monster trends in enterprise tech: the flash disruption and what it means for database and business

© Wikibon 2008 © Wikibon 2014 www.wikibon.org

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[[The Wikibon Project]]

Monster Trends in Enterprise Tech

The Flash Disruption, &

what it Means for Database &

Business

David Floyer

CTO & Co-founder,

The Wikibon Project

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Key Trends

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IoT

Fog Computing

Flash


Key Trends

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IoT

Fog Computing

Flash

© Wikibon 2008 © Wikibon 2009 | Confidential www.wikibon.org www.wikibon.org © Wikibon 2014

• CIO's should expect that high value, revenue-producing

applications will be most affected by these changes. As such

there is an opportunity to improve the amount of data that can

be processed within a transaction by 1,000X. This means

organizations will be able to dramatically enhance the quality,

performance, and end-user experience of their most important

IT application assets.

• Vendors have seen a steady migration of storage function

away from the processor for the past two decades, creating a

multi-billion dollar storage software market. Function will

increasingly migrate back toward the processor creating a

dislocation that is both an opportunity and threat to

established array vendor software franchises.

The Flash Attack

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How Flash Helps Existing Apps

• Speeds them up: milliseconds to

microseconds

• Wikibon Case Study: Revere * (200 person)

• Before: Only Call Center in Prime-time

• After: All departments could operated in Prime-

time

• Business benefit: 20% growth with no additional

people, $1 Million to the bottom line

• Cost: 1 Flash card

• ROI: almost infinite, with <3 month break-even * Reference: http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Case_Study:_The_Hunting_of_the_RARC

Flash Memory Summit 2013

Santa Clara, CA

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• Customers can add to current architectures & protocols (e.g. Bolt on

SSDs and flash for read IOs) but unless you have a “write to flash

first” architecture with a single master copy which primarily resides

in flash – you’ll never be able to scale.

• Without a “write to flash first” architecture, the cost of software and

hardware at scale become prohibitive

• This ripples thru to OPEX because the amount of effort required at

scale to tune the system is expensive

• Traditional arrays today don’t scale well- i.e. Ones that use “Flash

Cache” (reads) and SSD (writes). The problem w/SSD is you have

to manually allocate the volume – too hard and too expensive

• All-Flash Arrays with De-duplication & Compression gives

competitive costs with tiered storage with lower OPEX costs - give

very consistent performance for database

• Application-led Open-source Server SAN - In general, the more

integration that can be done closer to the application…costs will be

lower, performance better and value higher

Hybrid & All-Flash Arrays

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Flash & Database

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Design & Architecture Problems

• DRAM non-persistent, Write-time to

acknowledgement key problem

• Elapsed Time milliseconds (20-200ms)

• Variance very high (for Databases)

• Limits Design for Transactional Applications

• 100DB calls/transaction

• Limits Scope of Analytic Systems (DRAM?)

• Modular Systems, difficult to deploy,

business fits to application

Flash Memory Summit 2013

Santa Clara, CA

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Atomic Storage

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• Atomic Storage reduces

latency from milliseconds

to microseconds

• Latency Variation as

important (or more

important) as Average

Latency for Databases

• SCSI overhead must be

tackled:

• PCIe primitives

• NVM on Memory Bus


Workload Differentiation

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Technology Trends

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Flape – Flash & Tape

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A Word on Converged Infrastructure

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Wikibon recently interviewed Wikibon members who

have adopted converged infrastructure solutions in

Oracle environments. From these findings and other

research, Wikibon has calculated that IT executives

can expect savings of 40% to 50% in costs or

equivalent value by adopting an aggressive on-

premise IaaS with the minimum number of SKUs, even

after taking into account the higher costs of highly

converged solutions. In a detailed analysis of Oracle

DBA productivity Wikibon shows that by adopting best

practices in Oracle environments, database admin

(DBA) productivity is improved by 50%.


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Converged Infrastructure


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Converged Applications


Converged Application Business Case

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One-size Does Not Fit All

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Server SAN


• Flash on Memory (NVDRAM)

– Early days

• Other NVM Technologies

– PCM, Memristor – 5-years out

• Flash will drive New Applications solving

New Business Opportunities

Futures

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monster trends in enterprise tech: the flash disruption and what it means for database and business

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