Flash

Five Reasons to Switch to Flash Storage

Ted Schmidt — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 21:12:16 +0000

By now you have heard your peers raving about flash storage. But perhaps you have not made the switch from your enterprise HDD storage solution yet, because of nagging questions you may have, about the cost of flash storage or its technical capabilities. Well here is a quick look at five compelling reasons why you should switch your enterprise storage from HDD to flash.

Performance
If flash storage has a defining characteristic, it would be speed. While flash storage was initially known for its astounding speed, more recently flash storage is gaining a reputation for delivering consistent performance. Without any moving parts, flash storage is capable of massive improvements in IOPS over traditional HDD storage. While enterprise-level HDD is capable of around 180 IOPS, comparable flash storage is capable of performance of over a thousand times faster than HDD. The result of such huge gains in performance is massive improvements in system and application performance.

Price
Until recently, the capital layout for flash storage was the single limiting factor to broad enterprise adoption. It doesn’t help that many storage vendors are hesitant to publish their prices. Generally speaking, over the past decade, the price per GB of flash storage has fallen at a much faster rate than the price of HDD, leaving some pundits to predict price parity in the near future. Bottom line is that flash storage will always be more expensive than HDD simply because it is a better product. But for your enterprise, the cost of flash storage should not longer be a limiting factor.

The fact is that current prices for flash storage are no longer a factor of ten, like they were five years ago. Today, you can get flash storage for about three times the cost of HDD. When you consider the performance gains we just referenced, that price is a steal.

Capacity
The capacity of flash storage solutions used to be another limiting factor. But like price, that constraint has long been removed, with many manufacturers producing flash SSD solutions that are two to three times the capacity of HDD solutions. For an enterprise data center, this means smaller physical space is needed while power consumption is reduced due to the increased storage density offered by enterprise flash storage solutions.

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How to Calculate Flash Storage TCO

Ted Schmidt — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 01:17:04 +0000

by Ted Schmidt

Across a wide range of consumer devices, from cameras to smartphones to laptops, flash storage has become the de facto standard for digital data storage. Because of its relative compactness, speed and low power consumption, flash storage also has experienced dramatic growth in enterprise data storage solutions. While initial use cases were somewhat limited, flash storage in the enterprise has expanded in many areas, which in no small way is related to the cost of flash storage dropping more than 80% in the past five years.

Compared to spinning disk systems (HDDs), enterprise systems using flash can use fewer storage devices to deliver comparable performance levels and require less cooling, simply because they have fewer moving parts. Consolidating storage like this allows enterprises to reduce power usage costs, maintenance costs and other costs as well.

Unfortunately, many enterprises miss out on these savings because they still rely on acquisition cost as the deciding factor when looking at storage solutions. Even with the incredible drops in acquisition costs of flash storage, it still can run five times more than HDD solutions, which can seem attractive when acquisition cost is the only consideration.

However, if you look at the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as a sum of the initial capital layout for a storage solution, plus all the other costs associated with the full lifecycle of the storage solution, industry studies agree that acquisition costs account for only about 20% of TCO. Other lifecycle costs like performance, power usage, reliability, maintenance and various factors, account for the other 80% of TCO, so it is important to consider those factors in a buying decision for any storage solution. Let’s take a quick look at some of the costs that make up 80% of your TCO.

Maintenance and repair costs are probably the most obvious in your TCO. HDDs have a failure rate of anywhere from 2-8%, meaning that every year, you can expect to lose one drive for every 12 deployed. That is significant, especially when you consider that the cost to replace a failed drive includes system down-time and labor to replace the drive, in addition to the cost of the replacement drive itself.

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NVMe over Fabrics Support Coming to the Linux 4.8 Kernel

Petros Koutoupis — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 16:15:00 +0000

by Petros Koutoupis

The Flash Memory Summit recently wrapped up its conferences in Santa Clara, California, and only one type of Flash technology stole the show: NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeF). From the many presentations and company announcements, it was obvious NVMeF was the topic that most interested the attendees.

With the first industry specifications announced in 2011, Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) quickly rose to the forefront of Solid State Drive (SSD) technologies. Historically, SSDs were built on top of Serial ATA (SATA), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Fibre Channel buses. These interfaces worked well for the maturing Flash memory technology, but with all the protocol overhead and bus speed limitations, it did not take long for these drives to experience performance bottlenecks. Today, modern SAS drives operate at 12 Gbit/s, while modern SATA drives operate at 6 Gbit/s. This is why the technology shifted its focus to PCI Express (PCIe). With the bus closer to the CPU and PCIe capable of performing at increasingly stellar speeds, SSDs seemed to fit right in. Using PCIe 3.0, modern drives can achieve speeds as high as 40 Gbit/s. Leveraging the benefits of PCIe, it was then that the NVMe was conceived. Support for NVMe drives was integrated into the Linux 3.3 mainline kernel (2012).

