1-2-1 I SSDs
from the past several years: they were looking at technologies that would be able to “bridge the gap” between the speeds of traditional rotational storage and the needs of today’s enterprises. Unforeseen by many was that the costs of MLC Flash would drop precipitously thanks in no small part to the phenomenal success of products like the iPhone and iPad. This has brought the cost-to-entry for flash to a level that the 95% of enterprises that are cost-sensitive can accommodate.
Q In broad terms, what are perceived to be the main advantages of SSDs?
MK: The main perceived advantages of SSDs are significant performance increases, measured in terms of higher IOPS and lower latency, which increase performance of applications such as Oracle, SQL, Exchange, VM and VDI), as well as reducing data centre floor space, power consumption & cooling requirements.
GW: In theory, a single SSD drive can deliver 100 times the random IOPS of a spinning drive. Assuming that the subsystem it lives in can actually deliver this kind of performance to the host, it’s a very attractive proposition for transactional workloads like SQL, Oracle, Exchange, and even the top end of the VMware market.
JC: Speed and Performance; Space, power and cooling savings.
Q SSDs are inevitably compared with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) - can you compare and contrast the main pluses and minuses of each?
MK: Today, SSDs deliver superior benefits compared to HDDs in all areas, except for higher cost/GB. For example; Performance - Flash based SSDs are100x faster; Form factor - SSDs are very compact at 2.5” & 3.5”; Lower power consumption - up to 85% lower than HDDs when active and up to 95% lower when idle. Taking all of these factors in to account, SSD based solutions deliver a greater ROI compared to traditional HDD based solutions.
JC: For all applications that require high IO, disk is dead. Legacy technology trying to keep up with 12 years of Intel and AMD’s development. Clients don’t want to pay 80% of their IT storage spend on less than 10% of the use cases.
SSD
Random IOPS Sequential MB/s Cost/GB
Cost/IOPS Write durability 22
Best (x100) Moderate
Very Expensive (x25 to x100) Best (x10) OK to poor
Gary Watson’s table summarising the pros and cons of SSD v HDD SEPTEMBER 2011 |
WWW.SNSEUROPE.COM
HDD’s are slow - 200 IO’s on a good day, and that’s READ IO. Virrtualization for example requires tremendous WRITE IO for small, random data requests - a nightmare scenario for HDD’s. SSD’s though can wear out FAST.
The main factor an enterprise needs to review is what is the wear management? Does the vendor offer some IP to extend the drives endurance beyond the usual 9-15 months? This is critical when reviewing an investment in SSD’s. SSD’s do not handle WRITE IO well. Again, this is a critical element, so any investment in SSD’s for a use case such as VDI must require that the vendor offer’s a layer of optimization to increase the WRITE speeds.
Q What are the types of applications that fit the SSD sweet spot right now? And could you provide a brief example of a customer success?
MK: Business applications such as OLTP databases (Oracle & SQL); email applications such as Exchange and Domino; Virtualised environments running VMs and VDI such as VMware, HyperV, WyseWSM; all fit the SSD sweet spot today.
GW: SSD is a clear winner for transactional applications, provided the highest quality SSD’s are used, and provided the supplier has the technical chops to know how to architect such a system. The most successful use of SSD for Nexsan has been in our new E5000 family, where we use DRAM-based SSD for write-intensive caching, and a much larger tier of SLC Enterprise-grade Flash SSD from Toshiba for all other cache applications.
JC: VDI has been huge for WhipTail. Be it for Citrix with XenDesktop or VMware for View, our unit’s ability to offer huge WRITE IO’s and extend the life of the drives has allowed us to deploy tens of thousands of VDI users to date. Clients such as the Becthel, the State of Ohio, Motorola, Pensions Trust, along with a major government agency in Europe to name just a few have chosen the WhipTail XLR8r to be the engine to support their roll-outs. Similarly, Citrix has embedded an XLR8r in their global Executive Briefing Center in Santa Clara, CA. We are the only non-traditional storage vendor included to support their view of the XenDestkop ecosystem. Q And what is the potential for SSDs in terms of the
15K SAS Good Best
Expensive Good Infinite
7200RPM SATA and NL-SAS Moderate Best
Very Inexpensive
Moderate Infinite
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44