Guest View: A New Era for Enterprise Storage - Systems Management News On The Web

DEPARTMENTS

HOME

TOP STORIES

DATA CENTER NEWS

ON THE WEB

PRINT EDITION

BZ MEDIA

AS OF 1/7/2009 8:06AM EST

Guest View: A New Era for Enterprise Storage
By Amyl Ahola

September 15, 2008 —

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.

In light of the growing power and space concerns of today’s enterprise IT environments, reduced energy consumption is an equally important criterion for new storage devices. Solid-state-based EFD technology has a clear advantage compared with disk drives and can replace many high-RPM disk drives, saving even more energy and space.

Given these requirements, I would define a true EFD solution this way:

An enterprise flash drive should provide a high level of performance and reliability for flawless, round-the-clock operation in mission-critical, data I/O-intensive enterprise environments. In addition, an EFD’s superior performance, energy efficiency and reliability should allow data centers to grow capacity and performance substantially in existing installations, while reducing energy needs and TCO.

As flash prices continue to drop and flash capacities rise, EFDs will rapidly be implemented in virtually every enterprise IT domain. I believe that as storage system performance requirements mount to serve new I/O-intensive applications, such as financial transactions, Web 2.0 and video delivery, data centers will increasingly use EFDs in combination with disk drives to balance the EFD’s low-cost I/O performance with HDDs’ low cost per gigabyte.

This mixing of technologies reduces the demand for high-RPM disk drives and lets IT managers optimize storage and energy efficiencies to achieve the lowest total-cost solution for growing enterprise storage requirements.

Amyl Ahola is CEO of Pliant Technology (www.plianttechnology.com). He has more than 40 years of storage industry experience with TeraStor, Seagate, OSI, WangDat and Control Data.

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

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

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE

SEND FEEDBACK

MORE OPINIONS