NetApp FlashRay Revolutionizes Storage by Using Low-Cost Flash Memory

April 2013

NetApp unveiled a new operating system that hopes to solve the main Achilles heel of Flash memory today which has the “annoying” property to quickly wear-out!

FlashRay will be in beta mid-year and available commercially in early 2014.

Spinning disks don’t wear out, they fail. But Flash predictably wears out because of the amount of the writing you do. Actually the length of time that your SSD runs is completely dependent on the workload. This is the thing that hard disk drives never had. Your workload didn’t cause your hard disk drives to fail faster. But if you have a write-intensive workload for a high performance application going to Flash, you’ll wear it out faster, explains Brian Pawlowski, NetApp’s senior VP.

The one big difference between spinning disk and Flash-based systems is spinning disk controller designers never worried about wearing disk out, so there is inefficiencies in how the applications are written.

By minimizing wear, NetApp engineers are now able to use the cheapest Flash memory components, like the ones you’ll find in iPods or smartphones, without impacting on the performance or the lifetime of the Flash storage system, which sits currently at 5-years. A “legacy” according to Pawlowski.

What we’re in hot pursuit of, is shipping the cheapest form of Flash possible by a Flash-centered design but that increases the lifetime and endurance by not wasting precious write cycles of those SSDs

But the rise of super fast, all-Flash storage systems, which have been the traditional bottleneck of enterprise information systems, will have serious consequences on the architecture of the next generation enterprise IT. ”The new bottleneck will be the network and the applications themselves,” adds Pawlowski.

As enterprises adopt Flash-based storage arrays, they will have to upgrade their core networking infrastructure to 40 Gbps and servers to 10 Gbps.