What really makes NVMe shine over the operating system's SCSI stack is its simpler and faster queueing mechanism. These are called the Submission Queue (SQ) and Completion Queue (CQ). Each queue is a circular buffer of a fixed size that the operating system uses to submit one or more commands to the NVMe controller. One or more of these queues also can be pinned to specific cores, which allows for more uninterrupted operations.

Almost immediately, the PCIe SSDs were marketed for enterprise-class computing with a much higher price tag. Although still more expensive than its SAS or SATA cousins, the dollar per gigabyte of Flash memory continues to drop—enough to convince more companies to adopt the technology. However, there was still a problem. Unlike the SAS or SATA SSDs, NVMe drives did not scale very well. They were confined to the server they were plugged in to.

In the world of SAS or SATA, you have the Storage Area Network (SAN). SANs are designed around SCSI standards. The primary goal of a SAN (or any other storage network) is to provide access of one or more storage volumes across one or more paths to a single or multiple operating system host(s) in a network. Today, the most commonly deployed SAN is based on iSCSI, which is SCSI over TCP/IP. Technically, NVMe drives can be configured within a SAN environment, although the protocol overhead introduces latencies that make it a less than ideal implementation. In 2014, the NVMe Express committee was poised to rectify this with the NVMeF standard.

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No Ubuntu Default Extras Install

Michael Reed — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

The Ubuntu Technical Board has voted not to install the non-free extras package by default during a standard Ubuntu Install. This an option that, if selected, installs proprietary software including hardware drivers, media codecs and the Flash player. It has been opt-in rather than opt out since its first appearance.

When considering the issue, bear in mind that the fact that many proprietary technologies “just work” is often cited as a superiority of distributions such as Mint. Also bear in mind that Ubuntu targets the “typical desktop user” who needs things like DVD and YouTube playback. However, it's arguable that a user who is sufficiently clued up to carry out an operating system install would be able to decide if he or she needed to tick the box.

The arguments against ticking the box by default can be divided into moral, technical and legal aspects.

Moral, because some of the add-ons are either closed source or open source software (such as gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad) that raises legal questions. For one thing, as Ubuntu is so popular, including non-free software by default could arguably remove some of the incentive for developing solutions that supplant proprietary technology. For many, part of the Ubuntu mission is to encourage the adoption of not just Linux but also free software in general.

In some jurisdictions the proprietary software in the extras cannot be legally distributed or installed. As things stand, it is up to the user to research the issues and decide whether they can legally add things such as DVD and MP3 playback to their system. I suspect the legal aspect is real killer of the idea.

Some people would also complain that what the restricted extras package offers amounts to bloat that is not needed. For example, YouTube playback could be achieved without resorting to the official Flash player. A solution involving Gnash, HTML 5 or FlashVideoReplacer (which now no longer needs Flash at all) could be made to work to some extent. However, none of these solutions support the range of web sites that the official Adobe Flash player does.

In the case of web browsing, it's worth noting that, even if the the extras package has not been installed, it should be possible to install Flash by following prompts from Firefox's plugin finder. In the same vain, some media players can automatically fetch the required codecs.

In closing, it's difficult to see what the “right” decision would have been, and it's an issue that would probably have been devisive within the Linux comminity as a whole, had it been given a wider audience and greater publicity.

The IRC discussion in which the vote was taken.

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Flash 10.2 Found To Be Crashtastic

Michael Reed — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:35:11 +0000

by Michael Reed

If you've experienced a lot of crashes when trying to access pages with Flash content recently, and you've been wondering why, take solace in that fact that it's not specifically a Linux problem. Windows users have had the same problem, and it's caused by the latest version of the Flash plugin. Fortunately, it's easy enough to work around.

At time of writing, the Adobe forum is full of reports of the crash, and it seems to affect Windows and Linux versions of the plugin. The situation is slightly annoying because many of us received a pop-up prompt encouraging us to go to an updated version of the plugin that has turned out to be unreliable.

The reports on the Adobe forum indicate that we may be having a slightly easier time of it, as typically, the player just pops up a message indicating that has crashed. In such a case, a page reload should be all that's needed to get things working again. Outside of Linux land, apparently, the faulty plugin regularly brings down the browser, and in some cases, the entire machine. Occasionally, the Linux version can cause browser crashes but I wasn't able to locate any reports of it bringing the whole system down. It might seem surprisingly that a mere browser plugin could cause system instability, but apparently, the the new version addresses hardware acceleration in a different way. There is always going to be a risk of this sort of thing happening when a high level program directly interacts with a low level driver. There have been reports of the problem affecting both Nvidia and ATI chipset equipped machines.

