Guest View: A New Era for Enterprise Storage

By Amyl Ahola

September 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)

Within three years, every enterprise data center in the world will be using enterprise flash drives (EFDs), a new class of solid-state storage devices, for at least a portion of their data storage needs. Given today’s disk drive-centric IT culture, this may sound like a bold prediction; but I’m confident, based on current technology trends, that the “EFD era” is just around the corner.

Two key factors are driving this technology shift. The first is an accelerating requirement for higher levels of I/O performance. The second is the pressure on companies to cut energy costs and reduce carbon footprints.

In the world of disk drives, enterprise-class products are distinguished from the consumer class by their ability to provide superior performance and reliability. That means they must perform flawlessly in mission-critical environments. Thus far, solid-state drive (SSD) technology has not measured up to the stringent enterprise reliability requirements and performance expectations.

The SSDs being described in many industry articles today are usually little more than consumer-grade drives originally designed for laptop and desktop systems. Such drives were never designed to hold up to the rigors of a 24x7 mission-critical enterprise data center environment. In my view, if we don’t make a clear distinction between consumer SSD and true EFD solutions, we risk setting the industry back years by confirming the fears of many IT managers about the use of flash technology in the enterprise.

Reliability is not a feature for enterprise systems; rather, it is a requirement. It is essential that reliability specifications are met 24x7 at 100 percent duty cycle operation for any enterprise-class device. Those in the industry know that true enterprise-class disk drives are required for this environment, and if EFD technology is to be accepted in the enterprise, it must meet or exceed enterprise-class hard disk drive (HDD) reliability. This is not a trivial task, and existing SSD solutions have come up short.

High I/O performance is the key benefit that EFDs can provide for the enterprise. Data centers require dynamic I/O performance levels to meet the changing workload requirements and to prevent storage I/O bottlenecks during peak activity periods, without requiring extra hardware for cache, for example. At a minimum, enterprise EFD solutions should deliver at least 100,000 random IOPS; ideally, an EFD should deliver a target level of I/O performance that is on par with that of DRAM-based solutions. This level of performance would provide dramatic improvements over existing technologies, with scalability for the future.

Related Search Term(s): solid-state drives, storage hardware

Share this link: http://www.sysmannews.com/link/32853