Holographic Storage Company, InPhase gets New Life.

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Founded in 1998 and spun out of Bell Labs in 2000 InPhase raised about $94 million over nine years to develop and advance holographic storage technology. However, last February they laid off its staff and closed its doors.

New life however has been injected into the remnants of this organization by the east coast investment firm Signal Lake Management LLC who has announced in a press release yesterday that it is acquiring a majority stake in what remains of the Longmont-based company.

Signal Lake was an early investor in InPhase and according to the press release they have agreed to buy out the shares of the company's largest shareholder, New Venture Partners, for an undisclosed amount. According to Bart Stuck, managing director the investment firm they plan to invest at least $20 million in debt financing to reorganize InPhase and get it back on its feet. The company will remain in Longmont

Stuck said the focus of InPhase will be to bring its holographic data-storage technology to the commercial market. Nothing new here which leaves me wondering why Stuck thinks that throwing another $20M at a technology that has so far foiled all attempts to commercialize will, this time, be successful.

I have written positively about this company in the past and wish them well. With all the negative front range (Colorado) storage stories in recent years, a success would be more than welcome.

When a second lost can cost $2.5M in lost revenues!

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Doing some research for a recent presentation I discovered an interesting whitepaper from Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware.

My talk was on eliminating performance starved applications, at least from a storage perspective with examples of how high performance storage such as the Atrato Velocity Series (Delivers 5333 IOPS/RU) can eliminate storage IO bottlenecks.

While the main thrust of my discussion focused on the storage challenges of the virtualized environment (subject of another blog) I found the challenges of customer facing WEB applications facinating and the financial penalties associated with relying on sub-par storage solutions, unable to deliver an aggressive IO performance, facinating. Here are some factoids I came across in the Gomez paper.

1. The average online shopper expects web pages to load in 2 seconds or less, down from 4 seconds in 2006
2. After a refresh delay of 3 seconds up to 40% of potential shoppers will abandon the site.
3. The Aberdeen Research group found that the industry average for availability was 97.8%. Not bad? Not good!! Consider what a 2% lack of availability really means. It means 8 lost days per year for a $100,000 a day ecommerce site which translates to a loss of $800,000 per year.
4. The Aberdeen group also discovered that a 1 second delay in page refresh meant a 7% reduction in conversions. Again for a $100,000 per day ecommerce site this translates to $2.5M in lost revenues per year.
5. Microsoft’s Bing found that a 2 second slowdown reduced customer satisfaction by 3.8% and a 4.3% loss in revenue per visitor.

Are these good enough reasons to look for a high performance solution that can deliver the high velocity data needed to speed up your customer facing WEB applications?

I suggest yes, but because a vendor can offer you SSD do not automatically think he is offering you a solution. Look at how this performance tier is being managed and beware that the solution is indeed problem solving and not problem inducing.

Green IT Alive and Well!

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A recent survey of 1200 technology and business managers by Ziff Davis Enterprise Research (Dec, 2009) for the Baseline Magazine suggests that green initiatives, energy efficiency or reduction in hazardous/toxic materials are far from being on the back burner. Their findings suggest that of those interviewed:

1. 37.6% have a greatly increased commitment.
2. 54.5% have an increased commitment
3. 5.8% have the same level of commitment
4. 2.1% have a reduced commitment

This would suggest that despite the state of the economy the Green IT movement is alive and well.

Eliminate the Management Complexity Common with Tiered Storage

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Atrato Inc has just introduced a unique, “autonomic” suite of software modules that is designed to eliminate the complexity normally associated with storage tiering. While storage triering itself is not necessarily complex, data classification, the key enabler of a successful tiered storage implementation can add considerable cost and complexity.

The claim made by Atrato is that their intelligent tiered storage management solution, ApplicationSmart™, automates, hence simplifies, the movement of data between SSD and spinning disk eliminating the complexity created by manual or programmatic data classification. The Atrato solution separates itself from a plethora of currently available management software by continuously monitoring the data stream and making (near) instant data placement decision based on actual, not historical, data access patterns. This task is completed automatically, without any user intervention which increases reliability and responsiveness. Some of the unique cleverness is the adaptation of a branch of mathematics that is normally restricted to the development of complex algorithms commonly used in facial recognition solutions.

