Competitors who lack the engineering capability to design their own flash devices use standard SSDs that were designed for the high volume commodity PC and server markets. These competitors are trying to create FUD around our purpose built enterprise flash module, FMD, claiming that the offload process causes significant backplane issues and the loss of an FMD would impact performance and cause other issues due to the design of our offering. This is utter nonsense and comes under the category of “fake news”
Hitachi has taken a very different approach to flash storage devices. Unlike other flash array vendors that use standard SSD’s, Hitachi has built their own flash module (FMD) from scratch to integrate the best available flash technology into the storage portfolio. While Hitachi does support SSDs, they recognized the opportunity to deliver higher capacity flash drives with advanced performance, resiliency, and offload capabilities beyond what SSDs provide by developing our own flash device, the FMD.
Industry Analyst, George Crump, stated in one of his blogs: "With flash memory becoming the standard in enterprise SSD systems, users need to look more closely at the flash controller architectures of these products as a way to evaluate them. The flash controller manages a number of functions specific to this technology that are central to data integrity and overall read/write operations. Aside from system reliability, poor controller design can impact throughput, latency and IOPS more than any other system component. Given the importance of performance to SSD systems, flash controller functionality should be a primary focus when comparing different manufacturers’ systems"
Gartner’s August 2016 report (ID G00299673) on Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays recognized this as a trend “To gain increased density and performance, an increasing number of vendors (e.g., Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Pure Storage and Violin Memory) have created their own flash NAND boards, instead of using industry-standard solid-state drives (SSDs). Dedicated hardware engineering has reappeared as a differentiator to industry-standard components, moving away from the previous decade's trend of compressed differentiation”. Hitachi Data Systems started this trend in 2012 with the announcement of our first FMD.
Competitors who lack the engineering capability to design their own flash devices use standard SSDs that were designed for the high volume commodity PC and server markets. These competitors are trying to fight this trend by creating FUD around our FMD, claiming that the offload process causes significant backplane issues and the loss of an FMD would impact performance and cause other issues due to the design of our offering. This is utter nonsense and comes under the category of “fake news”
In the first place, the only function that is off loaded from the storage controller to the FMD is data compression which is handled by two coprocessors in the FMD and has no impact on performance. Compare this to the software overhead of doing the compression/decompression for selected SSDs in the storage array controller versus doing this in hardware in the FMD. Because of the performance impact of doing compression in the storage array controllers, storage administrators have the added task of managing the use of compression. With the FMD you can turn on the compression and forget it. Aside from the reporting of audit log and normal usage information, there is no significant side band communication between the Hitachi VSP storage controller and the FMDs so the claim that the offload process causes significant backplane issues is completely false.
The management of a flash device is very compute and bandwidth intensive. SSDs rely on a controller to manage the performance, resilience and durability of the flash device. As the I/O activity increases, these functions cause controller bottlenecks, sporadic response times, and a poor customer experience, causing IT organizations increasing work in managing the tradeoffs between workloads and data placement on different SSDs. We have published a white paper that explains the technology, and the pitfalls of trying to do this with the limited architecture and compute power of standard SSDs. You can down load this white paper via this link.
The brains of the FMD is a custom-designed ASIC featuring a quad core processor, 32 parallel paths to the flash memory, and 8 lanes of PCIe v2.0 connection to the external SAS target mode controllers. This ASIC is composed of more than 60 million gates, two coprocessors for compression and decompression, and direct memory access (DMA) assist. The ASIC compute power drives up to eight times more channels and 16 times more NAND packages than typical 2.5 inch SSDs. This powerful ASIC enables the FMD to avoid the limited capabilities of the standard SSD controllers, which restricts the amount of flash that an SSD drive can manage and forces the flash array controller and storage administrator to do more management in the placement of data on SSD drives. The FMD ASIC enables Hitachi Data Systems to deliver capacities of up to 14 TB in one FMD today.
