The “Drive” for Higher Data Center Application Performance
Friday, July 23rd, 2010For 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






