Xsigo (see-go) produces an I/O consolidation appliance whose elegance impresses.

I/O clutter
Typical blade servers have several I/O adapters for networks and storage. Today’s multi-CPU – each multi-core – mobo’s need much bandwidth to stay busy, thus 2-4 GigE or 10GigE network ports and 2 or more SAS or FC HBAs configs are common.

Each HBA/HCA eats slots and power, adds cost and makes I/O a pain to upgrade or replace. Xsigo offers an alternative.

Big cheap pipe
Built on 20 Gb/s DDR Infiniband, Xsigo replaces physical NICs and HBAs with virtual ones configured on the fly. Xsigo says that the Infiniband is not visible in daily operation.

They physical I/O is implemented in Xsigo’s I/O Director, a 15 slot box with 24 non-blocking DDR Iband ports for server connection. The slots support your choice of single-port 10GigE, dual-port 4 Gbit FC or 10-port GigE I/O modules.

Each 10GigE module supports up to 128 vNICs. The FC module supports 128 vHBAs. And the GigE module can support 160 vNICs.

Xsigo says you can do most anything with the v-adapters that you can do with the real thing: jumbo frames; LUN masking; link aggregation; VLANs; SAN boot; and QOS features like committed information rates.

Here’s the cool part: the v-adapter addresses can dynamically migrate with a specific VM. Big improvement over the default VM-only migration.

The StorageMojo take
Good to see Iband used as a big cheap pipe. Its low latency, cheap switch ports and high bandwidth make it the best choice for this application.

VMware and Hyper-V have serious I/O problems. Xsigo helps manage them.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Xsigo was one of 10 or so sponsors that brought me and 15 other bloggers to Silicon Valley last week. They probably have some competition, but I couldn’t find them by Googling. Let me know who they are.

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Update: All -I think – the links have have been reset using a fresh batch of WordPress grout. If any still don’t work please let me know. End update.

I’m told that the StorageMojo price lists are down because the pages were switched to permalinks.

I didn’t knowingly do that. Once I’m back in the office tomorrow I’ll see about fixing it.

Welcome help from anyone who knows WordPress.

Robin

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Spending the week in Silicon Valley catching up on storage progress. Short takes:

• Hyper-V storage virtualization. Software now in beta that dramatically increases the Microsoft virtualization layer’s storage chops: cheap snapshots; high-performance I/O with multiple VMs; and an almost invisible UI. Snaps into the management bus as a standard VHD with a map magic smart driver behind it.
• A NAS test appliance that replaces a lab full of equipment with a single server box that can generate millions of NFS connections and drive GB of traffic. CIFS too. Swifttest.
• Update from Parascale: some vlarge customers seeing compelling economic benefit from an internal scale-out file storage utility. Time is ripe.
• Quick intro to FOSS NAS – NFS, CIFS, HTTP, WebDAV & more – company Gluster. Metadata server is an architectural problem – so lose it! Want/need a deep dive on this.
• Rapid growth at Nexenta with their ZFS-based storage server.
• An informed observer posits that ZFS on Mac may not be dead – if Oracle’s acquisition of Sun goes through in the not-too-distant-future. See = believe.

And there’s more
Today the event I came to town for starts with briefings from several firms and a reception at one of my favorite places, the Computer Museum. Looking forward to visiting PARC and briefings from VMware, Xsigo, MDS Micro, 3PAR, Symantec (Veritas), Ocarina, Nirvanix and Data Robotics.

The StorageMojo take
Storage is not, historically, a fast moving market. But I’m seeing more action today than in years.

And that’s good for customers and the industry.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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A recent post on the dumb disk fallacy argues that enterprise storage isn’t overpriced. That misses the point: enterprise arrays may not be overpriced – but they overshoot most market requirements.

That’s why there’s so much innovation in the high capacity/low cost end of the market. And why high-end monolithic arrays are the mainframes of tomorrow.

Background
Disk drives are only 5-10% of an array’s cost. Since dual-parity arrays protect against 2 drive failure/read errors, the logical question is “why not just replicate the data 3x for 15-30% of the array’s cost and get better protection?”

Comparing bare drive costs to array costs isn’t realistic. Power supplies, chassis, cabinets, processors, interfaces and firmware all cost money.

Servers have it all
Which is why I prefer to look at server costs – especially servers with lots of disk slots. Like a Supermicro Superchassis 846E1-R710B 4U 24-bay storage server.

