1-2-1 I SSDs
Market is ripe for enterprise SSD adoption
GURDIP KALLEY Business Development Manager, S3
S3’s Gurdip Kalley looks at the massive potential of solid state disks, while partner companies’ Chief Technology Officers - James Candelaria of WhipTail, Gary Watson of Nexsan and iD7’s Mark Klarzynski - explore the reasons behind the current SSD buzz.
Solid State Solutions (S3) is forever looking at emerging technologies and companies to complement its existing portfolio of mainstream vendors such as HDS, NetApp and EMC. Many readers may be aware that we were one of the first VARs to pick up and run away with DataDomain, Isilon and Nexsan. In all three cases we have held the coveted position of “Partner of the Year”.
It is important to stay ahead of the curve not only in terms of business productivity but customer satisfaction. Our customer base expects S3 to be innovative and leading edge in its recommendations and system designs, which brings us neatly to the subject of Solid State Disk (SSD).
S3 was itself formed in 1988 to sell high performance solid state disk systems. Two decades later and we are now seeing a massive rise in SSD focussed start-ups. The recent successes of acquisitions such as 3PAR, Isilon and EquaLogic have led VC’s to hungrily (greedily) look for the next big thing. Where do we start? The choices in terms of dedicated SSD solutions seem almost infinite - Violin, WhipTail, Nimbus, Pure Storage and iD7 !!
What is clear to S3 is that the market is ripe for Enterprise SSD adoption and 2012 will see a monumental uptake in SSD based storage technologies. Whether one is looking at SSD in terms of PCI card type technology, accelerator device or dedicated array, it is clear that Enterprise SSD storage solutions are here and now.
The tumbling cost of SSD has been the real driver and many believe we are not too far off seeing the manufacturing cost of
20 SEPTEMBER 2011 |
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SSD reaching a similar equivalent to HDD. The emergence of different grades of SSD from MLC, eMLC and SLC now means that there is a price point to suit most.
As with all technologies economics rules the roost - as SSD becomes more affordable our customers will readily deploy it where it suited most - virtual desktop deployments, application hotspots, oracle databases for example. The reality is that SSD offers customers a high performance, low footprint, “green” and easily manageable alternative to the age old of answer of throwing more disks at a problem that is inherently not about capacity.
There is best exemplified in a recent S3 customer deployment: £ The general rules for VDI (or VMware View as it’s called now) are low capacity / high IOPs storage. Unlike Virtual servers which get powered on and off infrequently, VDI machines get powered on every morning and powered off every night creating what is known as a “boot storm” (where all the machines start up at the same time say at 9am). To handle a boot storm the underlying storage and servers must be able to cope with all users accessing their desktops simultaneously.
£ Our customer has 1000 desktops that form part of their VDI project. After sizing and with direct input from the customer we decided on 25 IOPs per desktop (this is very high and would be considered a “conservative” estimate).
£ The customer has a mixture of high demand and medium usage users due to the applications they use so could not use the VMware recommended 5-7IOPS per desktop.
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