Securely erasing SSDs

Each InVincible SSD comes with a special cable with two buttons on it one for overwriting the data (intelligent destruction) and the other for destroying the NAND cells (physical destruction).

• In the erase data mode (intelligent destruction), device data is overwritten on all NAND cells so that the original data is no longer readable.  Presumably as this is an internal feature even over provisioned NAND cells are also overwritten.  Unclear what this does to pages that are no longer programmable but perhaps they even have a way to deal with this.   There was some claim that the device would be rendered to factory new condition but it seems to me that NAND endurance would still have been reduced.
• In the kill NAND cells mode (physical destruction) apparently the device generates a high enough voltage internally to electronically destroy all the NAND bit cells so they are no longer readable (or writeable).  Wonder if there’s any smoke that emerges when this happens.

Not sure how you insert the special cable because the device has to be powered to do any of this.  It seems to me they would have been better served with an SATA diagnostic command to do the same thing, but maybe the special cable is a bit more apparent.  The cable comes with two buttons one green and the other red (I would have thought yellow and red more appropriate).

But what about my other SSDs?

It’s not as useful as I first thought because what the world really needs is a device that could erase or kill NAND cells on any SSD drive.  That way we could securely erase all SSDs.

I suppose the problem with a universal SSD eraser is that it would need to somehow disable wear leveling to get at over provisioned NAND cells.  Also to physically destroy NAND cells would take some special circuitry. But maybe if we could come up with a standard approach across the industry such a device could be readily available.

I suppose another approach is to encrypt the data and throw away your keys but that seems to simple.

Or maybe just overwrite the data a half dozen or so times with random, repeating data patterns and then their complements. But this may not reach over-provisioned cells and with wear leveling in place all these writes could conceivably go to the same, single NAND page.

New approaches to securely erasing disk data

On another note at SNW early this year I was talking with another vendor and he said that securely erasing disk drives no longer takes multiple (3-7 depending on who you want to believe) passes of overwriting with specified data patterns (random, repeating patterns and complements of same).  He said there was research done recently which had proved this but I could only find this article on [Disk] Data Sanitization.

And sometime this past week I had read another article (don’t know where) about a company shipping a device which degausses standard 3.5″ disk drives.  You just insert a disk inside of it and push a button or two and your data is gone.

Why all the interest in securely erasing data?

It never really goes away. No one wants their data publicly available and securely erasing it after the fact is a simple (but lengthy) approach to deal with it.

But why isn’t everyone using data encryption?  Seems like a subject for another post.

Comments

Image: Safe ‘n green by Robert S. Donovan 

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Post tags: data encyrption, Data sanitization, Degaussing disk, Disk secure erase, InVincible SSD, RunCore, Secure erasure, SSD secure erase

I was at the Solid State Storage Symposium a couple of weeks ago where Robin Harris (StorageMojo) gave the keynote presentation. In his talk, Robin mentioned a new technology on the horizon which holds the promise of replacing DRAM, SRAM and NAND called resistive random access memory (ReRAM or RRAM).

If so, ReRAM will enter the technological race pitting MRAM, Graphene Flash, PCM and racetrack memory as followons for NAND technology.  But none of these have any intention of replacing DRAM.

Problems with NAND

There are a few problems with NAND today but the main problem that affects future NAND technologies is as devices shrink they lose endurance. For instance, today’s SLC NAND technology has an endurance of ~100K P/E (program/erase) cycles, MLC NAND can endure around 5000 P/E cycles and eMLC somewhere in between.  Newly emerging TLC (three bits/cell) has less even endurance than MLC.

But that’s all at 30nm or larger.  The belief is that as NAND feature size shrinks below 20nm its endurance will get much worse, perhaps orders of magnitude worse.

While MLC may be ok for enterprise storage today, much less than 5000 P/E cycles could become a problem and would require ever more sophistication in order to work around these limitation.    Which is why most enterprise class, MLC NAND based storage uses specialized algorithms and NAND controller functionality to support storage reliability and durability.

ReRAM solves NAND, DRAM and NvRAM problems.

Enter ReRAM, it has the potential to be faster than PCM-RAM, has smaller features than MRAM which means more bits per square inch and uses lower voltage than racetrack memory and NAND.    The other nice thing about ReRAM is that it seems readily scaleable to below 30nm feature geometries.  Also as it’s a static memory it doesn’t have to be refreshed like DRAM and thus uses less power.

