Solid State Drives

More quality time at home or more unplanned time in the office?

No joke!  If you want more time at home and less unplanned time cranking on performance problems follow these

“3 Tips to Using SSD Today”

Frank, the CIO for a medium sized service provider, had to do something to cost effectively increase application performance. After rejecting all other options, he took a second look at SSD and was delighted to find and share these three tips:

1. The price difference to move to SSD was 1/5 what he had expected.

2. Two SSD outperformed 66 Fiber Channel Drives! You read that right!

3. Power and Rack Space can be reduced by more than 90%. Make the kids happy
with your Green impact.

The word is starting to get out that by using the right technologies, companies can cost effectively start enjoying the performance advantages of Solid State Drives (SSD) sooner than previously thought. By employing storage arrays that employ virtualization down to the block level as well as an automated Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)system, as few as 2 SSDs can significantly improve performance of multiple, critical applications. This is possible because only the “hottest” data blocks are kept on the Tier 0, SSDs. Less active blocks are automatically moved to slower tiers made up of various levels of traditional spinning drives. So, using this approach, only enough SSDs to house the most active data blocks are needed rather than the entire volumes associated with the most demanding applications.

Let’s look at the results:

1. Respected information technology research and advisory firm, Gartner says that 80% of the data stored on the most expensive drives in traditional storage arrays is stale. Therefore a well integrated, automated, block level, ILM system lowers the required number of SSDs for maximum application improvement by 80%.
2. Two SSDs outperform 66 Hard Disk Drives as follows:

   Traditional Implementation:

   Hard Disk Drive (HDD)-20,000 IOPS – 66 drives @ 350 IOPS per drive

   Latency – 2000-4000 µs

   SSD Solution:

   Solid Sate Drive (SSD)-20,000 IOPS – 2 Drives @ 10,000 IOPS per drive

   Latency – 20-120 µs

3. Green Impact:

   Traditional Implementation:

   A single Enterprise class HDD can consume over $16 of power a year

   A blade of 2 performance-based drives will run $32 a year

   A rack with 33 blades of drives will run $1056 a year

   Rack Space – 3 Trays

SSD Solution:

• A single Enterprise class SSD can consume up to $2.50 of power a year
• A blade with 2 SSD drives will run $ 5 a year
• A rack with a single SSD blade will run $ 5 a year
• Rack Space – 1/8 Tray

Getting results often means straying from the so-called market leaders who lag behind the feature curve but run ahead of the price curve! I can’t modify your corporate purchasing policies or VPA’s that lock you into higher costs (that’s right!) but I can inform you about what the technology leaders are doing today. Frank today: “Wow, what a difference. The boss is happy with the reduced load on the data center, the users are blown away with the increased performance and virtualized storage is so much easier to manage that I’m having a blast and my kids no longer say ‘Who’s that guy?’.”

Here are some links to document and support my message.

SSD Killer App
Gartner on SSD

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