For $5500 you get:

• A 4U storage 24-drive chassis w/ redundant power & cooling, 2 GigE ports
• Mobo with dual quad-core Xeon 2.5 GHz processors and 16 GB ECC RAM
• 24 1 TB 7200 rpm SATA drives
• Dual 12 channel PCIx RAID cards
• Support for 15k SAS drives if desired

Update: Some folks asked where that pricing came from. It is from Priority Computer & Networks. I have no experience with them, but I like the nifty online configurator. End update.

The drives are 40% of the configuration’s cost. And I’m sure you could do better. Throw Linux or OpenSolaris storage stacks on the box for free, or, for example, Nexenta’s Enterprise Gold Edition for another $4k and you’ve got a nifty NAS/iSCSI array.

Buy several and layer HP’s IBRIX or ParaScale software on them and you’ve got a scalable file cluster with redundancy and performance for way less than monolithic enterprise arrays. Or even mid-range modular arrays.

When are enterprise arrays better?
Enterprise arrays aren’t designed to compete with Supermicro boxes and FOSS. They offer benefits way beyond commodity-based storage – but at a price.

• Performance. Big redundant write caches are perfect for transactional apps – but the corner cases make engineering them a nightmare.
• Scale-up architectures. Embedded switches, star networks, high-performance FPGA controllers, FC and Infiniband – all the hot-rod, go-fast, low-volume tech give big arrays a scale-up capability that enterprise IT likes – until its gone.
• Bullet-proof hardware and software. Years of tweaks to the exception-handling and careful drive qual and firmware control makes these systems more reliable.
• Layered software. Database and email backup, LAN and WAN replication and all the other options give enterprise IT a warm feeling and operational flexibility.

So what’s the problem?
On the Supermicro the storage is $0.50/GB, while on the enterprise array it’s $5 GB or more. And enterprises can’t afford that for everything.

As intuition suggests and recent research confirms data is getting cooler. We store more and more and access it less and less.

Translation: we need cheap capacity, not high performance. And as Google proved years ago, just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it is slow.

The StorageMojo take
I don’t know if enterprise arrays are “overpriced” – if people buy ‘em, how bad can they be? – but I am confident that they overshoot the performance requirements of most applications by a wide margin. And that performance is very expensive.

But enterprise IT learned long ago that it is better to be overconfigured than to be caught short. And in good times who cares?

But times aren’t good and despite the Q3 numbers we haven’t seen the end of the Great Recession. The good old days aren’t coming back.

The point behind comparing array prices to dumb disks is to remind people that there might be a better way to achieve their goals than spending $4.75 per GB on performance that most of their data doesn’t need.

If it is redundancy you’re after there are better alternatives than RAID 6. With the arrival next year of pNFS and the commoditization of 10GigE we have many more options for high performance at a low cost per GB than ever before.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. I once worked for Sun and have done work for IBRIX and Parascale.

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I have some openings Tuesday and Wednesday – 10th , 11th – for folks who’d like to engage.

Let me know in the comments or at my email.

Thanks!

Update: my schedule is full. Watch this space for future travel info.

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It gushes money
Gartner’s business model is genius. They gather information from vendors and users – for large fees from both – and then sell that information back to them for even more money. Bliss.

They own a toll booth on the user/vendor information highway. And collect $1.3 billion a year from the traffic – over $300,000 per employee. Drool.

But the best is the Magic Quadrant, Gartner’s money-spinning qualitative graphic. You’ve seen it, but here’s a blank version.

The “magic” is how it gets tech execs leaping, like spawning salmon, for the upper right corner.

The little engine that couldn’t
Everyone toes Gartner’s line. Until now.

Beth Pariseau posted on ZL Technologies’ suit against Gartner . ZLT hopes to force Gartner to provide:

• Fair Disclosure on Conflicts of Interest – Gartner generates its revenues from payments made by the same vendors whose products it evaluates. Similar to the new rules now being imposed on financial ratings agencies on Wall Street, Gartner should be required to disclose the revenues received from the vendors it ranks.
• Fair Disclosure on Evaluation Scores – The tech industry would benefit if Gartner were required to disclose more data in its evaluation process and disclose component scores so vendors know exactly where they are lacking and by how much and take corrective action. Currently, there is zero disclosure, which can lead to arbitrary placement, with no recourse and no basis for appeal.
• Better Oversight – Gartner currently has an employee act as ombudsman to handle disagreements. The conflict of interest is self-evident in the way ZL’s concerns were summarily dismissed with little supporting evidence. There is a crying need to establish an impartial ombudsman similar to those found in public media, in order to ensure purchasers that they are receiving impartial analysis.

