EMC’s purchase of flash storage startup DSSD, a venture EMC and SAP partly funded, has legitimized the very low latency storage marketplace, writes Wikibon Cofounder and CTO David Floyer in “EMC to acquire DSSD”. Developed by storage OS engineers Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore to extract maximum performance and capacity from flash chips, DSSD is “an exciting development in the flash NVM marketplace”, and CEOs and CIOs should understand its potential to disrupt business models.

DSSD’s approach is to rewrite Linux file systems to bypass the overheads of the SCSI file system created to support spinning disk. It moves large amounts of non-volatile storage close to compute nodes by addressing them as memory. This reduces latency from about 1 millisecond to 50 microseconds or less, a 20 x latency improvement.

In some respects the DSSD approach resembles Fusion-io’s, Floyer writes. The key to Fusion-io’s success is its development of open source APIs and advanced file systems. It is a server-centric approach to improving performance, although its ION line offers a shared storage solution.

DSSD is built on a shared storage model and both can be used as the base for Server SANs, which Wikibon sees as the next generation predominant storage architecture. However, at the moment the DSSD protocol is proprietary. Floyer recommends that EMC contribute the protocol as an open standard to stimulate development and market growth for low-latency storage.

As with all Wikibon research, this Professional Alert is available without charge in full on the Wikibon Web site. IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon community, which allows them to participate in and influence the direction of Wikibon research and post their own research, questions and comments.

Graphic courtesy EMC