In addition, it appears that  ReRAM is much more flexible than NAND or DRAM which can be designed and/or tailored to support different memory requirements.   Thus, one ReRAM design can be focused on standard  DRAM applications while another ReRAM design can be targeted at mass storage or solid state drives (SSD).

On the negative side there are still some problems with ReRAM, namely the large “sneak parasitic current” [whatever that is] that impacts adjacent bit cells and drains power.  There are a few solutions to this problem but none yet completely satisfactory.

But it’s a ways out, isn’t it?

No it’s not. BBC and Tech-On reported that Panasonic will start sampling devices soon and plan to reach volume manufacturing next year.   Elpida-Sharp  and HP-Hynix are also at work on ReRAM (or memristor) devices and expect to ship sometime in 2013.  But for the moment it appears that Panasonic is ahead of the pack.

At first, these devices will likely emerge in low power applications but as vendors ramp up development and mass production it’s unclear where it will ultimately end up.

The allure of ReRAM technology is significant in that it holds out the promise of replacing both RAM and NAND used in consumer devices as well as IT equipment with the same single technology.  If you consider that the combined current market for DRAM and NAND is over $50B, people start to notice.

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Whether ReRAM will meet all of its objectives is yet TBD.  But we seldom see any one technology which has this high a potential.  The one remaining question is why everybody else isn’t going after ReRAM as well, like Samsung, Toshiba and Intel-Micron.

I have to thank StorageMojo and the Solid State Storage Symposium team for bringing ReRAM to my attention.

[Update] @storagezilla (Mark Twomey) said that “… Micron’s aquisition of Elpida gives them a play there.”

Wasn’t aware of that but yes they are definitely in the hunt now.

Comments?

Image: Memristor by Luke Kilpatrick

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Post tags: MRAM, NAND replacement, pcm, racetrack memory, ReRAM, RRAM

It certainly signals a significant ongoing interest in flash storage in whatever form that takes. Currently EMC offers PCIe flash storage (VFCache), SSD options in VMAX and VNX, and has plans for a shared flash cache array (project: Thunder).  An all-flash storage array makes a lot of sense if you believe this represents an architecture that can grab market share in storage.

I have talked with ExtremeIO in the past but they were pretty stealthy then (and still are as far as I can tell). Not much details about their product architecture, specs on performance, interfaces or anything substantive. The only thing they told me then was that they were in the flash array storage business.

In a presentation to SNIA’s BOD last summer I said that the storage industry is in revolution.  When a 20 or so device system can generate ~250K or more IO/second with a single controller, simple interfaces, and solid state drives, we are no longer in Kansas anymore.

Can a million IO storage system be far behind.

It seems to me, that doing enterprise storage performance has gotten much easier over the last few years.  Now that doesn’t mean enterprise storage reliability, availability or features but just getting to that level of performance before took 1000s of disk drives and racks of equipment.  Today, you can almost do it in a 2U enclosure and that’s without breaking a sweat.

Well that seems to be the problem, with a gaggle of startups, all vying after SSD storage in one form or another the market is starting to take notice.  Maybe EMC felt that it was a good time to enter the market with their own branded product, they seem to already have all the other bases covered.

Their website mentions that ExtremeIO was a load balanced, deduplicated clustered storage system with enterprise class services (this could mean anything). Nonetheless, a deduplicating, clustered SSD storage system built out of commodity servers could define at least 3 other SSD startups I have recently talked with and a bunch I haven’t talked with in awhile.

Why EMC decided that ExtremeIO was the one to buy is somewhat a mystery.  There was some mention of an advanced data protection scheme for the flash storage but no real details.

Nonetheless, enterprise SSD storage services with relatively low valuation and potential to disrupt enterprise storage might be something to invest in.  Certainly EMC felt so.

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Comments, anyone know anything more about ExtremeIO?

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Post tags: all-flash array, EMC, ExtremeIO, solid state drives, SSD

Down a bit in the article they said that the mystery deflecting gamma rays seems to be the creation of  ”virtual electron” electron&anti-electron pairs in the nucleus. The deflection is something ~1.000000001 not much yet, but the belief is that even heavier elements such as gold will refract gamma rays even better.

Gamma-ray and gamma ray bursts are typically evidence of extremely energetic explosions witnessed in distant galaxies. They are the most luminous electromagnetic events in the universe. Most gamma ray bursts are released during supernova explosions when a star violently collapses.