Sour grapes?
In its court filings ZLT talks about the harm it suffers caused by customer reliance on the MQ. I’m not surprised.

As Geoffrey Moore noted in Inside the Tornado IT managers are herd animals. They know there is safety in numbers – in keeping their jobs and getting problems solved – so they like to stick together.

The power of the MQ is that it captures this mentality and gives it a graphic form that comforts even the most technophobic CFO/CEO in a few seconds. IT may not have the foggiest notion about the firm’s 5 year requirements or what implementation will entail, but by going with the big guy they have an alibi and an escape plan all in one.

MQ criteria
Gartner’s lumps all the MQ verbiage under 2 headings:

• Ability to execute
• Completeness of vision

Ability to execute
Ability to execute favors the large. If you’ve got 5,000 engineers and free cash flow you can, eventually, execute anything. Never mind that a team with 10 smart engineers and a clear vision will move faster and smarter to solve a particular problem: tiny CDC built the first supercomputer, not IBM.

Many of the criteria explicitly favor size: global presence in large markets; “viability;” market share; marketing and sales to drive acceptance; and more. You’re a smaller company? Tough. It’s Gartner’s quadrant and you may not live in it.

Completeness of vision
The large company bias here is the way markets are defined. For example, the mid to high-end NAS MQ excludes vendors whose focus, today, is not “primary file systems storage, instead of storage that narrowly targets backup or archive data.”

But the available research finds that most enterprise files are created and accessed only a few times. What then is the difference between “primary” and “archive” storage? Shouldn’t Gartner raise their enterprise customer’s awareness of this and other file storage issues?

Gartner analysts read the research. Why doesn’t the MQ reflect the best information in major use cases, instead of reinforcing popular prejudice? Doesn’t Moore’s Law steadily move the bar upward for what “narrowly” focused systems can do?

Mid to high-end NAS that includes both scale-up and scale-out – as Gartner’s market definition does – is lumping 2 very different markets together and blurring the distinctions. Rather than accepting vendor market definitions, Gartner analysts should be in the forefront of defining new market segments.

For $100,000+ per year a CIO should expect no less.

The StorageMojo take
The Magic Quadrant has the analytical rigor of a beauty contest. Implicit and explicit assumptions about customers, markets, technologies, use cases and suppliers obscures more than it reveals. The MQ seeks to rank vendors not only by what their products do, but by what Gartner presumes an enterprise customer should want. They presume too much.

Marketers often disagree about what constitutes a “product:” is it the widget itself; the widget + services; or the widget + services + ?? In truth, customer perception of what constitutes a product changes with time and experience. But Gartner is stuck: if someone has a better widget – as ZLT says it does – there is no way that the MQ will tell you that.

Enterprise IT staffs abhor change, so Gartner could argue they are meeting customer needs by rigging the MQ to favor incumbents. But the current crisis and the need for greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness means decision makers need better data and informed opinion.

If ZLT, for example, can search archived emails 1,000x faster than Symantec – as they claim – then Gartner should disclose that for the customers for whom performance is important. Get feedback from actual customers – what Gartner does today – about ZLT and pass it on. Don’t just ding them because they’re small.

Customers aren’t idiots; they can see that a company isn’t very big. What they don’t know is how well their products work.

Gartner needs to start earning that $1.3 billion, not just collecting it. If the FTC can require lowly bloggers to report vendor freebies and payments, perhaps the day isn’t far off when mighty IT consulting shops will have to do likewise. Kudos to ZLT for noting the emperor’s scanty attire.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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Ding, dong.
PC file system progress took a giant step back this week with the news on MacOSforge that Apple’s ZFS project has been discontinued.

ZFS Project Shutdown 2009-10-23
The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

Apple announced in June ‘08 that Snow Leopard server would support ZFS. But things came apart early this year.

What happened?
Jeff Bonwick, ZFS architect, posted Saturday on an earlier quoted comment:

> Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it
> (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a “private
> license” from Sun (with appropriate technical support and
> indemnification), and the two entities couldn’t come to mutually
> agreeable terms.

