Steve Ballmer did a nice job kicking off the keynotes on Monday night with an impassioned presentation about Windows Phone, Windows 8, and Xbox 360, but when it ended I found myself wondering why he didn’t talk about any other Microsoft products. Windows phone looks pretty slick though, and I’m assuming it will run on eMMC flash for data storage. Next year Microsoft will be passing the baton to someone else for their traditional opening keynote and will not be back – not sure what (if anything) that means. We’ll also have to wait and see if Ryan Seacrest will be invited back…

Sony announced a new flash memory card promising even faster performance, which goes to show users are still looking for faster flash-based devices and manufacturers are paying attention. One of the guys in the Sony booth also mentioned a flash card that can read up to1 GB/second that is coming soon. He didn’t have any samples available, but he sure enjoyed telling me about it.

There were tons of SSDs displayed at the show. They’re not very exciting to look at since they all look the same, but check out these specs! 80K random read IOPS and 36K random write IOPS – amazing!

There was a lot of talk about super thin and light ultrabooks, which sounds like yet another Windows product following in Apple’s footsteps (MacBook Air). After schlepping my heavy Dell all over Storage Visions and CES though, I have to admit feeling some pangs of want; the new Windows ultrabooks look awfully sleek and comfortable to work with. The latest version demands an on-circuit board SSD design to meet the form factor and weight requirements.
Coming to a beach near you: water-proof cell phones! I love the ocean and beach life, but I’m in the habit of leaving my phone at home. This demo showing water-proof phones in an aquarium was certainly eye-catching, though I wonder if people really want to be connected while they’re swimming. Clearly the eMMC in these phones is water-proof as well, but we have yet to see any in our labs. Then again, our engineers have been known to work and swim.

Ken Jacobson with Qualcomm had a nice keynote presentation Tuesday morning, including “augmented reality,” a new feature that allowed him to animate several plastic Sesame Street characters, which were talking and interacting with the demonstrator. It being Vegas, Qualcomm decided to include some very funky dancers just for pure entertainment value.
Automotive was hot this year, with lots of really nice cars. It was a little odd to me that graphics and CPU chip maker NVIDA had a Lamborghini in its booth, but it definitely got my attention!

Car telematics demos were everywhere. This in-dash version looked nice, but I was surprised that last year’s big concept of connecting a cell phone to function as your telematics device was nowhere to be seen. It seemed like such a good idea given that this technology becomes obsolete so much faster than the average life of a car. Do they really expect us to use the same telematics for 15 years? Or is there some kind of planned obsolescence at work here?

Forget about driving a Prius; this year’s uber-environmentalist should be driving this solar car. It only costs a few hundred thousand dollars, but think of how much you’ll save in gas. Note to my fellow Seattleites: Do not attempt between October and April, you may not reach your destination.

Below is a concept car from Audi that will out-Smartcar the Smartcar.

Last week we attended Storage Visions, a show adjacent to CES that focuses on data storage solutions. This year’s theme was Heavy Storage for thin Clients.
We were honored to be a finalist for the Storage Visions award “New Enabling Consumer Storage Technology,” for the Datalight Reliance Nitro fault-tolerant file system. Although we didn’t get to take home the trophy, we wanted to congratulate our partner, Micron, for winning the award with their Real SSD C400 Self Encrypting Drive.

Learn more about Datalight Embedded File Systems

There’s a lot of buzz on the MSDN blog site regarding their latest file system post. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx - and plenty of insightful comments as well.

I for one am happy to see people talking about file system features, especially Data Integrity, knowledge of Flash Media, and faster access through B+ trees. Of course, Datalight’s own Reliance Nitro file system has had all this and more for some time now…

Microsoft has a new term for a thing we’ve seen often in the case of unexpected power loss – a “Torn Write”. They point this out as a specific problem for their journalling file system, NTFS, but updating any file system metadata in place can be problematic. It looks to me like this new file system, ReFS, handles this by bundling the metadata writes with other metadata writes or with the file data. If the former, this demonstrates the trade-off between Reliability and Performance that we are very familiar with at Datalight. Bundling smaller writes will help with spinning media and flash. In time we will see how much control the application developer has over this configuration – another important point for our customers.