Unlike standard SSDs, the FMD was purpose built for enterprise storage workloads. It was specifically designed to address intensive large-block random write I/O and streams of sequential write requests from applications such as software as a service, large scale transaction processing, online transaction processing (OLTP) databases, and online analytic processing(OLAP). It also understands that storage array controllers format drives by writing zeros, so the FMD avoids writing the zeros, to improve performance and durability. It can also erase all the cells, even the spare cells that the array controller cannot see and report back the status of the erased cells through a SCSI read long command for auditing purposes. SSD storage arrays have no way to securely erase all the flash cells in an SSD since they cannot see the spare cells and overwrites are always done to a new cell.
As far as the loss of an FMD having an impact on performance there are two cases, a planned threshold copy-replacement and an unplanned RAID reconstruction. With the copy-replacement, the simple copy places a minor load on the FMD, but there is no impact to host I/O. There is an impact for the standard RAID reconstruction, but that is the same for any storage array, except that higher performance of the FMD could shorten the reconstruction time, depending on what else is happening in the array.
To get the true news on Hitachi Data System’s FMD please read our white paper which explains it all.
Citrix Cloud simplifies the provisioning and management of Windows 10 Enterprise on Azure desktops by using Microsoft Azure and Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop Service. In the past, public cloud desktop offerings relied on Windows servers to offer Windows applications …
IBM Helps Advance Collaboration ARMONK, N.Y., March 31, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today showcased how the education industry across the globe is implementing IBM Connections to help transform working methods and accelerate productivity. With IBM collaboration technology individuals and…
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Increased performance on Azure…
Cybercrime Regulation Cybercrime is a well-known challenge we all face, some in more dramatic ways than others. Large organizations secure themselves from DDoS attacks, ransomware threats, and data theft with sophisticated technology and well-trained security personnel, and individuals do their…
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ShareFile provides customers with flexibility in storing content through our StorageZones architecture. Customers have always had the choice between hosting content entirely in the cloud via a Citrix-Managed StorageZone…
The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched BusinessCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Providing Answers at All Hours
Machine learning allows us to provide higher quality customer service at a lower cost. In the past, we had to direct customer questions to a static FAQ during off-business hours. Now we can use bots to help provide “live” answers to customers 24/7. We route questions we cannot address easily with machine learning to our human customer service team for the best experience.
2. Anticipating Needs
This will enable huge amounts of data to be examined rapidly, with the aim to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences and other useful business info. Ultimately, this could lead to providing better financial services for our clients by anticipating their needs and wants, as well as identifying and mitigating problems before they arise.
3. Better Targeted Marketing
Machine learning will provide computers with the ability to learn more about a target audience and change the conversation when exposed to new data. This will help marketing efforts by offering highly customized information based on what the computer has learned about prospects and customers, and their desires, needs, fears and wants.
– Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now
4. Shifting Staff to Answer Complex Questions
By automating part of the customer service process, like using a help desk to cover easy questions, there’s more time to proactively contact customers and ask them if they need anything. It’s also a way to free up time to handle more complex customer problems and put in face time that could save relationships.
5. Applying Results of Research
Machine learning will take a lot of the grunt work out of auditing and research so that we can get to answers and high-level thought much more quickly. Without having to dive into the data ourselves, we’ll be free to use our brains for higher-capacity learning and apply whatever the results teach us.
6. Tailoring Campaigns via Clustering Techniques
One of the hottest research areas in machine learning is clustering customer data. This kind of approach automatically groups related customers according to the way they interact with your business. Clustering techniques extract information to tailor campaigns and promotions to each target audience with fewer costs involved.
7. Giving Specific Answers to Clients
Machine learning will allow us to process bulk quantities of data from different sources, and will allow us to make decisions more quickly that will directly impact how we communicate and interact with our customers day to day. For example, instead of giving subjective answers and estimates, we’ll be able to say things with greater certainty and predict performance with better accuracy.
