Twitteratti at NetApp event spill guts over FlashRay's innards

StorageGRID gets shot in arm, ready to take on Glacier

Tweets from a NetApp Insight briefing event showed the company is preparing a replicating, deduping, clustering FlashRay iteration, complete with Glacier-targeting for StorageGRID.

FlashRay, NetApp's coming ground-up designed all-flash array, will have global deduplication. Here are three tweets:

#NetApp FlashRay dedupe is going to be global between all luns in an n-way cluster. Wow, game changer. #NTAPinsight

— Adam Bergh (@ajbergh) October 8, 2013

Oh yeah, FlashRay dedupe is in-line as well. Duplicate data doesn't get written to SSD at all saving wear life! #NTAPinsight

— Adam Bergh (@ajbergh) October 8, 2013

#NetApp FlashRay inline dedupe has a 0 overhead cost. It's just part of the OS not an attached engine #NTAPinsight

— Ryan Beaty (@rnbeaty) October 8, 2013

This says that FlashRay, and its Mars OS, will present block storage, partitioned into sections denominated by Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) assigned to applications just like a disk array SAN does. It will be possible to cluster FlashRay arrays, providing scale-out expansion, and have in-line deduplication work across the cluster to reduce the amount of data written to the flash.

Shoichi Morita, CEO of Japanese IT distributor Networld Corporation said FlashRay will have replication:

"@ajbergh: #NetApp FlashRay will be able to replicate to Clustered ONTAP. #Awesome #NTAPinsight" < Yes, it is.

— Shoichi Morita (@moritacocoa) October 8, 2013

Adam Bergh, a data centre and systems engineering consultant provided an enclosure snippet:

FlashRay uses the DS2246 disk shelf for its SSD drives. #NTAPinsight

— Adam Bergh (@ajbergh) October 8, 2013

As well as FlashRay, NetApp's StorageGRID object storage looks set to have some marketing oomph put behind it. The StorageGRID object storage technology comes from its September 2012 Bycast acquisition and NetApp has been relatively quiet about its intentions with the technology.

Our understanding is that StorageGRID nodes use E-series disk arrays as the data storage medium and StorageGRID software runs in VMware virtual machine in a server in front of the array. This software processes object metadata using a distributed relational database to store it. There can be up to 35PB of capacity and 8 billion objects in a single namespace. which can span multiple nodes across geo-distributed data centres.

Here's a tweet from Val Bercovici, noted NetApp evangelist:

Want AWS Glacier pricing on premises? Look out tape - Here comes NetApp StorageGRID.next! #NTAPinsight #ObjectStorage pic.twitter.com/VhyCpNglUa

— valb00 (@valb00) October 10, 2013

The tweet implies StorageGRID will be used for archiving data as well as offering Amazon Glacier-level pricing - $0.01/GB/month. We might expect Amazon to drop its Glacier pricing as competition intensifies, perhaps to $0.01 or $0.02 per GB/month – it's such a ferocious cloud storage and compute pricing competitor.

Like SpectraLogic's DS3/BlackPearl technology, StorageGRID can send object data to tape with up to 200PB supported. We don't know if the tape-stored data will be logically part of the StorageGRID or separated off. ®