NexGen boss: If solid hardness isn't stuck into PCIe - forget it

Is your storage gear highly available?

El Reg: Should storage arrays manage server SSD as cache? Should they manage it as a tier?

John Spiers: Whether it’s managed as a tier or a cache, HA becomes a concern. If the server fails over to another physical server it could cause data inconsistency on the storage because data in a tier or cache is now missing, unless it’s a read-only cache.

In order for the storage system to control the server SSD as a tier, you have to introduce software overhead on the server, and then the reliability of the server-storage combination can vary because it may not be designed to work together. Centralizing the solid state resource provides higher utilization, simplified management and lower overall cost. These are the same benefits that drove the storage industry to invent SAN/NAS systems in the first place.

We don’t see any reason why this dynamic would change for solid state, the exception being those applications that cannot deal with the additional latency that a network imposes on performance.

El Reg: If Nexgen Storage adds a PCIe interface to accessing servers how will it avoid competing with Fusion-io?

John Spiers: We are partners with Fusion-io. Today they sell Fusion-io DAS and many of their customers ask for “shared Fusion” and that’s where we come in. It’s a new market for them.

El Reg: How will Nexgen Storage position its products against pure flash array startups such as Pure Storage and SolidFire?

John Spiers: We’ve designed our system from the ground up to provide the ability to manage and control performance in a shared storage environment. The ability to set QoS and guarantee performance in addition to prioritizing application performance in degraded mode scenarios is critical for success in the midmarket.

In addition, we’re selling systems today, and today, disk is less expensive than solid state/flash capacity. NexGen dedupes all tiers, so as long as disk is the lowest $/GB and pure solid state/flash systems don’t leverage that cost advantage, we deliver more value with our storage system.

Pure and Solidfire seem to be focused on the highest performance applications for the high-end enterprise and service providers - and they may struggle with I/O bottlenecks from having SSD behind a legacy disk controller as opposed to PCIe based solid state.

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Conclusion

Should we assume that the n5 goes faster than HP's P4000? Until we see some numbers we can't be sure, but the dedupe, flash, and performance features should see the n5 outgunning the P4000, Dell's EqualLogic and the EMC VNX and NetApp FAS arrays in iSCSI form.

There's a glorious competitive battle is warming up in storage as flash, and how you use it, move to centre stage. Once again the mainstream incumbents are facing a rash of startups eager to show they have better, cheaper faster technology than them. NexGen's hat is in the ring and it's ready to force the pace. ®