So this is it – the last article in my mini-series on understanding flash. This is the bit where I draw it all together in a neat conclusion that makes you think, “Yes! That was worth reading”. No pressure eh?

So let me start with the conclusion first: as a storage medium, NAND flash is a royal pain in the ass.

Chaos

Why? Well, let’s look back at what we’ve learned in the previous 9 articles:

• Data stored in flash pages cannot be overwritten without an erase operation taking place first
• Erase operations affect entire blocks of flash pages instead of just the page you want to erase
• Erase operations are an order of magnitude slower than read and program (write) operations
• Flash media wears out and is limited by the number of program and erase operations (P/E Cycles) possible
• The performance of a flash package is unbalanced: for example, some writes are faster than others
• Complex mapping tables are required to write updated data to free pages and track stale pages prior to erasure
• The process of garbage collection (the recycling of stale pages) requires the over-provisioning of flash
• The phenomenon of write amplification causes many more writes to take place on the backend than those issued from any hosts, negatively affecting performance and endurance
• The fabrication plants (or “flash foundries”) built to manufacture NAND flash are incredibly expensive

In short, NAND flash is a tricky medium to use for enterprise storage. A whole lot of work is required to make a collection of flash chips appear to be a unified, resilient block of storage with fast, predictable performance.

And I haven’t even told you everything. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of read disturb. When you read a page within a NAND flash chip, you cause a very minor electronic field in the locality of the cells it contains. That field will cause a small disturbance to any neighbouring cells – usually not enough to cause concern, but significant nevertheless. So what happens when you repeatedly read that page? Eventually, after X number of reads, the data stored within the nearby cells becomes questionable.

The solution, therefore, is to keep track of the number of times each page is disturbed in this manner and then set a threshold (let’s say 50 disturbances) beyond which you will copy the data out to a clean page and then mark the old page as stale. Easy.

But just think about what that means for a moment. Remember when I said that write amplification was mainly impacted by write workloads? This new piece of information means that even on a 100% read workload there will be additional back-end writes taking place on the array. Just another example of why flash is a tricky medium to manage.

Order

Of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention that NAND flash brings a tremendous set of benefits along with these problems. You could say they come as a package (oh come on, that was one of my better puns).

Let’s go back to basics for a moment: if you want to take a defined quantity of work and do it in a shorter amount of time, what are your choices? Put simply, there are two options: do the same work faster, or do more of it in parallel (and of course both options can be used together for extra gain).

The basic building block of a disk array is, obviously, the hard disk drive. I’ve already explained at tedious length about the performance gap between disk and flash, so we know that we can access data faster using flash. Technologies like RAID allow multiple disks to be used in parallel to achieve performance (and resilience) gains, but given a limited amount of physical space (such as a data centre rack), how many hard drives can you actually squeeze into one system?

Now compare this to the number of NAND flash packages you could fit into the same space, all of which you could potentially utilise in parallel and at a lower latency. Doing the same work faster – and doing more of it in parallel.

And there’s more. Those clunky great big cabinets of disk use up horrendous amounts of power just to spin those little rotating platters – with much of the energy converted to heat and noise: waste. The heat results in a requirement for additional cooling, which uses even more power: more waste. And it all takes up so much physical space that data centres become overrun with storage.

In contrast, all flash arrays (AFAs) require less power, less cooling and take up less physical space: it’s not uncommon for customers to pay for the move to flash simply by avoiding the need to build a new data centre or extend an existing one. In summary, the net cost of using flash is now less than that of using disk.

When I first started writing this blog back in 2012 there was still a debate over whether flash would replace disk for enterprise storage. That debate was over some time ago: flash has already won.

Architecture Matters

So this post marks the end of my journey into explaining and understanding NAND flash. Yet there is a whole new area which needs exploring: the architecture of all flash arrays.