The software moves beyond traditional application-aware storage introducing intelligent autonomics that identifies data access patterns to optimize the management of data between storage tiers. ApplicationSmart™ dynamically manages data to the proper tier, eliminating the need to manually move data. With IT administrators no longer having to decide which files need to reside in a particular tier, management complexity is eliminated encouraging practitioners to take full advantage of solid state technology.

Some of the highlights ApplicationSmart™ include:

1. Identifies access patterns in real-time workloads eliminating the need for administrators to separate data types for storage tier placement. This is not a traditional programmatic or policy driven process but one enabled by a branch of mathematics employed in facial recognition.
2. Automates the matching of data value to media attribute improving storage efficiency.
3. Analysis of the Access Profiler output produces tier sizing recommendations to eliminate the wasteful practice of over-provisioning.
4. Simple management of a Hybrid vLUN blends the attributes of spinning and SSD storage.

Whether SSD’s will eventually replace HDD’s is a future trend forecast I will leave to those with clearer crystal balls. However what is clear is that there will continue to be a requirement for a workable blend of spinning and SSD storage. Those vendors who master* the application of mixed media, Hybrid vLUNs that effectively blend HDD and SSD storage will have a bright future for some considerable time into the future.

*(master does not imply marketing speak but a pragmatic application that delivers true user value.)

Energy efficient, high performance storage is not necessarily an oxymoron.

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Green is undoubtedly a pertinent issue in today’s business environment. However, business decisions are always based on priority. Although the impending energy crisis is compelling, next to performance and capacity requirements, green status is a nice to have, not a must have. Companies cannot afford to compromise fundamental performance competencies in the name of going green.

However, the common perception is that energy efficiency and high performance are incompatible objectives. That is true with traditional storage architectures but there is an innovative storage option that blends the attributes of high performance storage with energy efficiency.

Atrato Inc recently started shipping their Velocity1000 (V1000), a 3U storage module with a unique packaging philosophy that accommodates 160, 2½” drives, creating a spindle density that delivers 16,000 IOPS in a single array. With 5,333 IOPS/RU and bandwidth approaching 2GB/s Atrato’s V1000 remains unmatched. This performance is delivered with an energy requirement of 50% to 80% less than other comparable solutions. A recent press release from Atrato describes how one of their customers, The Department of Energy, has implemented the V1000 to realize new green objectives in the data center and to eliminate the storage I/O bottlenecks they were experiencing as they implemented their VMware and began growing their virtual desktop infrastructure.

Metrics to measure and monitor performance are well known, however, the practical understanding of these metrics is often foggy. There are two important aspects to consider. First, it is imperative to understand how green will impact the bottom line, and how it will bring value to the data center. Second, it is important to have a working understanding of how to measure green for data storage solutions. These two goals will help IT professionals make intelligent decisions on how to best use green to increase productivity, save money, and reduce management complexity.

Check out this white paper "The Greening of IT" for a more detailed discussion.

Single Threaded Applications Experience Significant Performance Gains from the Atrato Solution

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Recently Atrato Inc introduced their latest storage management software, called ApplicationSmart™ , a tiered management software which has introduced some innovative and unique approaches to managing the integration of SSD and spinning disk. While many vendors are now incorporating SSD into their storage portfolio few have integrated management tools that effectively mitigate the increased complexity common in today’s tiered storage implementations.

