For today’s data centers, achieving ever higher levels of IT system performance to meet the demands of data-transaction intensive applications is fast becoming the primary objective of IT mangers.

The reason: time is money.  And, for increasing numbers of businesses a small advantage in IT application performance can translate into millions – or even, tens of million dollars – in gained, or lost, revenue. 

Brokerage trading applications are a prime example.  According to the TABB Group, if a broker’s electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition, it could lose at least 1 percent of its flow – that’s $4 million in revenues per millisecond. Up to 10 milliseconds of latency could result in a 10 percent drop in revenues.  Looking at this another way:  a 1-millisecond advantage in trading applications can be worth $100 million a year to a brokerage firm (source: Computerworld).

This is just one of many enterprise applications where the tremendous performance advantages of solid state drives/Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) can provide tangible, bottom line business benefits. 

Here’s why: Even today’s fastest HDDs have access times (the time delay between a request for data and the requested data returned) of approximately 9 milliseconds – an eternity in the lightning-quick world of securities trading.  Today’s enterprise-class SSDs, on the other hand, have access times of .2-.3 milliseconds.  (source: Transcend Information, Inc.)

With this increased level of performance applied to trading applications, the benefit to Wall Street is real, immediate and significant.

And, these performance benefits apply to many enterprise and data center applications.  Peak period transaction processing, global ERP-driven supply chains, video streaming, and even networked gaming will all see tremendous data processing productivity gains which could result in significant competitive advantages and real increases in profitability.

Only enterprise flash drives can provide this level of game-changing, bottom line performance benefits. 

It’s no surprise, then, that Jim Handy of Objective Analysis, is so bullish about the growth of the SSD market for enterprise applications.  In his recent report, “The Enterprise SSD: Technologies & Markets,” he projects that enterprise SSDs will reach $4 billion in revenue by 2015, driven by the ongoing quest for higher levels of enterprise application performance.

Curious to hear what you think.  Your comments and feedback are welcome.
 
Greg

Previously I wrote about the importance of “scalable performance” when it comes enterprise storage. My point: Enterprise-class SSDs must have sufficient back-end horsepower to scale I/O performance to meet increasing workloads for today’s data-throughput intensive applications.

Pliant recently ran a series of performance tests on several storage devices, and the results were eye opening. For baseline reference, see what happens to a typical enterprise 15K RPM hard drive as the workload increases:

Once the HDD reaches 400 IOPS, the response time starts to increase considerably to more than 75,000 microseconds (μs). And, as it reaches 500 IOPS, the response time nearly doubles, reaching more than 137,000 μs. This is the expected behavior for a mechanical device, limited by a single actuator.

Generally speaking, SSDs offer better raw I/O performance than HDDs, but when it comes to scalability and managing response time, the results are startling:

The chart above compares the STEC ZeusIOPS SAS SSD against the Pliant Lightning™ LS 300S EFD using the same saturation plot. As the workload increased, the STEC SSD’s response time increased dramatically, reaching as high as >10,000 microseconds, without significant scaling of I/O bandwidth. In contrast, the Pliant LS 300S was able keep response time below 2,000 microseconds and continued to scale I/O bandwidth to more than 32,000 IOPS.

This is the reason we designed Pliant’s Lightning Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) to provide steady, predictable performance over time regardless of workload:

Data center I/O demands are dynamic and unpredictable by nature. As such, enterprise storage devices must have the power and flexibility to scale on-the-fly to provide a high level of performance at all times and under all workloads.

C.T. Chu

We’ve been participating in Bell Micro’s SSD Seminar Series to help educate enterprise IT managers, OEMs, and storage and IT system developers on the significant performance, reliability and cost advantages of next-generation solid-state storage technology.

The seminars have been held in cities across North America (Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Bethesda, and Minneapolis), and the final one is scheduled for this Thursday, Dec. 3, in Milpitas, CA. Four SSD suppliers, including Pliant, will be presenting on the multiple benefits of adding SSDs to the storage infrastructure.

Not surprisingly, there’s quite a bit of expectation and discussion at the seminars that SSDs can deliver significantly higher I/O performance than hard drives. However, what’s surprising to me, having done five of the six seminars, is that people are already talking about “performance droop in SSD over time.” One of the vendors even stated, “fresh-out-of-box performance is different than steady-state performance.”

Now, I will spare you the discussion on how garbage collection affects SSD performance over time, as there are already plenty of articles on this subject. What is most troublesome is that performance droop should not occur at all. Solid state drives are supposed to alleviate performance bottlenecks, not introduce new ones. As such, a properly designed SSD controller should and must have sufficient horsepower so that a critical function like garbage collection will not impact I/O performance.

While we’re on the subject of performance, let’s talk about scalable performance.

Advanced interfaces, such as Fibre Channel (FC) and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), provide access to two ports. For years, the secondary port has been relegated to sitting idle, used only when the primary port failed.

That’s a shame…and a waste, in my opinion.

Both the FC and SAS interfaces allow performance to scale when both ports are actively used. Given the fact that solid state drives are not physically constrained by a single read/write head, one should expect to scale performance by reading and writing to both ports at the same time!

The below charts illustrate the point:

You paid for both ports already. Why not actually use both?

