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SUPPLEMENT SSD


Solid State Storage: New Storage Models to Accelerate Application Performance


Tony Afshary Director of Marketing, DAS and Server Storage solutions at LSI™ Corporation


Solid State Storage performance and cost per gigabyte will continue to improve and this trend will accelerate adoption.


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commonly referred to as Tier 0 in the server market space, using direct attach storage (DAS). A typical example here would include the ultra high performance applications used by financial firms for high volume, real-time market trading. Today, the Tier 0 market represents less than five percent of the overall DAS server market space.


As the cost of flash memory technology used in Solid State Storage devices continues to come down, more are being deployed in what can be considered the Tier 1 server market space, where applications require high random input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance to handle revenue- generating, intense transactional processes. Typically, active and frequently accessed data stored in this tier is less than a day old.


olid State Storage significantly accelerates application performance by reducing data read and write access latency, especially for workloads dominated by random accesses. It also reduces overall system total cost of ownership (TCO) by:


a) Lowering capital expenditure by increasing individual server performance, allowing server consolidation, and


b) Lowering operating expenditure by reducing power, space, environmental cooling and support costs


IT administrators are now, more than ever, faced with a myriad of options when building solutions using Solid State Storage. This article discusses the merits of the different design approaches to Solid State Storage solutions.


Today, Solid State Storage resides in servers handling the most mission-critical and latency-sensitive application environments,


Solid State form factors to satisfy storage requirements The most widely available Solid State Storage form factors today are solid state drives (SSDs) and PCI Express-based storage adapters with fully integrated Solid State Storage modules. SSDs provide a compatible Solid State Storage alternative to hard disk drives (HDDs) for easy integration into existing storage environments utilising HDDs. As with spinning media HDDs, the Solid State Storage SSDs utilise standard storage interfaces such as SAS, SATA and Fibre Channel. The PCI Express form factor approach provides the fastest performance boost in smallest storage footprint because it is housed completely inside the server. It is also the easiest to install and configure. Either Solid State Storage form factor can be utilised as a storage cache or dedicated storage volume.


Common approaches to integrating Solid State Storage into server environments The most common approach to implementing Solid State Storage into today’s enterprise environments is to treat it as a dedicated storage volume, much the way one would configure traditional rotating


SSD6 www.snseurope.info I October/November 2011


media or HDDs. While it is more expensive to implement a one-to-one replacement of rotating media, the performance gains and latency reductions are dramatic, particularly in application environments where data needs to be processed and analysed in real-time, such as Ultra Low Latency Direct Market Access (ULLDMA) systems.


A primary objective of Solid State Storage solutions in enterprise environments is application acceleration. Product offerings such as LSI MegaRAID® controller cards, with MegaRAID FastPath™ SSD optimisation software, or the LSI WarpDrive™ SLP-300, a PCIe-based card with onboard Solid State Storage capacity, are a few leading examples for the DAS server storage market space. Another emerging opportunity for flash- based storage use in the enterprise are solutions that deploy Solid State Storage as cache memory. An example would be LSI MegaRAID CacheCade™ software, which enables SSDs to be configured as a secondary tier of cache to maximise transactional I/O performance. This approach has the advantage of letting the caching system observe the data access patterns and determine what data to place on Solid State Storage in order to realise the maximum performance benefits. In most cases the user or administrator does little or nothing to achieve the performance benefits for the amount of SSD capacity allocated. The caching system puts as much frequently accessed data into its SSD cache as possible and leaves the remaining infrequently accessed data safely stored on one or more HDD volumes. Data stored in the SSD cache and on the HDD volumes is protected by standard RAID data redundancy schemes. The only real task for the administrator or end user is to decide how much SSD technology to deploy, and then to configure the caching system to use only the specified amount.


Another approach that is commonly deployed in large, traditional shared storage data centre environments, and is now gaining momentum in the server storage market,


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