There is a growing appetite for storage performance in the data center that old fashioned disk drives don’t seem to be able to satisfy. Solid state drives are becoming the new stars of performance hungry applications, but with so many vendors and no unifying product standard is there a common ground for those drives? In an exclusive e-mail interview with Jim McCoy, chairman of Pliant Technology, a new company that will soon begin shipping their own SSD products, we try to find an answer to that question. InfoWorld: What is Pliant Technology?McCoy: Pliant Technology is developing a new class of solid state drive storage devices for the enterprise. The company is primarily focused on Enterprise Flash Drives, or EFDs, that offer very high performance, very high reliability and low power consumption compared with traditional disk drive architecture. The company came out of stealth mode in February, but we have been working on our device for about two years. Pliant was established by a team of executives and engineers from Fujitsu, Seagate and Maxtor who’ve had a track record of success in the storage industry. I expect we’ll find the same success with Pliant. InfoWorld: Why create a new company? Aren’t there already many suppliers of SSDs?McCoy: You are correct that there are several SSD suppliers. However, we feel they do not solve the essential problem that SSD was designed to address, especially for enterprise applications. The issue is that disk drive performance is no longer adequate for high transaction rate applications. In this age, there is a huge amount of data that needs to be moved and accessed quickly, and disk drives aren’t doing it efficiently. And, so far, every supplier we’re aware of that has tried to stretch consumer type Flash SSD technology to meet the high demands of enterprise storage has not been able to do it either.InfoWorld: How will Pliant products be different? McCoy: Enterprise applications demand very high IOPS performance, low latency and high reliability, while operating 24/7 at or near 100 percent duty cycle levels. The Pliant EFD is different from traditional SSDs in that it has been designed specifically for this environment while being fully plug compatible with existing disk drive architectures. In addition to superior reliability, our EFD device will provide performance that is exponentially greater than other Flash-based SSDs. In fact, our device will provide greater performance than DRAM-based SSDs in the same rack space, at a lower cost and using a lot less power. InfoWorld: What market segment are you targeting?McCoy: In general, we are targeting the enterprise market. To go into a bit more detail, there are many applications today that have extremely high IO requirements and are in desperate need of better performance. These include any online transaction based or query based system, such as financial services, banking, manufacturing, etc. In fact, any system incorporating expensive, power-consuming supposed high-performance disk drives (15K RPM) could potentially reap huge benefits from the use of Pliant EFDs. InfoWorld: Who will be your customers?McCoy: Pliant Technology will sell its products on an OEM basis to storage system and server providers. We plan to bring our products to market by the end of this year. InfoWorld: Why should end-users consider SSD? McCoy: End users are facing many storage performance related issues today and employing multiple techniques, such as thin provisioning, virtualization, and expensive DRAM caching in addition to data center consolidation, to improve performance and efficiency. These tactics place even greater demands on already over-burdened storage systems, and too often result in painful over provisioning of disk drives. Over provisioning is the tactic of utilizing more disk drives than needed from a capacity standpoint by 3 to 1, or 4 to 1, or in some cases even 10 to 1, to achieve the required performance. Think about it: it’s not uncommon for end users to purchase and run 3 to 4 times as many disk drives as they need just to get functional performance. That IT executives have learned to accept over provisioning as “normal” is a clear statement of the need for a better solution.This of course results in more racks, more controllers, more cache appliances, reduced reliability, and power consumption that’s going through the roof. By using EFDs together with low cost disk drives, over provisioning can not only be avoided, but higher capacity and performance levels can be achieved at lower costs and with power consumption reduced by as much as 80 percent. InfoWorld: What capacities/performance are you targeting with your products? McCoy: Capacity points will be similar to disk drives capacity points, and will grow with improvements anticipated by Flash chip suppliers. Specific performance specifications will be released when we formally announce our initial products later this year. While I can’t get into specifics, I can say that our performance will go far beyond the enterprise SSD vendor’s products out there today, and will look more like DRAM performance. InfoWorld: Write performance and long time data persistence are typical weak point of SSD drives. How do you plan to overcome those limitations?McCoy: These are only some of the issues that need to be specially addressed for enterprise applications. Traditional solutions may be adequate for low duty cycle applications, such as laptops, but absolutely are not sufficient for the enterprise. Enterprise read and write performance needs to be symmetrical and considerably higher than traditional SSDs and far better than the best of the disk drives. Data integrity and reliability must be at least as good as the best of the disk drives. In addition to providing unprecedented performance, Pliant’s new controller architecture and firmware are specifically designed to overcome Flash phenomena, such as write endurance, read disturb and program disturbs, to provide no-compromise enterprise-level reliability. InfoWorld: Price is another aspect of SSD that customers may not like…McCoy: I’m glad you brought this up because there is a bit of a misconception in the industry. I believe that customers will like the cost of EFD. They’re recognizing that cost per gigabyte is only one of many metrics in real-world storage applications. As I said earlier, OEM customers who pair our EFDs together with low cost higher capacity disk drives for their high transaction rate applications can provide major purchase cost savings, as much as 40 percent or more, to their customers. They’ll no longer need to over provision disk drives and can also enjoy the tremendous reliability improvement and energy efficiency of a more streamlined approach. So while initial cost savings will be significant, total cost of ownership savings will be outstanding.InfoWorld: Can a single vendor have a significant impact on SSD prices? McCoy: To some extent yes. As an example, the Pliant EFD does not require any on-board DRAM cache to achieve its performance levels. Other SSDs do require such cache, which is not only expensive itself but requires additional costs in terms of power backup and complexity due to its volatility. InfoWorld: Storage vendors seem to be reluctant to move away from spinning drives: what could change that?McCoy: How about a 40-percent cost reduction, an 80-percent power reduction, and an 80-percent lower failure rate? That’s a simple answer, but it gets right to the bottom line about what IT managers and CTOs need. Disk disk drives are not going to evaporate in many bulk storage mid-range performance applications in the near term. But the basic physics and power requirements intrinsic to their mechanical nature makes them unsuitable compared to a good solid state solution at the high end of HDD’s historic markets. Clumsy early Flash SSD products and hybrid HDD/Flash products are confusing to customers today. Our new generation of products will change those perceptions and help customers understand the limits of mechanical HDD technology and advantages of Pliant EFD.We think that word within the industry and recognition of the reliability and cost effectiveness of the RIGHT enterprise Flash SSD – Pliant’s EFD – product will travel fast. Adoption of Pliant EFDs will rapidly displace disk drives in high-performance applications as low-end Flash has displaced HDD storage in small and portable consumer devices. The good old HDD we’ve come to know and love will do just fine in the middle for a while. null