But what can you do with Gamma ray optics?

The possibility of gamma ray optical systems introduces a whole new way of looking at the universe.  For example, the introduction of x-rays in the early 1900s created an entirely new way to see inside the human body, never before possible. It’s unclear what gamma ray optics or a G-ray machine will do for medicine or human health but it’s certain that such devices will be better able to “see” processes and objects impossible to detect today.

One item of interest was the promise that someday, gamma ray optics will be able to render harmless, radioactive isotopes such as nuclear waste.  Somehow a focused gamma ray beam at the proper (neutron binding energy) wavelength could be used to “evaporate” or remove neutrons from an atomic nucleus and by doing so render it less lethal.  How this works on Kg of material versus a single atom is another question.

Also, gamma ray optics could be used in the future to potentially create designer radioactive isotopes for medical diagnostics and therapy.  Even higher resolution nuclear spectroscopy is envisioned by using gamma ray optics.

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I don’t know about nuclear waste, but if gamma ray optics could transmute lead into gold, we might have something.  This probably means that someday, gamma ray optics will be able to store information in an atomic nucleus and that would certainly take data density out of the magnetic domain altogether.

Image: Tycho’s Star Shines in Gamma Rays

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Post tags: Atomic nucleus, G-ray machine, Gamma ray, Gamma ray optics, green energy, neutron binding energy, nuclear waste

How big companies die

One article I read was from Forbes on Here’s why Google and Facebook might disappear in the next 5 years.  The central tenet of their discussion was that the rise of mobile is a new paradigm shift just like Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 emerged over time and reinvented most of the industries that went before them.

Most companies around before the internet were unable to see and understand what would constitute a viable business model in the new Web 1.0 environment. Similarly, the major players in Web 1.0 never really saw the transition that occurred to a more interactive, information sharing that became Web 2.0.

The problem is that all these companies grew up in the reigning paradigm of the day and became successful by seeing the transition as a new way of doing business. They just couldn’t conceive that another way of doing business was coming along that was strategically different and thus, highly damaging to their now outdated, business models.

Full speed ahead

But it even get’s worse. Another article I read from Tecnology Review was titled Questions for Mobile Computing.

One interesting tidbit is that time it’s taking to reach a certain adoption level in the market is shrinking. The chart (from Apple) showed that both the iPhone and iPad has drastically shrunk the time it took to attain high market adoption.

Mobile business models

The main question in the article was how web 2.0 advertising revenue business models were going to translate into a mobile environment where they no longer controlled advertising.  Many Web2.0 companies seem to be ignoring mobile at the moment but it won’t take long for companies focused on this new computing tsunami to roll over them.

Apple and Google have taken two distinctly divergent approaches to this market but at least they are (massively) engaged.  That’s more than can be said for some of the web 2.0 properties out there ignoring mobile to their long term detriment.

The fact is that mobile is a new computing platform.  It’s possibilities are truly extraordinary from mHealth (see my post on mHealth taking off in Kenya) and  mCurrency today to Google glasses of tomorrow.

I strongly believe that those companies that see this shift now and go after it with new business models to profit from mobile computing will succeed faster and mightier than we have ever seen.   The rest will be left in the dust.

The funny bit is that it’s not the developed world that’s taking the new model to new directions but the developing world.  They seem better able to see mobile computing for what it is, an relatively easy way to leapfrog from the 19th century to the 21st in one jump.

So what are profitable business models that leverage mobile computing?

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Post tags: Apple, Facebook, Google, mHealth, Mobile adoption, mobile business models, ubiquitous computing, Web 2.0

(SCISFS120316-002) (c) 2012 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

For some time now I have been using OPS/drive to measure storage system disk drive efficiency but have so far failed to come up with anything similar for flash or SSD use.  The problem with flash in storage is that it can be used as a cache or as a storage device.  Even when used as a storage device under automated storage tiering, SSD advantages can be difficult to pin down.

In my March newsletter as a first attempt to measure storage system flash efficiency I supplied a new chart shown above, which plots the top 10 NFS throughput ops/second/GB of NAND used in the SPECsfs2008 results.

What’s with Avere?

