Surprise Inside!

Think about matryoshka dolls.

Think about the childlike glee that comes from discovering that one doll is really eight!

                                        

Matryoshka are the Russian nesting dolls where each fits inside the other. (I always called them “Russian Dolls” and had to look up “matryoshka”) The first were created near Moscow in 1890. Maybe not high-tech but they help to illustrate an important eco-energy concept .

Dale Hoenshell, a colleague at EDS, recently explained a computer controlled lighting test project he was running. Preliminary results indicated potential for a 45% reduction in electricity use. Maybe more.

Among other means, they achieved this by dimming lights to reduce glare in work areas, turning off lights where nobody is present and by “harvesting” sunlight.

They were achieving, even exceeding, the desired power savings – the big doll.

But there were other benefits, smaller dolls, hidden inside.

For example, the employees in the test area were more productive and satisfied under the dimmer lights.

Happy and productive probably means more profit potential too.

So, you get the idea. Save energy. Reduce carbon output. Save cost. Increase employee satisfaction. Maybe retain them longer and attract better talent too.

Improve productivity and profitability.

Not bad when the initial intent was just to save some juice - cascading energy benefits and the doll with the surprise(s) inside.

The way Dale described it "if you see multiple, unexpected and positive results, you know you are on the right track." 

The second nested doll-like benefit popped up at a customer briefing last week. We were discussing the relationship that multiple energy saving strategies have to one another. Consolidation of storage (SANs) and servers (Virtualization) allows for better utilization of both and improves power and space use too.

Each helps the other to increase impact.

Look at data deduplication. Done before backup transmission it helps control bandwidth demands, speeds up backup time, cuts required storage capacity and also cuts energy use.

Dolls.

But it was Flash drives that started me thinking about matryoshka dolls.

Really.

Flash drives are the big dolls.

Initial press and analyst reactions to EMC’s January Flash drive announcement have been glowing.   

One of my favorite headlines was EMC Lands a Haymaker:

"EMC's announcement of the inclusion of NAND-based flash memory devices, ...within the DMX-4...shocked the storage world and ushered in a new era of storage tiering, ..."

Nearly all of the press coverage was focused on the speed of the drive, which at 30x what it replaces is very impressive.  However, there is much more - more dolls to be discovered.

(For a refresh on Flash disks, go to Enterprise Storage Strikes Back! on Chuck's blog, « 0.059: bold, fast and green from the Storage Anarchist, or Topping the CIO's Most Wanted List   on my blog.)

The Flash drives fit in a standard drive slot.  That means they fit in standard DMX-4 machines. 

Already have one of those?  Buy a Flash drive and slide it in.

Practically speaking, cost and system throughput factors will limit just how much you will take advantage of these capabilities. For now. But in the right situation, the payback can also be big right now. And costs will come down and system throughput will rise.

So, first, you know you will get 30x performance improvement, and you get big energy savings too because Flash drives use less energy than spinning disks - around 40% less.  They weigh less too.

But the real energy savings comes when comparing Flash and spinning disk on comparable IOPS. A single Flash drive delivers the same IOPS as 30 of the 15k rpm drives. So, the real energy comparison is 1-to-30. That cuts energy use by as much as 97.7 percent on an IOPS basis. 

What else?

Well, all of the standard software - SRDF, Timefinder, Control Center etc., will work with Flash drives too.

So what? 

Think about the prior alternatives.

Until now, enterprises with these high performance requirements had limited choices. They could spread workloads over dozens or hundreds of underutilized disk drives - expensive-,  or they could purchase separate servers and memory storage that essentially add complexity and create storage islands without capabilities typical of enterprise-class storage arrays. Also expensive.

Still had to back it up and protect it too.

So, how about simpler, protected and integrated. Not inexpensive, but lots of nested benefits.

Enter Flash drives inside a Symm. Tier 0 applications can be closely coupled with other storage tiers inside the Symmetrix.   You get process consistency and efficiency and simpler management because less time is  invested in manual data layout or end-of-day data transfers from separate RAM disk or specialized memory storage systems.

But wait.  It gets better.

Enginuity 5773, the revised Symmetrix operating system also adds new features that increase storage utilization and optimization, enhanced replication capabilities, greater interoperability and security, as well as multiple ease-of-use improvements.  Coupled with Flash drives the system provide maximum performance and all of the feature benefits of a Symmetrix too.

And each makes the others more valuable.

Describing the Flash drive, EMC calls it "ultra performance".  Yes, that, and ultra-cascaded benefits too - not unexpected benefits on the part of the designers.

Now customers are getting some very nice surprises.

Lots of dolls.