I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.

Jeff

Indemnification?
Sun is being sued by NetApp claiming that ZFS infringes on NetApp patents. If NetApp won, Apple would find itself in a tough position unless Sun shouldered the financial damage. That’s indemnification.

IMHO Sun has a good case that NetApp’s patents will be invalidated by prior art. But with all their other problems and the Oracle purchase it was a headache they, Oracle and Apple didn’t need.

Where does Apple go from here?
Apple has hired some smart file system engineers and wants to hire more to work on “state-of-the-art file system technologies for Mac OS X.”

I’m not convinced: it sounds like standard HR boilerplate and a snare for the unwary. But hey! it could happen.

But writing new file systems isn’t easy. It takes 5-7 years for a new file system to achieve the maturity needed to support large-scale deployment. Even replacing QuickTime is non-trivial.

So if Apple is starting from scratch we have a long wait for real innovation to appear. Like Mac OS XII.

What about Microsoft?
Meanwhile Redmond’s file system gurus are well aware of NTFS issues. They’re making stepwise enhancements.

But as the NTFS and HFS+ architectures age and the pace of storage innovation increases the gap between what is and what could be grows. It’s like putting a 1001 hp Bugatti engine in a Model T: the power is there but you can’t use it.

The StorageMojo take
I already hate software patents – but that’s another post. As long as law allows companies will try to enforce them.

Why didn’t Apple cut a deal with NetApp directly? Probably for the same reason Sun didn’t: money. Apple has a lot more of it than Sun, but Steve is a tightwad, especially when it comes to storage.

NetApp could have raised their visibility in the consumer market by cutting a deal with Apple, but NetApp’s management isn’t thinking strategically about the low-end of the market, as the rapidity of StoreVault’s entrance and exit demonstrated. True, they have bigger issues, but multi-tasking is supposed to be a corporate strength.

Consumers are generating masses of video and photos at an accelerating pace – and they’ll need reliable, available and dirt-easy storage. Lots of it.

Let EMC supply it!

Until the Next New Thing in file systems rolls out of Cupertino, Redmond or, maybe, Redwood City, consumers will stuck with too many BSODs, missing or corrupted files and app crashes. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait too many more years.

Comments welcome, of course. An earlier version of this was posted on Storage Bits. Can you spot the dozen or so differences?

And there is a Google code page for MacZFS for you diehards out there.

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Spent 3 days at fall ‘09 SNW. Given the economy my expectations were low.

The good news: it was active. The better news: the pace of innovation across storage is accelerating, despite the economy and the drop in VC funding.

Make that perhaps because of the drop in VC funding. Veterans of prior startups have self-funding and the chops to prototype and market-test without VC “help.”

Fewer vendor staff – more customer interaction
Vendors brought fewer people – a good thing. Too often SNW booths are reunions of industry veterans leaving customers on the outside looking in.

They breakout sessions I saw were near full to SRO. Much content on SSD’s, cloud storage de-duplication, backup/archive and more.

The biggest disappointment was the Cisco UCS presentation. The Cisco NDAs must be dynamite because the public information isn’t.

New companies and products
Dataram was there with their new flash FC caching appliance, the XcelaSAN (pdf). They should’ve been included in the Hot data, smart cache post.

Avere Systems made its first public appearance with the results of their SPEC 2008 NFS benchmark. The six node configuration using 79 disks achieved a record-setting combination of more than 131,000 operations per second throughput with a latency of 1.38 ms overall response time. The other SPEC08 benchmark leaders use 10 times as many disks and sometimes multiple filesystems to achieve competitive results.

Zetta was talking about their new cloud-based NAS platform. The architecture impresses. Starting at $0.25/GB/Month with a highly-redundant platform and open NAS interfaces, they are well-positioned to compete with standard NAS boxes for general purpose file storage.

Simply Continuous is focused on the backup/disaster recovery market and offers a cloud backup to Data Domain dedupe boxes.

In addition, 3 stealth mode companies said hello. We should hear more from them by early next year. And they weren’t all cloud either.

The StorageMojo take
SNIA and ComputerWorld squeezed a lot of cost – the shirts, live music, bags and the like – out of SNW, but none of the value. SNW is still the place to go for the latest in commercial storage information and education.

