Micron Announces 5100 Series Enterprise SATA SSDs with 3D TLC NAND

Enterprises are absolutely using SSDs (find one who isn't), what on earth makes you think otherwise? At the most 'dramatic' I can muster, I've seen the same general thing in creaky smelly old 'enterprises' such as you describe. Almost all these places have the same story on how they got to the point where they had no other choice but to spank loads on storage, this is why SSDs became so pervasive there and it's why your post makes so little sense to me.

It goes something like this (ring the bell if you've lived this before); you'll have some ex-windows/mcse-types who fancied themselves as 'virtualization' experts back when vmware gave you ssh access and the words 'mezzanine connector', 'blade enclosure' and 'IO VIRT' were just whispers on the weirder parts of the internet.. Maybe they even spent a week at a vmware event and got that t-shirt they wear every friday which irritates you irrationally for some reason. They'll have taken an entire SAN's worth of disks and made one giant lun from it, presented that to their vmware 'cluster' and then can't understand why the hell the 2000 VMs all running across the same spindles (which are probably in 'training wheels' HW raid5 mode) then perform like an asthmatic camel carrying a few binbags of spanners under any load. What then? Well, unless they got lucky enough to hire some people who knew what they were actually doing who could help, they drop EMC a cool few mil and you get auto-tiered into the 8U of SSDs that got pushed in, someone talks at a conference and everyone pats themselves on the back and goes home to have a wank.

They have cool as fuck blue LEDs on the front of the racks though and it's all pre-tax spends so no one really loses.

The latest dell kit generally uses SAS for the 'os' drives even if you go cheapo and load it up with slow LFF sata's. I'm not really sure what your point is? If you're connecting to JBODs and building your own storage, then yep -- SAS isn't going anywhere.. You really shoudn't be doing that sort of thing though. It's almost always better and cheaper to BUY storage instead of building it unless you have the ops capacity to actually do yourself (hint: you probably don't, and even if you do you probably won't keep it for the lifetime of the solution). Same story for virtu; yeah sure you can spend 8 months deploying openstack but it's probably cheaper to just give vmware some money and work on your actual problems which probably aren't around provisioning compute anyway.

So; back to the point. Hooking up to JBODs and local disks in your boxes are probably using SAS. If you're actually dealing with a larger infra tho you're probably not lucky enough to have local storage across the estate, so you're rigging up sas to some build some SANs, or to some specific giant DB or other which should probably be left to a vendor anyway. If you're building out real shared storage anywhere which has more than a dozen racks per dc then it's almost certainly going to have to be fed out over the network.

Then it'll via be 10g fibre HBAs in your VM hosts, probably with a filesystem, then a file which'll show up as disks in the vms VM's. This is a really poor way to do it, but things are fast enough now that it mostly works, even if it gives us a bit of a scratchy feeling in our eyes. If you're not masochistic enough to deal with iSCSI (I'll never do it through choice; zfs+gluster+nfs is almost always the better choice) -- then you'll work out the simplicity of a NAS outweighs the whole SAN thing these days at almost any scale. It'll take a few massive outages until you really get there though. Before the claims otherwise, I've run multi-TB oracle DB's over NFS, we're not in 1999 anymore; and this has caused me way less problems (actually almost none) than san, fcoe, iscsi, or whatever else combined.

For the initated, who are you trying to convince here? Hell, 6 years ago I was putting in 25k flash accel cards for companies with 6x the employees you claim are 'enterprise', and they knew exactly what they were doing. Those same folks have entire SANs which have no spinny disks in them at all these days..

NVMe is the new cool for sure. You almost certainly don't need them, though, and you probably won't use them properly either. You can get them passthrough'd on google cloud these days too, but drivers are still a bit ropey.

I guess the pro tip here is: Unless you're doing PROPER infra stuff (e.g running a massive cloud where you don't control the workload, massive shared storage environments and the like) then tech like NVMe is probably just letting you avoid the issues you should actually be fixing. You can do quite a lot with solutions that cost 1/10th of the bleeding edge costs and probably outperfom the 'hardware' solution by making your workload more efficient anyway..

Anyway, my $0.02