Something different has occurred with the (#1) Avere FXT 3500 44-node system in the chart.   The 44-node Avere system only used ~800GB of flash as a ZIL (ZFS intent log from the SPECsfs report).   However, the 44-node system also had ~7TB of DRAM across their 44-node system, most of which was used for file IO caching.  If we incorporated storage system memory size with flash GB in the above chart it would have dropped the Avere numbers by a factor of 9 while only dropping the others by a factor of ~2X which would still give the Avere a significant advantage but not quite so stunning.  Also, the Avere system frontends other NAS systems, (this one running ZFS) so it’s not quite the same as being a direct NAS storage system like the others on this chart.

The remainder of the chart (#2-10) belongs to NetApp and their FlashCache (or PAM) cards.  Even Oracles Sun ZFS Storage 7320 appliance did not come close to either the Avere FXT 3500 system or the NetApp storage on this chart.  But there were at least 10 other SPECsfs2008 NFS results using some form of flash but were not fast enough to rank on this chart.

Other measures of flash effectiveness

This metric still doesn’t quite capture flash efficiency.  I was discussing flash performance with another startup the other day and they suggested that SSD drive count might be a better  alternative.  With such a measure, it would take into consideration that each SSD has a only a certain performance level it can sustain, not unlike disk drives.

In that case Avere’s 44-node system had 4 drives, and each NetApp system had two FlashCache cards, representing 2-SSDs per NetApp node.  I try that next time to see if it’s  a better fit.

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The complete SPECsfs2008 performance report went out in SCI’s March newsletter.  But a copy of the report will be posted on our dispatches page sometime next month (if all goes well). However, you can get the SPECsfs performance analysis now and subscribe to future free newsletters by just sending us an email or using the signup form above right.

For a more extensive discussion of current NAS or file system storage performance covering SPECsfs2008 (Top 20) results and our new ChampionChart™ for NFS and CIFS storage systems, please see SCI’s NAS Buying Guide available from our website.

As always, we welcome any suggestions or comments on how to improve our analysis of SPECsfs2008 results or any of our other storage performance analyses.

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Post tags: Avere FXT 3500, Chart of the month, FAS3160, FAS6240, FlashCache, NetApp, NFS flash use, NFS throughput per flash memory, SPECsfs2008, ZFS, ZFS intent log, ZIL

Coraid EtherDrive mounted in rack by redjar (cc) (From flickr)

Held a Storage Field Day briefing yesterday with Coraid, the creators of EtherDrive an all Ethernet SAN storage system.

The advantages of EtherDrive are significant.  Not the least of which is that it is very cheap storage.  It scales  independently as each storage server/node is a separate storage system.  Also it’s very easy to set up as each storage drive has it’s own MAC address.

I suppose the downside is that it uses an internal storage access protocol to supply access across the Ethernet.  This requires a special host device driver and they have to modify the firmware of a standard Intel NIC to support their internal protocol. After all this is in place their storage LUNs appear as parallel SCSI like service to Linux and Windows hosts, but is actually using the Ethernet protocol at a low level to support attache their shared storage to the hosts. They call the protocol ATA over Ethernet but they could have just as easily called it the Coraid storage protocol.

It is a connectionless protocol which uses Ethernet Layer 2 switching to supply a datagram storage service.  Data is packaged into 64KB blocks and then broken up into jumbo frames and sent to the MAC address for the storage drive which somehow maps to a storage server and disk LUN.   Data is RAID protected within a storage server.

The advantage of the connectionless protocol is that it is very robust in the face of errors and it can take advantage of any number of parallel paths that are available between the storage and the servers that are using it.  (As an aside, another session in Storage Field Day was at Brocade and we got to see some of their SAN fabric switching gear – subject for another post someday).

They showed one animation which had an iSCSI with MPIO transfer a 64Kblock but it ended up only using one of the MPIO paths because the other was only used in failure scenarios.  They then showed their approach and it used all the paths that were between the server and the storage.

Apparently, in native mode (whatever that is), LUNs are limited in size to something less than a disk device but they seem to have a LVM/virtualization server that is somehow both out of band that provides multi-disk LUNs, replication, snapshot and other advanced services. We didn’t talk about this capability much.

Coraid said they have 1500 customers, plenty with more than a PB. In fact they handed out tokens which provided us honorary memberships in the PB club.  They mentioned FORD, NASA, SONY and a bunch of other well known G100 companies around the world which has lot’s of Coraid.  Also it appears there is quite a lot of Coraid in DOD installations around the world.  In fact, one of the Execs at the session was a former IT exec for the Marines who liked it so much he now works for Coraid.

