storage ICT
reaching the proper balance between cost, performance and capacity needed to supplant HDDs in various enterprise environments. Software solutions, like SanDisk’s FlashSoft, have come to market to help take best advantage of the performance and latency that SSDs provide, enabling the creation of powerful new application throughput. This is all coming together to create new opportunities for software- controlled architectures, showing the promise of SDS.
With these important developments it is likely that we will see SDS become a reality over the next year or so and an increase in adoption of SDS in the enterprise.
Q There’s a lot of debate as to where the storage should reside, with, perhaps, more emphasis being placed on server-side
storage. Presumably this fits well with SanDisk’s technology?
A We span the whole range of architectural approaches with specific drive technology combinations from ULLtraDIMM which is the
closest coupled storage available to our drives that are tailored for SNA and NAS architectures.
Q Right now, there’s also talk of application-centric storage. How would you define this, and how does SanDisk help end users
meet its storage requirements?
A App-centric storage is about getting the optimum match between the app and the storage that supports it in terms of performance and
cost. With SanDisk’s all-encompassing range of drives, capacities and performance in SSD, the designer will have more fine-grain choice in terms of performance and endurance. This means that the design of application-centric storage can move deeper than architectural tiering and hybrid considerations to a new level of optimisation at a drive level.
Q In more general terms, there still seems to be some debate/ confusion as to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different
types of SSD/Flash storage available on the market. Do you have any thoughts as to why this is and how SanDisk (and others) can help cut through the ‘mess’?
A Many people will still be confused when it comes to the different types of flash storage available in the market due to the number of
solutions, approaches and enabling technologies available today, as well as the differences in the components of each drive.
The key to overcoming this confusion is to explain the basics of flash technology vs. hard disk drives.
1. Enterprise and consumer needs are different The average consumer will take a considerable amount of time, likely years, to fill an SSD drive. However, depending on the type, businesses could fill a drive in just a day. This means that the wear on the drive and the performance needs are considerably different between consumer and enterprise. The predictability of wear is also easier to gauge for business use, making it easier to tailor drives to a specific use case.
2. The price gap is closer than it appears If you are evaluating SSDs on a dollar per GB basis, you are lost before you start. SSDs and HDDs do not compare when it comes to performance, power consumption, drive reliability etc. It is for this reason that you should instead evaluate your options from a Total Cost of Ownership, evaluating cost per IOPS, or IOPS per Watt basis. If you do, you will find that in fact the scale is far more heavily weighted in favour of SSDs.
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3. Looking forward to 16TB Today, we already have SSDs in the market that pack up to 4TB of flash in a standard form factor, like our Optimus MAX, but that is just the beginning. The continued drop in NAND geometries is leading to higher and higher capacity points being possible – we should see 8TB drives make it to market in the coming year, quickly followed by drives holding up to 16TB of flash!
4. Endurance: Not All Flash is Created Equal When flash is packaged together into an SSD, software suites can significantly increase the native endurance of base MLC. If you deploy SSDs with too little endurance, you could put yourself into a never ending cycle of ripping and replacing drives, increasing your TCO.
5. Flash can be Storage or Memory Recent innovations in the storage industry, namely the ULLtraDIMM technology, are extending the possibilities for flash well beyond the storage medium it has historically been leveraged for. In fact, flash will eventually be leveraged as an alternative to DRAM for memory, offering similar performance and latency for a far cheaper cost.
By understanding the five things above, customers should be better equipped to properly evaluate their options and get the most out of an investment!
Q What can we expect from SanDisk during the rest of 2014?
A As we move through 2014 and beyond, multiple advances in flash storage technology
will emerge to place the possibility of a ‘flash transformed data centre’ and ‘flash- accelerated enterprise’ within reach. What are they? First and foremost, SSDs have become more reliable and have taken on more enterprise features to ensure that data isn’t lost. This was a critical step because without it, flash could never be relied upon to store mission-critical information.
Additionally, many storage solutions—including our 4TB Optimus MAX SSD—are now able to take advantage of the full performance benefits that flash delivers vs. HDDs, such as significantly improved IOPS performance, lower power consumption and heat emission, as well as lower, more consistent latency – which allows flash to serve up many of today’s read/write intensive applications, such as Big Data analytics, high frequency trading, cloud computing, VDI, virtualization, and more. These data-intensive applications—that are heavily utilized by today’s businesses—will never be able to be served up with the processing power of an HDD.
However, the advantages of using flash in the data centre don’t stop there. Today, flash can be extended to almost every layer of the data centre and deployed in multiple flavours to fit into existing infrastructure, whether it is in the form of SATA, SAS, PCIe or even DIMM slots. It also opens up new server system design opportunities in order to meet evolving application needs.
Additionally, scaling SSD capacity, combined with the cost of flash continuing to fall will lead to SSDs reaching near cost parity with HDDs. This cost achievement coupled with the energy, efficiency, scalability, and performance benefits that SSDs deliver will lead to the further penetration of flash in the data centre and finally make flash a viable option for archiving and other cold storage applications. 2014 will be an exciting year for the industry and those impacted by
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