IBM plugs SanDisk's flashy JBOF rig into its spectrum IBM and SanDisk are jointly adding Big Blue’s parallel filesystem software Spectrum Scale to SanDisk’s InfiniFlash all-flash array. Spectrum Scale, formerly known as GPFS, is a mature and well-used parallel file system, that IBM has been continually updating to keep it current. SanDisk’s InfiniFlash is a 3U enclosure with …
When is someone going to build a 1RU rack mount box that uses flash devices that are about one inch tall and 500 mm deep. That way up to about 64 hot swappable flash devices could be slid in to a 1 RU rack mount device. If the bus connector was PCIe and SATA then a universal standard host could support a massive about of JBOF at speeds ranging from cheap to blindingly fast.
Of course there needs to be much better support for 4,608 byte sectors so ECC can flow from all the way from storage to the CPU registers.
...is storage industry speak for how much storage your real physical GB is equivalent to after compression, dedupe, and any other clever tricks the hardware and software might do to increase the amount of data stored. It's a pretty subjective number because some things compress a great deal more than others (e.g. images that are already compressed...).
Sometimes they are also honest enough to deduct the overhead for reliability, e.g. erasure coding, RAIDing, etc.
I used to work on this team at SanDisk. This product is struggling. All of my accounts have looked at it, and NONE of them are pulling the trigger. SanDisk is not a storage company. They lack storage IP. They lack storage people. They lack storage margins. They are more likely to EOL this product sooner versus selling any of it. It has been a disaster so far. Anyone in the storage business understands the costs incurred in supporting enterprise data center customers. SanDisk has priced this array ignoring a true understanding of what kind of margins it takes to run a real storage business. They are desperate for customers. After much customer feedback, (i.e. "you don't have storage IP") they are trying to get IP from companies like IBM. First of all, IBM spectrum was built for commodity HW and is a server side technology. It has nothing to do with a purpose-built flash array, nor should it. Good luck to the idiots at SanDisk and IBM in making this venture work. It has little chance of making any sense to any customer, quite frankly. SanDisk needs storage companies like IBM, but I feel sorry for IBM. They have a great flash array, but apparently idiots are running their business trying to enable a new entrant competitor.
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