Enterprise storage needs be safe, reliable, predictable and fast. Yet at a package level, NAND flash is a tricky little beast that has to be constantly watched to make sure it behaves itself. There’s a dichotomy here: how do we use the latter to deliver the former? How do we take a component designed for consumer electronics and use it to build an enterprise-class AFA? In short, how we derive order from chaos?

The answer is in the architecture. At the time of writing this blog there are a number of AFA vendors on the market, each with a different approach to taming the beast. Apart from my own employer, Violin Memory, there is EMC, IBM, HDS, Pure Storage, SolidFire, Kaminario and a whole load more.

And that’s why this industry is so interesting to me. Everybody is trying to do this differently, although you can broadly categorise the solutions into three distinct ranges: hybrid arrays, SSD-based arrays and ground-up arrays. Everybody thinks their way is right – and nobody can afford to be wrong. The market for flash-based primary storage is huge and growing all the time: the winners get unparalleled success, while the losers … are simply left in disarray*

*I won’t lie – I’m so proud of that pun I’m going to award myself a couple of weeks off.

Storage architecture shapes database behaviour – and that relationship is evolving again. If you found this series useful, you might also be interested in Databases in the Age of AI, which explores how AI agents are changing the assumptions at the heart of enterprise data systems.

Before I draw this series on Understanding Flash to a close, I wanted to briefly touch on the subject of manufacturing. Don’t worry, I’ve taken heed of the kind feedback I had after my floating gate transistor blog post (“Please stop talking about electrons!“) and will instead focus on the commercial aspects, because ultimately they affect the price you will be paying for your flash-based storage. If you’re not familiar with the way things are you might be surprised…

The Supplier Landscape

Semiconductor chips, such as the NAND flash packages found in your storage, phones and tablets, are manufactured in fabrication plants known as “fabs” or flash “foundries”. To say that fabs are not cheap to build would be somewhat of an understatement – they are mind-bogglingly, ludicrously expensive.

In 2014 the global semiconductor industry posted record sales totalling $335.8 billion. That’s the entire semiconductor industry, not just the subset that produces NAND flash… and I think you’ll agree that’s quite a lot of money. But to put that figure into perspective, when Samsung decided to build an entirely new fab in late 2014, it had to commit $15 billion for a project that won’t be completed “until mid-2017”.

Clearly a fab is an eye-watering investment – and it is mainly for this reason that there are (at the time of writing) only six key companies worldwide who run flash foundries. What’s more, because of that staggering cost, four of those six are working together in pairs to share the investment burden. The four teams are:

• Toshiba and SanDisk
• Samsung
• Intel and Micron
• SK Hynix

With only four sets of fabs in operation, the market is hardly awash with an abundance of NAND flash – which of course suits the fab operators just fine as it keeps the price of flash higher. Oversupply would be unsustainable for an industry with such high costs.

Process Shrinking

Talking of costs, the fab operators are never allowed to stand still because of the relentless drive to make things smaller – Moore’s Law doesn’t just apply to processors; NAND flash is a semiconductor too. The act of taking the design of a microchip and reducing it in size is known as a process shrink – and it brings all sorts of benefits. Remember that a NAND flash cell is basically constructed from floating gate transistors? Well if those transistors are reduced in size:

• Less current is needed per transistor, reducing the overall power consumption of the flash
• This in turn reduces the heat output of an identical design with the same clock frequency (or alternatively the clock frequency can be increased)
• Most importantly, more flash dies can be produced from the same silicon wafers (the raw material), resulting in either reduced costs or increased density

It may sound like smaller is better, but as always there is a flip side. Retooling a flash foundry to move to a smaller process geometry takes time and money – and the return on investment for the fab is reduced with each shrink. But we’ll come back to that in a minute.