This was the second to last stop of the day so by this time the Storage Field Day team was somewhat dragging but we managed to ask a bunch of pertinent questions.  If you want to see what it looks like I suggest you watch the video (which can be seen here, I’m the handsome guy in the brown sports coat close to the front of the room).

Don’t know why I have never heard of them before but they are unlike anything else I am aware of in the storage industry. They certainly are a block storage system but seem to have taken DAS and somehow put it out as shared storage, at the other end of an ethernet plug…

In my opinion, I would say Coraid has an awareness gap.  Although with the customer sizes they were mentioning, it seems that word of mouth is somehow working ok for them.  Maybe a more aggressive sales/marketing team could take it to the next level. But I don’t know if they want it that much and if they did it might bring another level of competition to their market.

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Anybody out there a current EtherDrive user? If so what do you think about their storage??

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Post tags: AoE, ATA over Ethernet, Coraid, EtherDrive

3D printer at Spectra Logic (for mechanical parts fabrication) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

When last we discussed inter-planetary commerce the concept was that funding space-faring outposts of humanity could somehow be accomplished using commercial endeavors rather than public funding.  The assumption being that any other life bearing planet would have have it’s own evolution, creating much different organisms than the earth, different ecosystems/biomes/flora/fauna.

In addition to the distinctly different biology, there would be a whole new geophysical environment such as weather systems, volcanic activity, plate tectonics, space weather, etc which could be analyzed to help better understand geophysical processes here on earth and other planets.

Information like this from any other life giving planet would be invaluable to pharmaceutical companies, agricultural corporations, research organzations, etc.   Such information could be used to more than pay back the investors in the space colonization effort.  (see my posts on Information commerce – part 2 and Information inter-planetary commerce).  Of course many risks exist for such activities not the least that all would be lost enroute, upon landing or shortly thereafter before any valuable information could be transmitted, information links could be severed for any number of technological reasons, and possibly the chosen planet would be unsuitable for human habitation for any number of reasons.  And yet the potential rewards would be equivalent to having another earth with all its biological treasures available at your fingertips.

Biological replicators

Well a recent Economist special on the third industrial revolution or the digitization of manufacturing just re-started the whole discussion for me.  It seems there is a product called the “Replicator” that performs both additive and subtractive manufacturing but also provides detail scanning of any part.  Such that, at one location a Replicator could scan a part and then ship this detailed information to another Replicator, around the other side of the world, or across space to another planet for that matter using that information to re-create the part.

It’s too much a leap of faith to see that sometime in the future, such a device could work in the biological domain just as easily as it could with mechanical parts.  It might have to be capable of gene sequencing and/or other types of biological assays/scanning. But if it could do this, then life forms on other planets could be scanned, with DNA/RNA/xNA sequences sent elsewhere to even another planet to construct a facsimile of that life form.

Of course having the DNA for an cell, and creating the living/breathing organism or even a working cell are two different things. But it seems to me that having the sequence of xNA, and other epi-genetics of the life form would give some company enough information to recreate a life form from somewhere else in the galaxy.

So rather than shipping goods across the galaxy one would ship replicator information which could then be used to re-create the biological organisms discovered on other planets. When you combine the biological treasures to the geophysical value of another life giving planet you may have enough valuable information to fund these exo-planetary colonization activities as a purely commercial activity.

Information bartering

Such information transactions could conceivably form the backbone of an information barter economy.  Whereby, one planet would barter with another for some useful biological or geophysical information.  Once bartering activity is up between two planets, other forms of information transfer could take place beyond that ultimately providing technological information that could help both societies.

Why it’s even conceivable that two planets who just managed to contact one another but were two far away for any material commerce could start off by providing geophysical information about each others planet to one another. Over time evolving from geophysical, arguably the least valuable, to biological which would be more valuable, to ultimately technological information which would be most valuable.  Establishing trust and reciprocal value from each exo-planetary interchange.

This seems to me to be how exo-planetary commerce could develop, could mature for the benefit of all players.

Of course, the language translation would need to be accomplished but here again starting with geophysical information would provide a sort of baseline or even a “rossetta stone” for exo-planetary language translation which could boot strap the conversation to more esoteric information transfers…

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Of course all this information has to be stored someplace…  Comments?

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Post tags: biome, exo-planetary commerce, fauna, flora, Information commerce