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Introduction
Predictions for the demise of traditional rotational storage arrays and hard disk drives (HDD) are becoming more frequent as manufactures of solid state drives (SSD) continue to improve quality, capacity, and longevity. At the same time, SSD array vendors are offering more enhanced management software features while dramatically improving price/performance, compelling buyers to rethink their short- and long-term storage purchase strategies.
Recent advances in affordable, more durable SSD or flash storage drives and the attendant management software allow multiple terabytes of data to be accessed many times faster than traditional HDD storage solutions allow. SSD technology has been the standard for mobile phone storage for at least two decades and now for smart phones and tablets as well. In addition, SSDs have been widely deployed in high performance computing (HPC) environments for several years.
Up until recently, the challenge was how to deliver terabyte-scale SSD arrays at an entry-level price-point with capacity, reliability, data security, and life expectancy equal to or better than HDD. With more than 100 SSD vendors flooding the market with a variety of performance, manageability and cost of ownership claims, savvy storage buyers need to differentiate carefully among offerings.
WHIPTAIL and MLC Flash
WHIPTAIL is one such SSD provider that offers multi-terabyte storage arrays ranging in price from $50k to $250K. More than two years ago, WHIPTAIL commercialized the first MLC NAND flash silicon storage array (SSA) and began delivering its RACERUNNER operating system – the brains behind its ACCELA and INVICTA solutions.
Flash drives or SSDs come in several different configurations that are now being deployed across the enterprise. In addition to consumer devices, SSDs have made their way into server memory, PCIe (peripheral component interconnect express) cards and hybrid storage arrays, which include both SSDs and HDDs to take advantage of storage tiering to reduce costs.
WHIPTAIL exploits consumer-grade or commodity SSDs based on the multi-layer cell (MLC) technology, which stores two bits of data in each memory cell and is half as fast, but also half the price of SLC technology, which stores a single bit of data per cell and, thus, has a longer useful life expectancy. Flash cells can withstand a finite number of P/E cycles (program-erase) or read-write cycles, that today can be as high as one million per cell for the most expensive SLC flash cards.
Longevity and Performance
According to WHIPTAIL, results derived from recent customer engagements indicate a useful lifespan of 7 to 8 years vs. 5 years for traditional HDDs.
Enterprise-grade SSDs typically have a longer useful life when superior wear-leveling algorithms are used, due to the lack of moving parts. SSDs are more shock resistant, require less power, create less heat and, by comparison to higher performing HDDs, address drive capacity much more efficiently because performance enhancement techniques such as short-stroking and over provisioning are unnecessary.
WHIPTAIL’s Founder and CTO, James Candelaria, made these salient points:
- Increased performance: An important advantage of flash-based storage that it contains no mechanical parts, unlike spinning disks, which allows for data transfer to and from storage media to take place at a much higher speed enabling applications to perform at a much higher level without any hardware storage tuning.
- Significant power and cooling savings: Using flash-based storage arrays, organizations can consolidate a large number of spinning disk storage arrays into a smaller footprint of flash arrays, which significantly reduces power consumption and cooling costs.
- More time for other tasks: With applications performing at their highest level, even as demand increases, flash storage provides admins with the time necessary to focus their efforts on solving problems in other departments, rather than focusing on how to get applications to perform faster using spinning disks.
For a WHIPTAIL INVICTA benchmarking discussion led by Candelaria, follow this link: WHIPTAIL INVICTA benchmarking
VDI and RAID
SSDs or flash storage arrays have proven to be as much as 100 times faster (when measured in IOPS) than HDDs for IO-intensive applications such as virtual desktop deployments or applications, commonly referred to as VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure). VDI is so called due to the practice of hosting a desktop operating system within a virtual machine (VM) running on a centralized server.
Today, the average desktop can require more IO than the standard Windows server – which creates an environment where your typical HDD array is often unable keep up with IO requests in a timely fashion. In addition, SSDs can typically transfer data at 170 megabytes per second, compared with 80 megabytes per second for HDDs.
On top of this, RAID configurations, such as RAID 5 that support redundancy and parity to protect against data loss and corruption, add an additional performance penalty because each random write to a disk needs to be replicated 3, 4 or more times underneath the logical storage volume. This is the case for SSD or HDD.
Healthcare, Higher Ed and Legal Industries
While many industries are deploying VDI solutions, price sensitive industries such as healthcare, higher education, and legal are particularly good targets for low-cost MLC flash array deployments. Doctors and caregivers as well as lawyers and their support teams need timely access to documents and records related to cases they are managing. Professors, students, and researchers are also looking to increase productivity and access content and data quickly.
Explosive growth in smart phone and tablet use along with much improved service levels from network providers is enabling caregivers, attorneys, and educators virtually ubiquitous access to large volumes of information sources. The need for affordable, near-real-time information access and the ability to accommodate multiple device types has driven broader VDI adoption – and storage plays a significant role in response time as the number of IO requests increases significantly within the VDI computing paradigm.
Bottom Line
WHIPTAIL meets or exceeds the market demand for cost effect, high performance SSD storage particularly in the case of VDI and other IO-intensive applications where traditional HDD storage can not perform nearly as well.
Action Item: Buyers looking to exploit SSD to accelerate application efficiency and dramatically improve user experience without breaking the bank should consider vendors such as WHIPTAIL that have a proven solution to meet the needs of price-conscious customers who also desire a major performance boost.
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