The Great Recession is forcing many organizations to look beyond what has worked towards what could work. Thanks to the rise of new architectures intelligent storage decisions are rewarded with greater savings and more operational flexibility than at any time in the past.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. No disclosures to make, darn it, but it was nice to be able to drive to SNW this time.

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These requests came in over the transom in the last couple of days. Maybe some StorageMojo readers have wisdom to share.

I have a question I hope you can help me with. My boss asked me . . . to research HP Left-hand SANs and Dell Equallogic SANs. Do you have any special knowledge of these products and, if so, would you make an informal recommendation?

What say you, StorageMojo readers? If you evaluated both, why did you make the choice you did? Vendors welcome to comment, but please identify yourself as such.

The StorageMojo take
AFAIK, both products are good iSCSI systems. Both are backed by major corporations. EqualLogic may be stronger in the channel today, but HP has channel chops as well. HP’s blade servers may be a more expandable platform, but EqualLogic’s software portfolio may be more affordable.

Translation: you could do worse than either of these.

Part II
Another customer perplexity: service.

We have a pair of HP disk arrays, EVA 8000 and 6000 and I am looking for a consultant to help up with storage planning. Do you do such work or could you recommend someone to me. I am looking for someone who goes beyond just being a seller, I have plenty of potential sellers already.

The writer is in a small city in the Mountain West, so you should be used to working remotely with clients. No, not in Arizona.

The StorageMojo take
HP folks may be wondering: why doesn’t he call HP? My guess: not big enough for a direct engagement.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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Sun announced the, or removed from stealth mode, the F5100, their flash-based storage array that uses SO-DIMM form-factor flash modules (see last month’s post for the StorageMojo take on the unannounced product). With 20 flash modules and 480 GB of capacity it starts at $50k, which means for big customers it will be less than $40k.

The box supports 64 SAS connections, zones, up to 1.9 TB of capacity and up to 9.7 GB/s sequential write bandwidth. Here’s the official Sun web page. Joerg Moellenkamp has a good short writeup as well. (Thanks, David!)

Here’s a picture:

The StorageMojo take
A shareable flash resource at $100/GB list should be popular. It should also get more data center guys thinking about power per IOP instead of just performance.

Another shot across the bow of the big iron storage flotilla and a nifty advance. Good luck to them.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Would a project name like “The Beast” have upped the sex appeal?

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TDK recently demo’d an impressive technical achievement: a 10 layer optical disk with 320 GB capacity – using standard Blu-ray (BD) drive technology. Each layer has better than 90% light transmission and writing required no more than 20 mW of the 30 mW Blu-ray spec.

Too bad it will never be a commercial success. Optical is at the end of the line.

When do formats die?
When their combination of reliability, capacity, performance, density and cost aren’t competitive. Which is where optical is now – even 320 GB optical.

Some of you may remember punched paper tape – hot in the 60s and early 70s – and popular on 16 bit minicomputers back when 4k of RAM was respectable and 64k unaffordable. It was limited to a few dozen KB of capacity and unreliable in long-term use, so when 240KB 8” floppies arrived in 1973 paper tape was toast.

Floppies had to improve to compete with removable disk pack drives – like DEC’s RK05 family – with their 2 MB capacity and a screaming 150 KB/sec transfer rate, and floppies did by increasing capacity – what TDK demonstrated – and decreasing size, from 8” to 5.25” to 3.5”, and cost from over a thousand dollars for a drive to less than $20.

But floppies couldn’t keep up with the growing size of applications and data sets. The 100 MB Zip drive was insanely popular when introduced in 1994 – a woman offered me a $100 premium on the spot to buy mine at a Palo Alto sushi bar – but by 1999 the format was on the way out thanks to cheaper and more capacious CD-R drives.

Despite heroic efforts to increase removable magnetic disk capacities – culminating in 2001 with the 5.7 GB Orb drive – removable magnetic disk media is dead, killed by cheaper optical and more convenient flash media.

Removable: backup and transfer
Removable media has 2 major use cases: data backup and data transfer. Tape dominates removable media backup today with capacities rivaling the largest disks.

Thumb drives long ago replaced floppies for smaller file transfers – “sneakernet” – with external hard drives handling large capacities. With 1 TB 2.5” hard drives, even a writeable 50 GB Blu-ray (BD-R) can’t compete with a small hard drive in transfer speed or capacity.

TDK’s problem
Which gets us to the 10x Blu-ray problem: even if it were commercialized there would be no market. Why?

