Nothing could be further from the truth.

I believe that this stems from the fact that the industry is stuck on using the HDD metric of $/GB and single drive cost as the primary measures of the cost. As I wrote in a previous post, “Storage managers getting wise to prevailing SSD limitations”, looking at historical or single drive cost metrics doesn’t accurately measure solution-level costs. So let’s try this again.

Yes, individual enterprise-class solid state drives (Enterprise Flash Drives) cost more than individual enterprise hard drives. So having stated this fact, let’s also be sure to state the fact that EFDs offer tremendous performance boosts (>100X), and can replace many 15K RPM HDDs. Budget constraints require that enterprises and data centers focus on maximizing both performance and efficiency, so transaction cost ($/IOPS) is also a key metric.

The goal is to provide a storage solution that optimizes for both $/GB and $/IOPS.

Let’s look at a typical data warehousing application from the TPC-C benchmarks (http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp). The storage solution must provide 640,000 transactions/minute (320,000 IOPS) for 18 TB of data. With a typical all-HDD solution, this requires:

• 1000 15K 2.5-inch HDDs (short stroked to 18GB)
• 40 rack mounted shelves
• 8000 watts to operate and (an additional) 8000 watts to cool
• Price tag = $ 450,000

Now, let’s look at how a ‘hybrid’ approach combining EFDs and existing HDDs can not only provide a lower transaction cost, but also a lower cost/GB and a lower total cost. This hybrid solution would be configured as outlined below:

Not only does the hybrid approach offer a much lower $/GB and $/IOP (and requires 34 fewer shelves), but the total cost is one-half that of the HDD-only configuration.

Did you catch that?  One-half the total cost.

At the end of the day, the numbers don’t lie. The value proposition of EFDs is simple, it provides ‘more for less’ – more performance for less cost, less power and floor space, and more reliability. And, EFDs can be managed with existing software.

What will IT managers do with all the savings?

Amyl Ahola

This poses a huge problem for enterprise IT managers. Why? 

Quite simply, enterprise information demands continue to increase with no end in sight.  And, data center managers will have to do anything and everything in their power — without making significant new IT capital investments —to keep up with the increasing IT system performance demands. 

Failure to do so will be unacceptable, so what are the options?

Two things come to mind:  1) optimizing existing IT systems for increased performance; and 2) significantly reducing the energy consumption of power-hungry high RPM hard disk racks.  Is this difficult? 

It may be easier than one thinks and requires no change to the existing infrastructure, management software or systems.  By adding Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) to handle the performance workload of many spinning hard drives, both goals can be achieved.  The high performance of the EFD enables more I/Operformance and flexibility to meet peak periods and growing demands.  By combining EFDs with high capacity HDDs, today’s storage racks can be reduced to storage shelves saving power (up to 80%), space and money. 

I predict that beginning in 2009, EFDs will be a key tool for enterprise IT managers to survive the economic turmoil while optimizing their existing storage systems.

And, let’s face it, it’s time for a change to the traditional approach to high-performance storage solutions. 

Interested to hear your feedback, so please feel free to comment.

Amyl Ahola

I was recently published in Systems Management News, so check out the article for greater detail.Click to link here:  http://www.sysmannews.com/link/32853. 

I’m curious to hear what you think, so feel free to comment.

Amyl Ahola

So, I think a description and definition is in order. 

In the world of disk drives, enterprise-class products are distinguished from desktop and laptop products by their ability to provide superior performance and reliability.  This means that they are expected to perform flawlessly in mission critical environments.  This same requirement also holds true for enterprise SSD devices.  However, just like lower-end disk drives, SSDs designed for laptops and desktops simply can’t pass muster when expected to provide the performance and reliability required in a mission-critical enterprise environment.  There are a number of existing SSD products marketed for the enterprise, many of which are nothing more than re-packaged consumer grade (laptop) SSD technology.  In fact, many of the so-called “enterprise SSD” drives actually underperform HDDs in laptop applications…hardly what I would call enterprise class. 

