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ShareSSD Poised To Move Into The Data Center
Posted by Paul Korzeniowski on January 18, 2010
Very high costs versus very dramatic performance improvements. Those are the two items that enterprises will have to balance as Solid State Disk (SSD) encroaches upon hard disk storage in the data center. Currently, the number of SSD products available is limited both by availability and their high price tags. Despite those obstacles, a number of companies have forged ahead and are deploying with SSD systems, which, though far from perfect, are proving to be intriguing.
SSD may seem like a recent phenomenon, but enterprises have used them for about 25 years. Their initial niche was as cache in real-time, performance hungry applications or in military and industrial applications, where the working environment was too harsh for standard magnetic hard disks. While those areas continue to be soft land spots for SSD, it has been working its way into the storage mainstream. Companies, like Compellent Technologies, EMC, Fusion-i/o, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, Intel Corp., NetApp, Seagate, Samsung, Sun Microsystems, and Verari Systems Inc., have delivered or -- more likely -- are building SSD products.
So what is the attraction? Performance. An SSD system provides 20,000 I/O processes compared to 200 for hard disk storage, according to Clod Barrera, IBM's chief technical strategist for Storage. Many enterprises now need the performance boost. "With the growing use of dual-, quad-, and multi-core processors, there are applications where performance requirements are outstripping the capabilities of traditional HDDs," said Jeff Janukowicz, research manager at International Data Corp. Solid state has the potential to enable companies to deploy new applications or to dramatically improve the performance of their existing systems. Early customers have been reporting response times plummeting by averages of 50 percent to more than 100 percent.
Another benefit is the systems consume very little power. As IT departments' data requirements have grown, so have their energy bills. Consequently, they have been pressuring vendors to make their products more energy efficient. Because SSDs hold information in memory, they do not perform as many reads and writes as hard disk storage. Because of the potential benefits, the SSD market is growing at a rapid rate. Gartner found that in 2009 vendors shipped 280,000 SSD units accounting for $450 million in revenue and expects those numbers to increase to 5.3 million units and $1.9 billion in 2013.
While flash has many benefits, it also presents companies with a few challenges. The main issue is its price. Hard disk drives cost around 20 cents to 50 cents per gigabyte, while solid-state drives cost $2 to $4 per gigabyte. So, the cost of a single 15K 300 GB Fibre Channel hard disk drive would be about $2,000 while a comparable SSD would run about $20,000 to $25,000.
Because the disk is so expensive, it does not make sense for companies to deploy SSD across their entire storage architecture. "Flash is emerging as a compliment rather than a full replacement for hard disk storage," noted Joseph Unsworth, research director at Gartner. Corporations are using it to front end their data, and the term "Tier 0" is being used to describe SSD's place in a company's storage hierarchy.
Comment by Mr. Pedantic on January 18, 2010 2:23 PM
SSDs are certainly interesting and will no doubt profoundly affect the storage industry (eventually). I can't help but comment on some of the oddities in this article, though:
"... enterprises have used [SSDs] for about 25 years"
Really? The original Toshiba nor/nand flash patent was published in July of '85 (about 25 years ago) but I'd be surprised to hear of an "enterprise" using SSDs in any significant way until this millennium. Flash has been around for a long time as a place for non-volatile storage of modest amounts of data like configuration information and firmware images, but I think SSDs (especially multi-GB SSDs) are a recent development.
"An SSD system provides 20,000 I/O processes compared to 200 for hard disk storage"
I think you mean "I/O operations per second", but even this is weird. Even the fastest disks manage less than 200 random IOPS, and many SSDs easily exceed 20,000 random read IOPS (though random writes may be much slower).
"Because SSDs hold information in memory, they do not perform as many reads and writes as hard disk storage."
SSDs consume less power because they don't need to move physical heads and platters around (they do less work in the engineering sense) not because they do fewer reads and writes! Unless they do MORE reads and writes in a given period of time than HDDs, who would want them?!! While flash does have limits to how many times an individual block can be erased/written, every vendor does some form of "wear leveling" to mitigate the effect. SSDs cost more but provide better performance. Better performance means more I/Os per second, not less.
"Hard disk drives cost around 20 cents to 50 cents per gigabyte, while solid-state drives cost $2 to $4 per gigabyte. So, the cost of a single 15K 300 GB Fibre Channel hard disk drive would be about $2,000 while a comparable SSD would run about $20,000 to $25,000."
Uhm ... better check the arithmetic there. With your per-GB price ranges, the high end of HDDs would be around $150 for 300 GB and $12,000 for SSDs. Your absolute dollar figures are reasonable though: a 15K RPM 300GB SAS drive can be purchased today for around $300 ($1/GB) but once it's in an array with volume management, dual-controllers, etc. that same 300 GB could easily cost you $2,000 (around $7/GB). I wouldn't be surprised if 300 GB of "enterprise grade" SLC SSDs in an array cost over $20,000 ($70/GB) though 300 GB of MLC SSDs can be purchased today for less than $1,000 ($3.33/GB).
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Comment by Louie on January 18, 2010 9:33 PM
Thanks Mr Pedantic. I thought it was me?
ANother unusual statement in this article:
"That process requires monitoring their information flows, placing the data that is updated most frequently in flash, and leaving the rest in hard disk. Right now, the tools that could help them do that in an intelligent manner are either non-existent or in an early stage of development."
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Maybe I'm wrong, but i believe this is EXACTLY what EMC FAST Technology is. ANd it is available today and certainly not ".. in an early stage of development".