• Capacity. Successful optical media capacities have been competitive with current disks – CD-ROM in the early 90s; DVD-R in the early 2000s. Multi-layer Blu-ray will never be more than a small fraction of hard drive capacities.
• Performance. 24x Blu-ray transfer rates are half that of today’s disks. And as capacities increase, disks get faster. Not so with Blu-ray.
• Reliability. Early adopters report that BD burner disks often don’t play on many commercial players. That will get fixed someday, but multi-layer DB-R will have to solve it again.
• Density. Managing a single piece of media is much simpler than managing 6 or 10. External hard drive density makes them much more convenient.
• Cost. BD-playing DVD drives haven’t been popular on PCs, and BD burners are way more expensive, as is the media. A FireWire or USB 2 or 3 hard drive can be had for less than $100, has much faster access times, higher capacity and faster data transfer. With volume BD-R costs will come down – but where will the volume come from?

Multi-layer BD-R has advantages, especially if current BD players can be updated to use it. But there is no commercial justification for distributing content on 320 GB optical disks and there isn’t likely to be one.

Hollywood has a real chance to make 3D work this time, but 3D HD movies will fit fine on BD. Put a 3D “Band of Brothers” on a single disk? OK, but really, getting up every 50 minutes to change disks isn’t so hard, is it?

The Storage Bits take
New optical formats will get introduced – like 750 MB Zip drives and 5.7 GB Orb drives – but they’ll stumble around the fringes of consumer acceptance before a quiet death off stage. Many of the same forces that are killing BD – downloading, upconverting, cost – are closing in on optical media in general.

DVDs will be around for years – even as CDs still are – but the focus is shifting to online storage and local disks. The industry still hasn’t cracked the code on massive home disk storage, but that day is coming.

You’ll buy HD 3D content online, download it, store it in your digital library, and watch it when and where you want. If your house burns down your content suppliers will let you download again. Who needs the hassle to burn disks?

The one remaining piece is for hard drive vendors to get serious about building archive-quality hard disks. I love their technology, but they aren’t the most forward looking group.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Anyone interested in buying a vintage USB Zip drive?

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Analog virtual, not Second Life virtual
StorageMojo is off to Storage Networking World in Phoenix, a mere 2 hour drive away. Our unfolding economic depression may be keeping many of you at home. Too bad: Phoenix is lovely this time of year.

Got a vendor question?
StorageMojo will be meeting with a number of vendors. Take a look at the list and then tell me what you’d like to ask them.

The companies currently scheduled include:

• QLogic
• HP
• Intel
• Whiptail
• Xiotech
• Zetta
• Texas Memory Systems
• Quantum
• Sepaton
• Simply Continuous

I’d also like to meet with Avere, but that isn’t scheduled. Other companies may pop up too.

Ask the questions in the comments or, if you’d prefer, email me.

The StorageMojo take
I won’t be blogging from the show – I’m going notebook-less and relying on an iPhone for IT support. Not sure how well that will work.

But I will write about the conference and what I learn. If you’re there, feel free to say hello. I still look a lot like my picture.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

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A 2½ year study of DRAM on 10s of thousands Google servers found DIMM error rates are hundreds to thousands of times higher than thought — a mean of 3,751 correctable errors per DIMM per year. Another piece of hallowed Conventional Wisdom bites the dust.

Google and Prof. Bianca Schroeder teamed up on the world’s first large-scale study of RAM errors in the field. They looked at multiple vendors, DRAM densities and DRAM types including DDR1, DDR2 and FB-DIMM.

Every system architect and motherboard designer should read it. And I agree with James Hamilton’s suspicion that even clients need ECC – at least heavily used clients.

If you can’t trust DRAM . . .
Here are some hard numbers from DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study by Bianca Schroeder, U of Toronto, and Eduardo Pinheiro and Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Google.

What you don’t know can hurt you
Most DIMMs don’t include ECC because it costs more. Without ECC the system doesn’t know a memory error has occurred.

Which is part of the reason people aren’t more concerned. Ignorance is bliss.

Everything is fine until a memory error means a missed memory reference or a flipped bit in file metadata writing to disk. What you see is a “file not found” or a “file not readable” message, silent data corruption – or even a system crash. And nothing that says “memory error.”