In my own experiments, I was able to provoke the crashing behavior by opening multiple tabs that contained flash content. You could limit the effect by running a flash blocking plugin such as FlashBlock in combination with the the excellent FlashVideoReplacer.

The simplest solution is probably to revert the back to version 10.01 for now. If you installed it manually, you'll have to locate an older version of the installation file. If not, you can usually use your choice of package manager to revert to an earlier version. In the case of Synaptic, the “Force Version...” option is in the “Package” pull down menu option.

Happy Flashing, folks.

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FlashVideoReplacer Continues To Improve

Michael Reed — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

We covered FlashVideoReplacer, a video add-on for Firefox, last year, but the new 2.x series offers several improvements. We look at what the new version offers and ask the developer a few questions.

[Update April 2 2011: Gonçalves got back in touch with me to tell me about the latest updates to FlashVideoReplacer. The updates are quite considerable so I've pasted his email to the end of this article. For example, the plugin now does not require Flash at all.]

As for how the add-on works, I got the information straight from Caio Gonçalves aka Lovinlinux, the developer:

When you visit a video page of a supported web site, the extension catches the direct link to the video embedded in the page, then removes the flash player object and inject a new object using the direct video link. As a result, the video is played with a different plugin on the original page, without the need to download it first. In order to work, the user needs a compatible plugin or standalone player, capable of playing at least mp4, which is the most common format. However, support for other formats like flv, mov, wmv and m4v is required for some videos.

This is a boon for Linux users as flash-based video players are normally comparatively inefficient on Linux, particularly for full-screen video playback. For FlashVideoReplacer to work, the user must have a working Flash plugin and a multimedia plugin browser installed. According to a survey recently carried out the the add-on site, Gecko Media Player, an MPlayer based plugin, is the most popular choice for Linux, although other plugins do work.

At the current time, the plugin supports video from YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe and a few adult orientated sites. Support for other sites, including Ustreme and Blip TV, is planned for version 2.03. As before, it's possible to disable the add on for some supported sites, but there is now an option to retain the user notifications when this is done.

The add on now offers a set of options that control how the intercepted video feed should be presented, and it's possible to have the video automatically open in a new window, a new tab, a stand-alone player or to prompt on a video-by-video basis. Facilities to download videos or to simply copy the URL of the video are hidden away in an addition to the standard Firefox context menu. This might allow some people to manage without a separate video downloading add-on, but it's worth noting that some of the dedicated add-ons have more facilities and support for a broader range of sites.

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FlashVideoReplacer - Use Native Video Playback Facilities On Sites Like Youtube

Michael Reed — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

FlashVideoReplacer is a Firefox add-on that strips out the Flash video on sites such as YouTube, automatically replacing it with a standard video file that is re-embedded on the page. In a nutshell, this means that a native player is used instead of the embedded Flash player. This can offer a huge performance benefit for web-based video playback, particularly full-screen playback.

Flash video performance on Linux is quite poor compared with that of Windows. Even if the playback is acceptable for a given situation, it tends to be inconsistent, often slowing down periodically. Full-screen video playback is particularly poor, often becoming unacceptably choppy. This high CPU usage also slows down the rest of the system.

There is a solution, although it has some limitations, in the form of a Firefox add-on called FlashVideoReplacer. This add-on dynamically changes the website sourcecode in order to replace the Flash video with a format that can be played using a native video playback plugin. This means that sites should look much the same but the videos themselves playback smoothly and consistently while using very little CPU. Best of all, it makes high quality, full-screen playback viable on Linux.

The main limitation of the add-on is that it currently only supports three sites, YouTube, Blip.tv, Vimeo. Fortunately, these are three of the most popular sites and FlashVideoReplacer wont interfere with video playback on sites on which you are already using standard flash playback.

Another problem is that seeking doesn’t work on material that hasn’t yet entered the cache. This means that you sometimes have to wait a while before seeking forward, although, once the whole video has loaded things begin to work as expected.

The familiar YouTube display, yet not so familiar?

Installation

I installed the add-on from the Mozilla Firefox website in the usual way. Following the advice on the add-on page, I installed the MPlayer-based Gecko Media Player using the Ubuntu package manager. Upon restarting Firefox, YouTube videos weren't replaced as expected due to a conflict with the FlashBlock extension that I had installed. Not to worry though, I simply added YouTube to the whitelist inside the FlashBlock preferences. Following this, I reloaded the page, and sure enough, the YouTube video popped up inside an embedded, but native, video player. Right-clicking on the playback window allows the user to access the preferences for the video player itself, giving a lot of options for video and audio quality.

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