Fastest storage ever

A new storage company has introduced the world's fastest storage. At ≈$100k a TB - 1,000x your SATA drive - even wealthy gamers will think twice. But if very little time is big money, this is for you.

$100k/TB?? Don't worry, you can spend more. Or less.

The system breaks the tight link between capacity and performance that disks and flash impose. There are performance nodes - I/O directors (IODs) - and data nodes (Dnodes).

The IODs use 8 Gb/sec Fibre Channel links to talk to app servers and 10Gig/Ethernet to talk to the Dnodes. The company says they can saturate both - unusual in enterprise storage.

Thanks to FC switches, each IOD can talk to multiple servers. Each IOD can handle 150,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS) and keep several servers busy.

The minimum config is 2 IODS and 4 Dnodes with 500 GB of capacity. That's 300,000 IOPS. They've been tested to 8 nodes and 1.2 million random read/write IOPS with tests of 16 nodes coming soon.

All in 1 or 2 19" racks.

The secret Obviously, they aren't using disk drives or flash (though they could) to achieve this performance. They're using ECC DRAM. Up to 288 GB per Dnode.

All the Dnodes have battery backup and 2 disks for de-staging data to persistent storage. Between the 2 you won't lose data. And DRAM, unlike flash, doesn't wear out.

The IODs are clustered so if 1 goes down the others can quickly pick up the load. The switched backend 10Gig Ethernet means all IODs can access all Dnodes.

Management With storage this fast you don't need to do much tuning. Lay your LUNs across the Dnodes and fasten your seatbelt. The software has some cute tricks, like pseudo-random block layout to minimize contention, automatic load balancing and block replication.

If your app calls for it you can tune chunk sizes and set replication policies over the dedicated management network. But all in all, not nearly the management hassle that most storage requires.

Who needs this? I don't. You neither. But if you are hammering a few TB of data for stock trading, real-time business intelligence or TLA government work, this could be just the ticket.

The Storage Bits take The current Big Storage vendors claim that they too can do a million IOPS. And they can, for $10 or $20 million - a price that makes DRAM look cheap.

Kaminario has opened a new niche: hyper-performance data storage. While a few TB doesn't sound like much, it is more text than all but the world's largest libraries place on miles of shelves.

The data arms race has kicked up another few notches.

Comments welcome, of course. I'll have a more detailed piece on StorageMojo later.