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According to EMC : "The new EMC FAST technology, available immediately, automates the movement of data within a storage system, replacing hours or even days of repetitive, manual storage administrative tasks. As a result, an average system configuration with a combination of EMC FAST technology, enterprise flash drives and SATA disk drives, can deliver higher service levels while reducing storage acquisition costs by at least 20 percent and lowering storage operational expenses by 40 percent."
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Comment by StorageAdminTom on January 20, 2010 2:22 PM
WOW ok I'll add to this odd article. First I'm not sure the author actually talked to people who use SSD's. I'm actually one of these people. I have 30 SSD 73G EMC FLASH drives running on a EMC Clariion CX4-960. The 30 drives act as the primary home of our hospital clinical database running on one of the leading clinical datbase vendors. These drives support the needs of 4 hospitals, 2 outreach surgical centers, and over 50 clinics, so I would call us as 'enterprise' as anyone.
First "The new drives wear out faster than HDD drives, which creates a couple of problems..." I'm not sure of your source on this but I've not seen this issue with reliability. I've had no more failure with SSD drives than I've had with a typical FC or SATA drive, in fact probably less failures. To say that SSD drives has a higher rate of failure than FC or SATA is something I expected and believed maybe 5-7 years ago. Today, that's not reality - the failure rate is no different than any other drive type. " First, companies need sophisticated management tools that will be proactive and take steps to ensure that a drive problem will not knock all of their applications offline." Because RAID is so sophisticated and is so hard to implement. Seriously if you can't put your SSD drives in a RAID configuration then you might want to rethink if you are ready for SSD drives. In the case of the EMC Flash, storage is provisioned no differently than if you were provisioning a FC or SATA set of disks. You create a raid group of disks based on a RAID type, configure your hot spare. done. Storage Admin's are some of the smartest people on the planet when it comes to how disk operations work and to make such a claim insults the intelligence of your target audiance and makes yourself look foolish.
Your math around disk costs leaves out one important point. IOPS / $. In your comparison, you mention that a 300G FC drive would run about $2,000 per drive while a single SSD drive would run you $25,000 - $28,000. Maybe so, when you consider a single EMC SSD Flash drive's rated IOPS are 2,500 versus at 300g 15K drive is 185 IOPS per drive. Simple math would say that in order to acheive the same number of IOPS between FC and SSD, you'd need roughly 14 FC drives at 185 IOPS to equate to 1 SSD drive at 2500 IOPS. When you look at the cost (using your example) that's 14 * $2000 or $28,000 for the same IOPS of 1 $25,000 SSD drive. humm....far higher IOPS, less drive density, more efficient power consumption on the drives, seriously what's not to like? Sure they are expensive but customers who buy into FLASH are not doing it to say money per say. They are doing it because their business critical applications demand the degree of performance that SSD can bring to the table.
lastly you're right on one point. Management tools to help Storage Admin's manage multiple teirs of storage when you introduce SSD or T0 disks are only now emerging. As louie mentions, EMC FAST is making the right moves in that direction and enough so it will take them a little bit more to really bring FAST into it's own and then they will have the monumental challenge of convincing the storage admins that they can trust it. But in time, the trust will come, price of SSD will fall, capacity of SSD will go up (EMC's inital offering was 73G, 3 months later, 400G, and now 200G), and in time, the cost delts between SSD and FC and/or SATA will be at such a point where it wont be a matter of cost moreso a matter of what your storage needs to do to maintain your SLA's which is what it's all about anyway.
So all this being said....do a little more research before you talk about stuff that clearly is over your head....
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Comment by Mike Fratto, Editor on January 20, 2010 4:32 PM
Guys, thanks for taking to time to respond to this article. I do appreciate the feedback. We do try to be accurate in our articles, but sometimes we fail. Spectacularly, even.
I am going to through your comments and make any corrections necessary on this article.
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Comment by Doug Williams WhipTail Technologies on January 21, 2010 8:35 AM
Mike
Great article, at WhipTail we have overcome the write amplification and wear issues on the SSD by patten pending solution. In test we are seeing a 7 year wear life out of our SSD Arrays, much more than spinning HDD.
The Racerunner Array has been shipping and installed for over a year and available in the US and Europe.
WhipTail are also the ONLY manufacture to introduce Inline De-Dupe at primary storage and compression at near Tier 1 pricing.
Also WhipTail is Citrix ready and gives you.
* Cut VDI Storage Costs by 2x-4x
* Consolidate VM's from hundreds of copies to a handful
View www.whiptailtech.com
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Comment by Jur Faber on January 21, 2010 8:52 AM
I agree the future for transactions, HPC and High Performance Trading is low latency 10 GbE and arrays of SSDs
Why wait anylonger on moving parts.
We see great improvements in database, VDI, backup index, using SSD technology, boost the performance 125.000 IOPS per shelve of SSDs. The other thing, is the security, to recover a RAID group is about 20 minutes on SSD. The price for 1,5 TB is about 30K euro's and you can get support subscription up to 6 years.
On the energy you can save your budget, these solution consume between 200 and 300 Watt. In Europe Green IT is a must.
www.do-it-green.eu
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Comment by MQ on January 24, 2010 12:52 AM
Failure characteristics between SSD and HDD are different. SSD will fail after some cycles, while HDD fails randomly. You can predict when a SSD will fail, but you can not predict when a HDD will fail.
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