Conventional Wisdom
The industry take on DRAM is summed in a quote from an old AnandTech FAQ that took the industry at its word:

Everyone can agree that hard errors are fairly rare. . . . For the frequency of soft errors. . . . IBM stated . . . that at sea level, a soft error event occurs once per month of constant use in a 128MB PC100 SDRAM module. Micron has stated that it is closer to once per six months . . . .

An even bigger surprise: it appears that hard errors, not soft errors, are the dominant error mode – the reverse of the conventional wisdom. This conclusion isn’t solid – the study’s data set didn’t distinguish between hard and soft errors – but the circumstantial evidence is suggestive. There may be a another study coming that uses error address data to distinguish hard and soft errors.

Issues
The paper has a few issues that make it difficult to understand. One issue is the use of the chip industry’s Failure In Time (FIT) metric.

One FIT = one failure per billion hours per mbit.

Confused? Me too. Taken at face value, FIT suggests that a 2 GB DIMM – 16,000 Mbit – has 16x the errors of a 128 MB DIMM.

But that isn’t what the study found: higher density DRAM doesn’t have more errors per DIMM. The FIT metric is most useful for comparing with earlier studies.

Good news
The study had some good news:

• Temperature plays little role in errors – just as Google found with disk drives – so heroic cooling isn’t necessary. Good news for data center air economizer architectures.
• Density isn’t a problem. The latest, most dense generations of DRAM perform as well, error wise, as previous generations.
• Heavily used systems have more errors.
• No significant differences between vendors or DIMM types (DDR1, DDR2 or FB-DIMM). You can buy on price – at least for ECC DIMMS.
• Only 8% of DIMMs had errors per year on average. Fewer DIMMs = fewer error problems – good news for users of smaller systems. Bad news for large-memory servers running in-memory databases.

Bad news
Besides error rates much higher than expected – which is plenty bad – the study found that error rates were motherboard, not DIMM type or vendor, dependent. Some popular mobos must have poor EMI hygiene.

Route a memory traces too close to noisy components or shirk on grounding layers and instant error problems. Design or manufacturing problems in motherboards? The study did not do a root cause analysis.

Hardware failures are much more common as well and may be the most common type of memory failure. Google replaces all DIMMs with hard errors – as do most data centers – as a matter of policy.

The server error reporting could not always differentiate between hard and soft errors. Hard errors are discovered through memory tests run on off-line servers.

Other interesting findings
For all platforms they found that 20% of the machines with errors make up more than 90% of all observed errors on that platform. There be lemons out there!

In more than 93% of the cases a machine that sees a correctable error experiences at least one more in the same year. They don’t get better by themselves.

High quality error correction codes are effective in reducing uncorrectable errors. There are “chip-kill” DIMM/mobo combinations that can detect and correct 4 bit errors, but few vendors offer those. Kingston and Corsair don’t.

Besides costing more, ECC DIMMs are about 3-5% slower than unprotected DIMMs. Few of us would ever notice that small a performance hit, but gamers might care.

HPC users might care too, for a different reason. James Hamilton noted a talk by Kathy Yelick – she doesn’t keep her web site updated – where she found that ECC recovery times are substantial and the correction latency slows the computation.

The StorageMojo take
You’d think that after several decades of semiconductor DRAM usage that this study would be old news. I did.

Like most folks I accepted industry assurances that DRAM is reliable. My main machine – a Mac Pro with an Intel server-class mobo – has FB-DIMMs whose 5-watt-per-DIMM overhead has irritated me. But when I found one DIMM reporting errors recently I felt better about it.

I suspect this is another example of the industry’s code of omerta. System vendors have scads of data on disk drives, DRAM, network adapters, OS and filesystem based on mortality and tech support calls, but do they share this with the consuming public? Nothing to see here folks, just move along.

Kudos to Google for doing the long-term research required for substantive results and then sharing those results with the rest of us. I expect ECC systems will become a lot more popular in the years ahead.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Note: Much of this was published on ZDnet Sunday night. This version is updated after speaking to Prof. Schroeder Wednesday. This version also dispenses with some consumer-oriented content.

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Finally, SNW is back in Phoenix, an easy 2 hour drive from the mountains of northern Arizona.

I’m looking to meet with as many companies as possible, as well as touring the show floor, shooting some video and maybe – maybe – doing some podcasts.

It looks like several interesting new companies are attending and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s new from the incumbents. Phoenix is nice in October – more reliable than Florida – and the room rates are low.

Always happy to meet StorageMojo readers as well.

See you there.

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