Volume Controller, we can manage both FlashSystem and XIV through a single intuitive interface. We have a lean IT team, so ease-of-use was a major advantage – especially as we rolled out the new solution.”
Lightning-speed performance for demand forecasting
With the IBM FlashSystem Enterprise Solution in place, CCBCC has achieved its goal of shrinking its customer forecasting batch cycles and meeting tough SLA requirements. Today, the company’s IT department can provide the business with the rich predicative analytics insights required to improve the efficiency of its supply chain processes – reducing the risk of out-of-stock or over-stock positions, and increasing profitability.
“After the application upgrade, our supply chain forecasting was typically completed by 8 a.m. the next morning – by which time the deadline for low-cost delivery rates had passed,” says DeJuneas. “Using IBM FlashSystem, we’ve accelerated our batch processing by a factor of four – enabling us to wait for the day’s sales figures to be posted and still complete the process by 5:30 a.m.”
He continues: “Because we can now fully meet the demanding SLAs set by the business, they get timely access to the accurate information they need, they can optimize manufacturing plans and take advantage of the lowest delivery tariffs. This helps us to increase the cost-efficiency of our logistics, and ultimately boost profitability.”
“What’s more, the improved accuracy of our daily supply plans enables us to reduce the amount of stock we hold – cutting our inventory-carrying costs significantly.”
With the success of its IBM solution, CCBCC is investigating the possibility of harnessing the performance of FlashSystem to accelerate other workloads with IBM System Storage® Easy Tier® software. If deployed, this solution would enable dynamic, non-disruptive migration of the most frequently accessed data to the fastest storage tier.
DeJuneas concludes: “Our mission statement is to make, sell and deliver Coca-Cola Company products better than anyone else. By using IBM FlashSystem to accelerate our insights into customer demand, we’re better placed than ever before to offer unbeatable levels of service to our customers across the United States.”
There are plenty of other examples available of how IBM customers are using FlashSystem technology to their advantage and, one imagines, that there are few, if any, companies who can afford to continue to ignore the compelling benefits of quicker deployment of new applications, faster market insights, happier customers, higher revenue, lower spending, and stronger profits that flash technology offers.

For further details access https://ibm.biz/BdXrKk

Box
Flash and the future

THE BUSINESS WORLD is undergoing a fundamental transformation as the traditional model of an internal IT department providing and supporting the compute resource requirements of an enterprise is being replaced by a more flexible, agile model, where any and all of an organisation’s employees have the potential to resource their own applications and underlying IT infrastructure – whether internally, externally, or, most likely, from both. Flash storage comes into its own when supporting this new computing world.
Cloud
IBM estimates that by 2016, more than a quarter of the world’s applications will be available in the Cloud, and almost all new software is being developed for Cloud environments, as part of the overall move to the delivery of IT as digital services. In the Cloud model, applications are delivered to end users through networks – creating possible issues around latency both to do with the network itself and the actual place where the application/data resides. IBM FlashSystem provides response times significantly faster than traditional storage systems, which makes all the difference between a good or bad user experience.
Data analytics
IBM estimates that the market for data analytics will approach $187 billion by 2015 – making this one of the hottest business and technology drivers right now. In this field, time is, literally, money, as the speed at which data is processed and analysed has a direct impact on the speed with which an organisation can identify, and respond to, specific customer needs and trends. IBM FlashSystem is designed to handle small and large block random I/O (data access) operations, a basic characteristic of analytics processing. The technology is also designed to provide exceptional performance scalability – as the analytics process becomes larger and busier within an organisation, FlashSystem can cope with this increase in demand.
Mobile and social
The huge growth in the use of mobile technology, alongside the massive uptake in social systems of engagement, means that businesses need to focus an increasing amount of their IT spend on this area. Data volumes and the speed at which they can be accessed are increasing dramatically, as is the transition from structured data to unstructured data – images, videos, texts, tweets and the like. This trend requires a corresponding change in the underlying storage systems. Technology that is a good fit for block (structured) storage is giving way to object storage – which includes the data itself, some metadata and a unique identifier that allows a file to be located anywhere. FlashSystem is designed to support such geographically distributed, unstructured storage environments that underpin mobile and social data systems.
Security
Hardly a day goes by without one or more news stories relating to a data breach experienced by a high profile organisation somewhere in the world. Such a security breach damages the reputation of a business, so it’s vital to ensure that detection and correction of these incidents is done as quickly as possible. FlashSystem’s positive contribution to the speed of data processing as part of this security data analytics process can be the difference between detecting and preventing a major security breach, or not.
In simple terms, IBM’s FlashSystem offers modern storage technology that is keeping pace with the modern business environment – enabling end users throughout the enterprise to ensure that storage is not the bottleneck as they seek to engage with their customers quickly and responsively.