Never send HDD to do the job fit for EFD…
Who could ask for more than seeing a new storage industry product announcement to highlight the points you’ve been trying to make?
I found myself in that position, and was quite surprised (well not really surprised…more like incredulous) to see a recent announcement of what had been frequently referred to as the Seagate “brick” project (not related to MiniScribe), but minimally disguised within a Seagate-funded private company. The product that was announced is another version of a sealed unit consisting of multiple hard drives “purpose-built to maximize performance and reliability.” The announcement makes it clear that many new techniques must have been employed to achieve “self-healing,” and to enable the product to essentially repair itself in place “to the equivalent of a fresh, factory-manufactured drive.” Wow! I will leave it up to people smarter than me to respond to this.
What I’d like to discuss is the price performance aspect of this announcement. The systems tested were fully mirrored, making comparisons never quite “apples to apples.” However, one needs to keep in mind that the MTBF of the drives employed require mirroring to reach any reasonable reliability level. While I could not find any real price or performance data on the company’s web site, the reference to their SPC benchmarks provided considerable data.
From a pricing standpoint, the 1.03TB configuration sells for more than $36 per gigabyte (after a 40% discount from $60/GB)…and, flash-based SSD at $30/GB is considered expensive?
This benchmark is also said to be record-breaking with the lowest cost per SPC-1 IOPs. I’m not suggesting that $36/GB is unreasonable, only that it illustrates the true cost of hard drives in high-performance environments. A closer look at the benchmark is even more telling. This “record-breaking” performance correlates to a response time of nearly 30 milliseconds. In fact, response time increases dramatically starting at about 50% of the max IOPs, which is certainly troublesome for high transaction-rate systems.
This project was started a few years ago, apparently to address the growing price, performance and reliability gap in enterprise applications, as we have been talking about, and to hold off the encroachment of solid state storage devices. However, with today’s technology, well designed Enterprise Flash Drives will not only be lower in cost per GB, less than 1/4th the cost per IOP, and more reliable. And, did I mention power: EFD’s will be well less than 1/100th the watts per IOPs. I cannot help but be reminded of the Anderson Cooper segment on CNN: “What were they thinking!”
Amyl Ahola
