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