Atrato positions ApplicationSmart™ beyond traditional application-aware storage with what they call, intelligent storage management autonomics. This feature recognizes data access patterns, real time, to optimize the management of data between storage tiers. As the word autonomic infers, management tasks are done without administrator intervention and it is this hands off attribute that eliminates complexity, increases responsiveness and accuracy. Their secret sauce if you will is the stepping beyond the more traditional programmatic approaches to tier management and innovatively adapting pattern recognition technologies to data storage management. For a more detailed explination check out the following paper that appeared recently in the Intel Technology Journal. "Solid state Drive applications in storage and Embedded Systems"

The purpose of this blog however was to look a particular application problem area, namely single threaded applications and to discuss how ApplicationSmart™ can be especially effective in enhancing their performance. Single threaded applications represent legacy architecture and characteristically issue ONE I/O at a time, waiting for completion of each before launching the next I/O, and suffer from an inability to take full advantage of servers with multiple CPUs, multi-core processors or parallel processing.

While all applications gain from improvements in the I/O process, the inability to take advantage of processor configurations gains make I/O improvements much more significant to the single threaded application. The most obvious solution would be to rewrite these aging applications, however desirable that option may be, it is not practical leaving outside options as the only solution to this productivity issue. ApplicationSmart™ is such a solution that delivers performance improvement to the I/O process that can significantly enhance single threaded application performance.

ApplicationSmart™ analyses data patterns, identifies data that is likely to be used by the application in the near future and promotes this data into SSD storage along with specific data requested in an I/O operation. Using a “locality of reference” methodology ApplicationSmart makes it highly probable that the next data requested by the application will be readily available from SSD rather than disk. This process is similar to that provided by shopping Web sites, which suggest that purchasers of book ‘A’ are also likely be interested in books ‘ D’, ‘K’ and ‘R’.

Using autonomic processes to identify relevant data, ApplicationSmart’s storage management process automatically replicates most frequently used data in SSD so that it is more readily available to the application. This reduces, the I/O calls on rotational disk in favor of I/O calls on the SSD storage resource. Response time from SSD is vastly improved over that of rotational disk.

Also included in ApplicationSmart™ is an ingest I/O reforming feature that ensures standardization of I/O sizes, further improving I/O performance. Combining this with features, such as Access Profiler, SSD LUN Manager, Tiered Management Engine, Ingest Accelerator and Egress Accelerator, ApplicationSmart enables the user to maximize the use of high density rotational disk storage, optimize performance across a combined, HDD/SSD, Hybrid Virtual LUN, to improve application performance, and save power, floor space and time commitment costs.

Given the ubiquity of multiprocessors and multi-core processors in servers marketed today, one might ask whether many single threaded applications still exist. The answer is that there are more than you might think. David Bolton, a 26 year software development veteran who has written software for Price Waterhouse, British Aerospace and London Clearing House states in his blog on www.about.com last October:
“For most of us I suspect single threaded applications are the norm unless you are working on a sophisticated application. Even then at my last job, working on a Front Office Trading System, it was single threaded apart from just two threads used very intermittently for reporting error and status.”Source: http://cplus.about.com/b/2009/10/20/beware-of-the-single-threaded-application.htm

The Atrato solution integrates a 3U sealed 'disk" enclosure delivering 16,000 IOP's, a 1U SSD enclosure that delivers 80,000 IOP's both tightly integrated and managed by ApplicationSmart™. By economically delivering high IOP performance atrato is targeting their solution to address I/O bottlenecks and may be the best performance enhancement for more applications than first realize.

The Performance Gap Dilemma:

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The storage industry is very cognizant of the number of conflicting challenges that they are facing. Not the least is the ever increasing gap between CPU performance and disk based storage performance.



Using the approximation of 50% annual growth in CPU performance and a 10%, annual performance growth of storage there is an increasing widening in the performance gap between the CPU demand for I/O performance and the ability of a storage solution to deliver. The chart above was created using these assumptions and as can be seen it results in an approximate 25x to 2x disparity in performance growth over the past 10 years between CPU and disk-based storage.

There is little surprise that in data intensive environments such as transactional-heavy DB applications, business & financial analytics, data mining, data warehousing, production archive, virtual machine deployment and VDI are in many cases becoming classified as performance starved applications looking for a storage solution that can deliver the high velocity data they need to be fully effective.

It is this dilemma and the need to close the performance gap to eliminate the performance penalty associated with I/O bound applications that is the catalyst fueling the demand for solid state storage.