8. Generating User-Specific Search Results
For e-commerce businesses, search is one of the most important technologies affecting how customers will interact with you. As machine learning becomes more sophisticated, advances will be made to display results that are more relevant to the individual user. Giving the customer the power to find what they are looking for will reduce the need for direct customer interactions.
– Diego Orjuela, Cables & Sensors
9. Discovering Need, Then Providing Better Products
The age-old problem for businesses is figuring out exactly what customers want and then either delivering it to them or building great products. Data allow businesses to find out exactly what customers are using, and what they want so that they can build those products.
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What Is World Backup Day? World Backup Day was established in 2011 to remind organizations and home users they need to backup their important data on a regular basis. Data of World Backup Day shows that 30 percent of people…
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By Jeff Jacobson
We announced the largest technology launch in our company’s history on Wednesday. It is the next stage of the product strategy we started in 2013, when we launched ConnectKey – the first ecosystem-based platform for A3 workgroup devices.
“Our new portfolio is poised to transform the workplace. It gives us great confidence in our path forward — as Xerox, and as an industry.” — Jeff Jacobson, Xerox CEO
We followed that up in subsequent years with a broader range of specialized apps, customizable workflows and solutions, to deliver a better user experience.
Now, we are increasing the range of ConnectKey-enabled devices to include both entry A3 and workgroup A4, with coherency among the fleet of A3 and A4 devices. Here are some of the comments I made during Wednesday’s briefing for the press and industry analysts at our Executive Briefing Center in New York.
The launch is not just about adding more devices. It is about ensuring that every enterprise in every workplace segment – from small to large workgroups – has a secure, mobile, personalized and productive experience, with a tablet-based user interface, that helps organizations grow.
These new products extend the functionality of multifunction printers. They go beyond the base printing, copying, scanning and faxing functions and change the fundamental nature of the connected workplace – because the workplace itself has changed.
Learn More
ConnectKey turns your multifunction printer into a center of a complete productivity, right out of the box. Click here.
Much like the evolution of your smartphone to an app driven-personal assistant, these devices are true workplace assistants that allow you to work securely from any location, save steps with simplified workflows, and personalize the way you work.
Xerox CEO: “Our new portfolio is poised to transform the workplace.” https://ctt.ec/219EL+ http://pic.twitter.com/WGgs9QB2lH
We believe the full-range of products, apps, workflows and solutions are on target to support our growth plans.
We’re getting back to our innovation roots with a strong research, development and engineering operation, and investments focused exclusively on document technology and inspired by a relentless focus on our customers. Our new portfolio is poised to transform the workplace. It gives us great confidence in our path forward — as Xerox, and as an industry.
Every week, new courses and workshops are published to the growing Treehouse Library! Here’s a short list of what we’ve added recently, upcoming course highlights, and our weekly video update of What’s New at Treehouse.
Start learning to code today with a free trial on Treehouse.
Introduction to Table Views – Pasan Premaratne
One of most common user interface elements used in iOS apps are table views. Table views are flexible components that allow us to display data in a hierarchical manner. In this course, we’re going to understand the many moving parts of a table view by building a simple contacts app.
Styles and Themes in Android – (April)
Styles and themes are used to create a consistent user interface throughout an app, in a way that allows for reuse, easy maintenance, and compatibility on older versions of Android.
Introduction to Scala – (April)
The name Scala derives from a combination of the words “scalable” and “language”. Scala is a functional programming language, which runs on top of the Java virtual machine and can use any Java class. Scala is well suited for distributed programming and big data. It is what Apache Spark is build in and can provide better performance when compared to Python and is much less verbose than Java. Whether you’re learning about functional programming or starting a career in big data, Scala is a great place to start.
Express Basics (Refresh) – (May)
Learn how to use Express.js to build dynamic websites on the Node.js platform. In the process, you’ll learn some fundamental HTTP concepts that you can apply to any other framework!
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