Therefore, a true EFD must provide high levels of performance and reliability for flawless operation in mission critical, I/O-intensive environments.  Given the growing power and space concerns of today’s large enterprise environments, reduced energy consumption is becoming an equally important criterion for any new class of primary storage devices.  An EFD’s superior performance, energy efficiency and improved reliability allow data centers to substantially grow capacity and performance in existing installations while reducing energy needs and TCO.

Given these requirements, an Enterprise Flash Drive should, at a minimum, provide the following:

1. Superior I/O Performance – Adequate I/O performance levels to prevent bottlenecks, even during peak activity periods (generally 3-5 times greater than typical activity periods), without requiring extra hardware (i.e., cache)  while providing ample scalability for growth.  At a minimum, an EFD should deliver at least 100,000 random IOPS or more and be able to sustain this rate for typical block sizes (4K bytes or more). 
2. Exceptional Reliability – EFDs need to deliver significantly lower failure rates than disk drives, given the inherent benefit of solid state technology (no moving parts).  Performance and reliability must be predictable and sustainable at 100 percent duty cycles (24/7/365) without cycle-stealing maintenance or “housekeeping” actions.  Lifetime should exceed five years without performance or capacity degradation.  Robust reliability monitoring and reporting capabilities are essential.
3. Energy Efficiency – EFDs should meet new standards for green data center excellence of greater than 20,000 IOPS per Watt, with activity-based power management to limit energy consumption when the device is less than 100 percent utilized.
4. Cost Efficiency – Transaction costs ($/IOPS) must be substantially reduced from that of an HDD (<10%).  And, it goes without saying that an EFD must be form factor and interface compatible with HDDs (while providing similar storage capacities).

While these requirements are very demanding, I believe they only begin to define the needs and ability of solid state technology to transform future system and storage architectures.  In my opinion, the vast majority of today’s SSD products are already falling short of the true needs. 

Interested to hear what you think…

Amyl Ahola

However, one topic that I’m afraid may not receive its fair share of MSM attention is the rapidly growing problem of data center power consumption. 

Here’s the issue.  According to a recent report (http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/prod_development/downloads/EPA_Datacenter_Report_Congress_Final1.pdf), servers and data centers account for about 1.5 percent of all U.S. energy consumption, or 61 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh).  This is more than the electricity consumed by the nation’s color televisions in a year, and about as much energy used to power 5.8 million average U.S. households.  And, at the rate our digital information requirements are growing, server/data center energy consumption will nearly double to 100 kWh by 2011, which represents about $7.4 billion in annual electricity costs. 

So what can we do to move rapidly to greener data centers?  The worst offending part of the system, the misuse of HDDs, should be among the first to be dealt with.  The fact is that many IT managers are using 3 to 4 times more HDDs than they need from a capacity perspective just to meet growing I/O performance requirements.  This “over provisioning” does not only fail to meet I/O performance needs as I noted in earlier posts, but it’s probably one of the most inefficient uses of IT technology I’ve ever seen.  Talk about a waste of space and power (not to mention money)!

With data centers under constant pressure to operate more efficiently and reduce costs, this type of waste is ridiculous, especially when there are other viable alternatives available.  One technology that deserves serious attention is the Enterprise Flash Drive, which is based on solid state technology to offer extremely high data I/O performance. 

Here’s an example of the benefits of deploying EFDs in the enterprise, without breaking the bank.  A hybrid solution combining existing hard drives (preserving some of the initial investment) with selectively deployed EFDs can greatly enhance I/O performance while eliminating the need for HDD over-provisioning.  Best of all, this type of approach can slash data center energy consumption – up to 80 percent in some cases.

Let’s face it, enterprise data centers will continue to push the envelope in terms of performance and capacity requirements.  The trick is finding ways to meet these demands in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible, and EFDs can be a great option for many organizations.

Amyl Ahola