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Nexenta, SanDisk hop into bed, one thing leads to another – now they've got a 512TB flash brat

It's game over, spinning disks

Nexenta and SanDisk are integrating the latter's dense InfiniFlash JBOF with the former's NexentaStor to build a half-petabyte-in-3U all-flash array starting at $1.5/GB raw. At these prices disk may not be dead, but it's heading for the mortician's parlor.

Tegile has an IntelliFlash product using the same hardware, and says it costs about $0.50 effective GB. Tegile assumes a 3:1 data reduction rate, which gets us to $1.5/GB raw, simplistically speaking.

Dell's latest SC-series all-flasher comes in at $1.66/GB raw.

Dell says its Dell Storage SCv2000 entry-level array can be had for a $14,000 street price, which "buys the SCv2000 with 7x480GB Mainstream RI SSDs (TLC), base software, and three years of support." That's 3.36TB, which maths out at $4.166/raw GB for a complete system.

A Kaminario K2 v5.5 using 3D TLC flash is priced at under $1/effective GB. Assuming 3:1 reduction, we get to less than $3/GB raw.

These prices kill 15K RPM 3.5-inch disks, and give 10K ones a severe headache – and it's only going to get worse. The 512TB InfiniFlash box will be a 1PB one in twelve months. We're looking at all-flash array (AFA) hardware becoming a commodity, with the deciding value being software-based.

Nexenta and SanDisk channel partners are being told they can now sell a 64TB - 2PB system that is a "pre-tested, full-featured, cost-effective, high-performance system [for] virtualization, Big Data analytics, data warehousing, and dynamic modeling." Extra dense active archive repositories are another use case.

We're told "NexentaStor's ability to support block and file services allows customers to address use cases such as: VMware vCloud Air, OpenStack and CloudStack backend storage, generic NAS file services and Home Directory storage, etc." Think general purpose primary/secondary data array.

Nexenta CEO Taekan Maner's prepared quote said the combined system "delivers the industry lowest-cost solutions for high performance (ultra low, consistent, sub-millisecond response times and more than 8 million flash IOPS in a rack) mature unified block and file services to cloud service providers and enterprise customers."

Who ships AFAs now? We can easily count 14; Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, Kaminario, NetApp, Nexenta/SanDisk, Nimble, Pure Storage, SolidFire, Tegile, Tintri, and Violin just reel straight off the tongue. This is the hottest hardware area in storage right now.

Flash boxes are spinning into enterprises while fast disks are spinning right out; windmills trying to compete with dynamos.

The Nexenta/SanDisk HW/SW combo has been tested for use with Dell PowerEdge R730 and Supermicro's SuperServer SYS-6028U-TR4+.

It will be available through selected channel partners and you can check out the Nexenta background doc here [PDF]. ®

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