Originating Author: David Floyer
The large number of potential approaches to introducing NAND storage in the data center are shown in the Wikibon entry “Integrating NAND technology into the data center”. This has the potential to bring confusion as technicians and vendors debate the merits of different approaches. The bottom line is that NAND is and will continue to be expensive but has the potential to improve performance for the users or maintain performance at a lower cost.
To streamline decision-making for introducing NAND devices, a total systems approach is recommended. The benefits of improved performance must be agreed with the departments paying for the applications. The cost side has to include the server, server RAM, storage subsystem, virtualization layer costs, and data management software, as well as any impact on the costs of development and operations. A cost/benefit model specific to the business applications should be developed with the ability to compare different storage hierarchy approaches and different cost assumptions.
Action Item: Storage executives are going to be faced with a plethora of different approaches to storage management from different parts of the business and different vendors. A single IT department should be charged with developing a simple total system model of the costs and performance trade-offs of different components and approaches within the storage hierarchy. All technical and business cases should be run though the model. The model should be simple enough to maintain, and be updated as experience increases with the deployment of NAND technologies.