Process Geometries

The different sizes in which flash is fabricated are known as process geometries. Traditionally, they are defined by measuring the distance (in nanometers) between the source and drain of each transistor (although these days this practice has become much less well-defined). In a strange quirk of algebra, the two digit numbers are written as <digit><letter> so that, for example, the first geometry to be in the range 29-20nm (e.g. 25nm) is called 2X, then a second in that range (e.g. 21nm) is called 2Y. Once into the teens (e.g. 19nm) we go back to 1X. [Although interestingly, Toshiba and SanDisk have a second generation NAND which they call 1Y to distinguish it from first-generation 1X even though both are 19nm]

Here’s the current technology roadmap for NAND flash courtesy of my friends at TechInsights:

So what’s the problem with flash getting smaller? Well, hopefully for the very last time, cast your mind back to the concept of floating gate transistors. On these tiny devices the floating gates effectively capture and store electrons that are passing from one side of the transistor to another, retaining charge – and that charge determines the cell’s value of 0 or 1. But at the tiny geometries that flash is approaching now, the number of electrons involved is desperately small, resulting in large margins for error. Electrons, after all, are notoriously good at hide and seek.

This means that flash cells are less reliable, that even more error correction codes are required… and that ultimately, we are reaching what is known as the scaling limit. It looks like the end is it sight for flash as we know it.

3D NAND Flash

Except it isn’t. If you look again at the Technology Roadmap picture you’ll see entries appearing alongside each foundry operator for 3D NAND. This is a significant new fabrication process that looks like it will be the direction taken by the flash industry for the foreseeable future. I would love to attempt a detailed explanation of 3D NAND design here, but a) it’s beyond me, b) I promised to listen to the feedback after the last time I went sub-atomic, and c) Jim Handy (AKA The Memory Guy) already has a fantastic set of articles all about it.

The point is, 3D NAND maps out a future for NAND flash beyond the scaling limits of 2D planar NAND – and the big fab operators have already invested. That puts 3D NAND in pole position as we increasingly look to non-volatile memory to store our data.

But there are other technologies trying to compete…

The Next Big Thing

The holy grail of memory technology is universal memory. This is a hypothetical technology which brings all the benefits, but none of the drawbacks, of the multitude of memory technologies in use today: SRAM, DRAM, NAND Flash and so on. SRAM (often used on-chip as a CPU cache) is fast but expensive, DRAM is cheaper but must be constantly refreshed (using considerably more power) while NAND flash is comparatively slower and wears out with use. If only there were some new technology that met all our requirements?

Well, first of all, it’s worth mentioning that if universal memory did come about it would have far-reaching consequences on the way we design and build computers… but all the same, there are various technologies in R&D right now which make claims to be the NVM solution of the future: PCM, MRAM, RRAM, FeRAM, Memristor and so on. But these – and any other – technologies all face the same challenge: that massive initial investment required to go from prototype to production. In other words, the cost and time associated with building a fabrication plant.

Say you converted your shed into a clean room and invented a wonderful new memory technology called Shed-RAM (SHRAM). SHRAM is fast, cheap, dense and only uses a tiny amount of power. You’ve still got to convince somebody to splurge billions of dollars on a foundry before it can be productised. And, as I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s a pretty big bet on an untested technology – especially if it takes years to build. What happens if, one year in, your neighbour (who recently converted his garage into a clean room) invents Garage-RAM (GaRAM) which makes your SHRAM worthless? Nobody is going to cope well with the loss of billions of dollars on a bad bet.

Conclusion

The investment hurdle required to turn a new NVM technology into a product is both a challenge and a stabiliser to the NVM industry. In theory it could stifle potential new technologies, but at the same time (at least for those of us in enterprise storage) it means there is plenty of warning when the tide turns: you are likely to see any successful new tech in your phone before it appears in your data centre.

Now, who can lend me $15 billion to build a new fab? I can’t afford anything more than 0% interest, but I can offer a lifetime’s supply of USB sticks to sweeten the deal…

Storage architecture shapes database behaviour – and that relationship is evolving again. If you found this series useful, you might also be interested in Databases in the Age of AI, which explores how AI agents are changing the assumptions at the heart of enterprise data systems.