Storage Unpacked 245 – Design Strategies for 300TB Flash Drives with Shawn Rosemarin from Pure Storage (Sponsored)

Storage Unpacked Podcast

English - May 12, 2023 11:00 - 46 minutes - 63.6 MB - ★★★★★ - 21 ratings
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Previous Episode: Storage Unpacked 244 – Unpacking GreenLake for File Storage with HPE and VAST Data (Sponsored)

Next Episode: Storage Unpacked 246 – The Next Era of Serverless Technology with Matt Butcher from Fermyon

In this episode, Chris talks to Shawn Rosemarin (VP, R&D, Customer Engineering) from Pure Storage about the evolution towards 300TB direct flash modules, the custom-designed SSDs used in FlashArray and FlashBlade. Pure Storage has stated an intention to deliver 300TB modules by 2026. With only three years to achieve that goal, how will the company move from today’s 52TB maximum capacity to 6x the amount of storage in a similar footprint?

There are two key technologies at play here. Firstly, Pure Storage designs and manufactures custom SSDs (DFMs) rather than use commodity devices. This approach offers much greater control over the operation of NAND and other aspects such as DRAM usage and power draw. Second is the use of Purity, the Flash platform operating system, which directly controls the placement of data across NAND.

As DFM flash capacities continue to grow over the next three years, the difference between future HDDs and commodity SSDs will widen. Pure Storage hopes the ability to drastically increase capacity in the same footprint will offer customers a way to cope with environmental costs, the cost of data centre space and meet the increasing storage demands of technologies such as AI.

Here are links to the “better science” blog posts mentioned in the discussion:

https://blog.purestorage.com/products/better-science-volume-1-hardware-and-software-co-design-with-directflash/
https://blog.purestorage.com/perspectives/better-science-volume-2-maps-metadata-and-the-pyramid/

Here’s the link to our Pure Storage Microsite.

Elapsed Time: 00:46:18

Timeline

00:00:00 – Intros
00:02:20 – Pure intends to reach 300TB DFMs by 2026
00:03:40 – Why do we not have all-flash data centres?
00:05:50 – Enterprise drives developed from consumer NAND usage
00:06:35 – HDDs are 67 years old
00:08:40 – 100TB HDDs by 2030?
00:09:25 – HDD and SSD device capacity is diverging
00:11:00 – Environmental aspects will affect adoption – such as power
00:12:10 – Data centre growth is being restricted by power availability
00:13:50 – there’s also an ESG aspect, what do businesses need to do?
00:15:50 – How will Pure Storage get to 300TB drives?
00:18:00 – Exploiting NAND efficiently is challenging to deliver
00:22:15 – Firmware on standard drives is rarely (if ever updated)
00:23:10 – Pure Storage can dynamically amend flash management algorithms
00:24:25 – DRAM is used to obfuscate issues with flash management
00:25:35 – Purity uses 1/40th of the amount of DRAM compared to standard SSDs
00:27:40 – QLC NAND is progressively harder to manage than previous generations
00:30:05 – How will reliability be managed at 300TB per drive?
00:31:35 – How repairable are current (and future) SSDs?
00:33:50 – As the biggest consumers of HDDs, how will the public cloud become all-flash?
00:36:40 – The public cloud will move towards managing raw NAND
00:38:12 – As divergence in capacity continues, businesses are creating greater technical debt
00:41:10 – Traditional SSDs will still not keep up with DFMs
00:43:30 – Pure Storage will reach 300TB in product release steps
00:44:40 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

The following podcasts and blogs are related to this podcast content.

Storage Unpacked 243 – Introducing FlashBlade//E
#234 – Introducing Pure Storage FlashBlade//S and Evergreen//Flex with CTO Rob Lee
#232 – Building Power-Efficient Storage Systems with Justin Emerson from Pure Storage
Pure Storage Announces FlashBlade//E
Pure Storage Announces FlashBlade//S
Dude, Here’s Your 300TB Flash Drive!