One of the commenters posted that error correction belongs at the block device layer, and I tend to agree. Microsoft’s design goal “to detect and correct corruption” is a noble one, but how would they detect corruption for user data? Additional file checksums and ECC algorithms would be intrusive and potentially time consuming. Keeping a watch on vital file system structures is important, of course, and a good backup in case block level error detection fails.

I look forward to reading more from Microsoft’s file system team in the future, and especially hope to see a roadmap for when these important changes will make it down to the embedded space.

Learn more about what happens during a power interruption.

Today we are excited to announce Reliance Nitro 2.5. This release was focused on the requirements of “Converged Mobile Devices” or multi-function mobile device types. To meet the requirements of the market, Reliance Nitro 2.5 continues to be a competitive advantage for any device storing critical data, plus now improves responsiveness, security and control of the device. For more information visit our Reliance Nitro 2.5 landing page or view our press releases:
Datalight Releases File Level Secure Delete on eMMC 4.4x
and
Datalight Improves User Experience with Low-Latency Reliable File System

Read more about our exciting new release

A recent article by Doug Wong compared performance characteristics of eMMC and ONFI specification EZ-NAND, specifically Toshiba’s SmartNAND here: http://www.eetimes.com/design/memory-design/4218886

One consideration I would add to this quite excellent summary is about the availability of drivers. Raw NAND has been around for quite a while and the market supplies a large range of drivers. Many of these will utilize the basic functionality of SmartNAND and other EZ NAND chips with only small modifications. Drivers for eMMC, on the other hand, are much harder to find. Only Linux has a freely available driver, which Google’s Android has taken advantage of in recent releases.

At Datalight, we continue to be excited by both of these new technologies. From the JEDEC eMMC parts, the cool features such as Secure Delete and Replay Protected Memory Block are very exciting. On the other hand, the sheer performance of Toshiba’s SmartNAND and other EZ NAND solutions is very much in demand.

Just in case you’ve ever wondered what we mean when we say Reliance Nitro is a “transactional file system,” or how it differs from FAT or ExFAT, have I got the video for you. Using a whiteboard and a seemingly endless supply of colored pens, I doodled my way through a 2-minute explanation of the technology behind our flagship product and why Reliance Nitro provides rock-solid reliability and lightning-fast mount times. Hope you enjoy it!

Learn more about Transactional vs FAT file systems

Flash Memory Summit has come of age with a conference agenda that has technical depth and an exhibit hall with professional quality booths and demos. This year SSD and PCI-e memory card solutions ruled, and Micron demonstrated a PCI-e memory card that had 128 individual Enhanced ClearNAND devices on it, 16 chips on each of 8 DIMMs. It totaled up to 2 terabytes of flash. It was very cool to see this kind of application demonstrated, and it reaffirmed our decision to support ClearNAND. In addition to demonstrating ClearNAND support in our booth, we debuted new file system technology to mitigate write amplification. There were a lot of tough questions asked, but the most common reaction was, “Really, you’re doing that many IOPs with small (4kb) random writes? How are you doing it?” We saw several references to write amplification in presentations and on the show floor, so clearly this is an issue the industry is actively wrestling with.

One of our senior software engineers at the show was particularly impressed by what he termed the “unbelievable performance” of some of the flash hardware being demonstrated (well over a hundred thousand IOPs), including the aforementioned PCI-e ClearNAND solutions. He said, “In some of the panel discussions, they were talking about IOPS in the millions! With the individual flash memory cells getting slower as lithography shrinks, there is only one way this is being achieved: pipelining and parallelism.”

This year we hosted the Software panel, or so-called Lunatic Fringe. It was surprisingly well attended for a show focused on hardware, and it ran the gamut from Flash Memory on Linux to Databases to a file system for SD cards. For next year, I’d like to see a push towards an Embedded portion of the show, because there was plenty of interest in our embedded software solutions.

Finally, I was excited to see some of the Enterprise level solutions mirror what Datalight is doing at the embedded scale. Tier 1 caching, which is using a few SSDs to speed up the slower hard drives? That matches our Paired Storage performance enhancement. Treating Flash differently than a Hard Drive? We’ve been doing that since the beginning, and it’s only getting better in this next release.

Learn more about Datalight’s flash media managers

Lately you may have noticed a lot of talk about eMMC on our blog and website. If so you may be thinking, “Why is Datalight so excited about eMMC?” Here are 5 top reasons we’re jumping on the eMMC bandwagon:

#5) Standards: Having a standard specification for hardware like eMMC enables our customers to spend less time integrating new hardware and more time focusing on their core competencies.