If you would like to learn more about “scalable performance” and how you can best implement enterprise SSD storage in your IT infrastructure, I invite you to join me and the Bell Micro team at the seminar this Thursday. It will be held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Milpitas, CA.

You can find more detailed info here:  http://www.bellmicro.com/ssd/seminar.asp.

I look forward to seeing you there!

C.T. Chu

A criticism I often hear from industry insiders and ‘experts’ is that the higher cost and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of SSD technology is a significant barrier to rapid and widespread enterprise adoption.

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

The industry is catching on to what I’ve been talking about for some time: flash technology offers tremendous value for the enterprise, yet adoption hinges on addressing the prevailing limitations of existing SSDs first.

This ‘revelation’ appeared in a SearchStorage.com article by Beth Pariseau, “Storage admins mull SSDs at SNW.”  The article quotes multiple storage administrators who all basically believe in the benefits of SSD, but stop short of saying that the technology is ready for prime time.

Here are their top concerns: predictable performance, data integrity, the lack of consistent, industry-accepted SSD benchmarks, and cost.

Let’s quickly look at each of these:

1. Predictable performance – I covered this recently in my “’Predictable performance’ for changing business dynamics” post. This area has traditionally been a challenge for SSDs in enterprise applications because workloads are random and indeterminate. Predictability requires consistent performance, independent of whether reading or writing data, because enterprise applications typically vary the read-to-write ratio between 60/40 and 90/10. Enterprise SSDs should be able to maintain performance across this range.
2. Data integrity – I couldn’t agree more that data integrity features are critical if flash technology is to perform at enterprise levels, and the Data Integrity Field (DIF) standard is an important step in this direction. Yet, today so few storage devices support the DIF standard. Pliant began mapping toward the DIF standard early on, recognizing how important it was for enterprise-class storage systems.
3. Standardized benchmarks – In my post, “SSD jargon and the need for standards,” I listed a number of pivotal questions that must be addressed if the industry is ever to develop more accurate, relevant – and yes, consistent – SSD benchmarks. These include making sure that real performance is measured and that product lifecycle benchmarks are based on true, 100% duty cycle operation. If product life metrics are contingent on usage limitations – e.g., based on a maximum number of writes or writes per day due to limited error management capability – then the benchmarks are virtually useless.
4. Cost – Transaction cost (IOPS per $) is the key SSD metric to consider, not the old HDD industry metric of $/GB. This metric is an irrelevant measure of SSD value as a performance solution, and we expect EFDs (Enterprise Flash Drives) to complement high capacity HDDs to optimize for both $/IOP and $/GB.

With most existing vendors either falling short on a number of these points, or masking the limitations of their devices behind carefully crafted marketing spin, it’s no wonder why some storage admins are still skeptical.

This is why I continue to extol the values of EFDs, a new class of solid state storage devices designed with key enterprise considerations in mind. By definition, EFDs are designed to address all of the above issues.

And, as we prepare to announce availability of our first products shortly, my hope is that our approach will help turn the heads and change the minds of the remaining nay-sayers in the industry.

Amyl Ahola

You don’t need a crystal ball to predict how the global economic slowdown and a prolonged recession will impact IT spending in 2009:  it’s going to be ugly.  Many projects will be delayed, eliminated outright, or at the very least, cut severely in scope. 

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

In a previous blog, I suggested that performance, reliability, IOPS per watt, and IOPS per $ are key storage metrics for enterprises. However, satisfying demanding enterprise needs goes far beyond the attainment of just these metrics. I/O-intensive enterprise IT applications require IOPS and bandwidth levels to be predictable and sustainable across a variety of workload requirements.

Predictable performance has traditionally been a challenge for SSDs in enterprise applications because workloads are random and indeterminate. This means that predictability requires consistent performance, independent of whether reading or writing data, as enterprise applications typically vary the read-to-write ratio between 60/40 and 90/10.  Ensuring that predictable performance is maintained while the workload changes is another example of how an Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) offers differentiation from traditional SSDs. 

A performance comparison (IOmeter-based) between a well-publicized ‘enterprise’ SSD and the new Pliant EFD illustrates this difference.  From the chart, you can see how the ‘enterprise’ SSD(I) performance drops by over 80% as the read/write ratio changes. The Pliant EFD maintains its performance across the range from 100% reads to a 50/50 read/write ratio. This is because the Pliant EFD can read and write simultaneously to the drive and therefore offer substantially better and predictable performance for these demanding applications. Traditional SSDs and HDDs can only perform one read or write at a time. 

The bottom line: EFDs enable enterprises to achieve higher I/O performance, maintain performance predictability with changing workloads, offer higher levels of service quality, and dynamically address changing business requirements without adding additional hardware.   

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

Amyl

I have written about a new class of SSDs referred to as Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs) many times.  But what does it take to make a true “enterprise-class” SSD drive?  With so many different SSDs targeted for the enterprise it can be difficult to tell which SSDs really qualify as EFDs, and which do not. 

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

My guess is that today’s gaggle of green events, speeches and articles will focus on inspiring each of us to raise our environmental consciousness by rethinking the way we use energy.  No question, a noble and necessary exercise. 

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 

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