#4) ECC: As NAND flash lithography shrinks and density increases, error correction has become exponentially more complex and therefore difficult to do in software. Performing ECC in the hardware, like eMMC (or OnFI EZ-NAND parts like Micron’s ClearNAND), overcomes this problem and offers much simpler integration.

#3) Performance: In combining an accepted standard with on-board ECC, eMMC offers excellent performance and flexibility for customers.

#2) Advanced features like secure delete: With more critical data being stored, data security is becoming a much bigger issue. We’re happy to see a standards body like JEDEC focus on tackling this problem. And since customers will need a file system capable of enabling this feature, we’re delighted to be the first to offer support for eMMC 4.41 features like secure erase and secure trim.

#1) Customers: More and more of our customers are either evaluating or using eMMC. Whenever we see our customers using a new technology we ask ourselves how we can help enable them to take full advantage of it. Exploiting the features of eMMC at the file system level is a win for all of us.

Learn more about Datalight flash management solutions

That cracking you may or may not have heard last month was the sound of SanDisk and Toshiba breaking the sub-20 nanometer NAND barrier. Flying in the face of conventional wisdom (and more than a few industry analysts), both companies recently announced they will be delivering 19nm NAND this year. Intel and Micron are close behind, each with their own 20 nanometer announcements. Those who said it couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be done had some very compelling reasons, chiefly that the physics behind multi-cell architecture in a 1x nanometer cell are shaky at best. How many electrons will there be in a 1x nanometer cell? How many levels of data can possibly be detected with so few of them? The supporting technologies for this detection, not to mention correction of the unavoidable errors that will creep in will be critical .

In an industry that has come to expect product innovation in the form of shrinking die sizes being announced roughly every 12-18 months, keeping pace with this trend indefinitely is not only pushing the boundaries of physics, but also manufacturers’ technical abilities. How low can they go? While the introduction of 19nm parts show that innovation and scaling of NAND Flash memory continues moving at breakneck speed, one wonders when the end point of this shrinkage will finally come. And while the drive for NAND innovation has dramatically improved both the cost and performance of the technology, moving to ever smaller die sizes is beginning to have severe consequences on data storage reliability and flash endurance – challenges which must be addressed not only by the supporting hardware technologies but also by the file system and flash management software. Bottom line: Will the devices you’re responsible for provide the performance, life span and flexibility your customers require? What contingencies should you be planning for as the storage technologies get ever smaller?

Learn more about Datalight flash management software

While listening to NPR this week I caught a story on a new artificial heart developed by the Texas Heart Institute. What’s cool is that the device promises to overcome some of the inherent limitations of older technologies that led to premature failure – such as pumps wearing out or breaking down, and blood clots. It uses a completely different mechanism than prior attempts at mechanical replacements that relied on valves and pumps. What’s creepy is that recipients of this new type of heart that uses rotors HAVE NO PULSE! I imagine this dramatic change will have significant implications for related medical technology such as blood pressure and heart monitoring devices and will require new ways of assessing patient status. The assumptions we’ve made about the necessity of a pulse to indicate life go out the window.

As I think more about it, I see some parallels to other technology advances that call us to re-examine assumptions. In the quest for solutions to problems, humans first attempt to mimic existing devices – such as pumping hearts or flapping bird wings, but the successful and innovative solutions often are completely different – non-pulsing hearts and fixed wing aircraft.

The world of digital storage offers yet another parallel. When solid state storage came on the scene in the late 1990’s, the approach to enabling adoption was to make the new flash technology mimic the old rotating media in a hard disk. Low level system software – like our FlashFX – made this new technology appear to the higher levels in the system as a hard disk, minimizing the changes for applications. But over time the underlying flash technology has become more sophisticated than hard drives and moved beyond simple read and write commands. Take the recent advances in e•MMC just announced by JEDEC, for example. If we want to truly enable these innovations for applications, the whole software stack needs to toss out old assumptions. Datalight will be leading the charge and developing a new generation of software that defends against the shortcomings of the technology while embracing its strengths. Hopefully this will pave the way for many innovations such as new medical monitoring devices that can determine health and life without finding a pulse.