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Enterprise solid state drives are gaining traction, but their predominant focus is still performance. The need for speed has driven SSDs into applications where HDDs previously reigned, but for those of us who aren't high-frequency traders, solid state will need to demonstrate some other benefits. What are they, and how important will they be in mainstream enterprise apps?
The traditional focal point for SSD has been in applications where the financial gain from performance increases is clear, says Tom Coughlin, founder of data storage consulting firm Tom Coughlin Associates. High-frequency trading is a good example.
"High performance enterprise applications like databases, OLTP, etc. are the first applications to move to all-SSD, or perhaps SSD with other non-volatile memory technologies (such as 3D XPoint or RRAM)," he says. "The reason why these will be first is that for these applications, time is money, so the payback is immediate."
SSDs aren't just a high-performance technology anymore, though, according to Frank Reichart, senior director product marketing for Fujitsu's storage operation.
He believes that IT purchasers are beginning to take a more rounded view of SSD that takes more than pure speed into account. "Besides performance (response time and IOPS) and storage agility we see more and more the TCO aspect as the main motivation for 'all-flash' deployments as general purpose storage (for almost any productive workload)," he says. Reichart outlines several areas in which he believes SSD can help to cut ownership costs for IT departments, including data centre space, power management, and server utilization.
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Hyperconvergence is one area where SSDs stand to gain particular traction, say experts. We recently saw Simplivity offering all-flash hyperconverged boxes, two years after Nutanix first rolled them out. Its rationale was that the market price was right, following a marked slump in NAND flash pricing over the last 18 months. Part of the appeal comes down to space, says Frank Berry, founder and senior analyst at market research firm IT Brand Pulse, who says that SSDs provide higher performance in far smaller packages.
"One server-sized package can replace a rack of HDD shelves. I expect as hyperconvergence grows, it will increase the percentage of server-based SSDs and PCI SSDs versus SAN SSD," he says.
The space advantage for SSDs doesn't necessarily come down to their form factor. The memory component itself may be smaller but both SSDs and HDDs adhere to standard physical sizing when mounted in the data centre. What really makes a difference according to Alan Niebel, president of non-volatile memory and storage semiconductor market research company Webfeet Research, is the number of each kind of device that you need to achieve the same input/output speeds.
[...]
Power consumption can also represent cost savings in enterprise SSDs. "Datacentres are maxed out in terms of how much power they can draw," said Niebel. SNIA reports power savings of over 90 per cent for SSDs compared to HDDs in both idle and data transfer modes. The same report also suggests temperatures roughly a third lower for SSDs than for HDDs, which will have some bearing on cooling (acknowledging, of course, that CPU temperature can impose a far bigger overhead).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 15 2016, @03:28AM
factors:
Write life, and data retention?
An SSD if you're lucky will hold data for 10 years at the maximum, less with modern MLC/TLC chips. Furthermore most SSDs are only rated for a few hundred times their capacity.
Magnetic disks on the other hand will often retain data for *YEARS* with minimal corruption, assuming their seals last and proper storage, and can be written to for as long as the heads last and the magnetic particles remain adhered to their substrate (teflon from what I have heard.)
Given those: SSDs/Flash make perfect sense for immediate use devices, or devices where short term storage and retention is acceptable. HOWEVER, for long term data storage the options currently are limited to magnetic tape, or magnetic/optical disks. Out of those the best options for cost/size/reliability/data retention are actually the hard disks. Archival grade optical disks cost too much per gigabyte, and magnetic tapes are known to have issues with differing drive models and data loss if not kept in pristine conditions. Hard disks on the other hand last for as long as the controller flash, bearings, read heads, and disk surface last, three of those having the benefit of being inside a relatively sealed environment (and in the case of helium drives, fully sealed enclosure.
So while this article might have some good details in it, the be all end all attitude about flash is surprising fallacious. For the operations they mention as benefitting from it you would be just as well off with high capacity lower clocked ramdisks taking up similiar formfactors. For the performance equivalent of flash full on RAMdrives should not require much higher standby power (beyond refreshing), and should see a limited increase during disk accesses (since refreshing is taken into account anyways.) Given that: Why would you choose flash for temporary storage over high capacity ram backs, and for long term storage, why would you choose flash over traditional disks in an enterprise environment?
Just my 2c
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday October 15 2016, @05:18AM
An SSD if you're lucky will hold data for 10 years at the maximum, less with modern MLC/TLC chips.
You seem to be saying that if, for example, one writes data onto an SSD and puts the drive into a drawer, the data will be corrupt within ten years. I've never heard that before; is there a name for that phenomenon or a Web page that describes it?
(Score: 2) by gringer on Saturday October 15 2016, @08:47AM
is there a name for that phenomenon or a Web page that describes it?
This is loosely the anchoring effect [youarenotsosmart.com] : your first perception lingers in your mind, affecting later perceptions and decisions.
Usually, it's attributed to pricing, but there's no reason why it can't be attributed to technology. I've seen it a fair amount with the MinION as well as with SSDs, and it presents as the same thing: people believe that the problems associated with the first exposure of a technology to the world still exist, despite plenty of documented evidence that the technology has improved substantially since that time.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday October 15 2016, @10:08AM
Anandtech [anandtech.com] has a good summary of a similar issue, and its misunderstanding.
(Regarding ten years - nothing non-archival is intended for that long (including cd, dvd, vhs, mc, printouts, floppies...))
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday October 15 2016, @04:47PM
Thank you. The page you linked says
Remember that the figures presented here are for a drive that has already passed its endurance rating, so for new drives the data retention is considerably higher, typically over ten years for MLC NAND based SSDs. If you buy a drive today and stash it away, the drive itself will become totally obsolete quicker than it will lose its data.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Saturday October 15 2016, @07:04PM
Actually the article is full of waffle words, and, as explained more by the comments than the article, it actually says that the typical consumer is quite likely to lose data on drives on old seldom used computers within two years of putting it on the shelf. Because he named the drive, (Intel) I suspect there was a lot of "don't sue me" language embedded in paragraph you quoted.
"Totally obsolete" doesn't even enter into the discussion here. The ssd is in a computer, that you expect to run when you eventually power it up to recover those old photos or whatever. The SDD might be obsolete if you tried to market it today, but that has no bearing on the use-case.
Speaking of Totally Obsolete, the data the author used was from a 4.5 years old Intel publication on the date he published his article in 2015. So likely 6+ year old test data was used originally.
I've got a few old computers sitting around that I don't use that often. (All have spinning drives). Having moved house in the last 10 years, I've dusted off and fired up several of these after more than 5 years of disuse, and didn't experience any occurrence of data loss. Articles on line indicate powered off life expectancy anywhere from 3 years to 15 years. The data is all over the map, as far as hard drives are concerned.
Quality CDs and DVDs, (say Taiyo Yuden, or similar) once burned, have a conservative 50 to 100 year life expectancy if stored out of direct sunlight.
Could I expect the same from an SSD? I'm guessing not.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by tbuskey on Saturday October 15 2016, @11:52AM
If you don't have the drives powered up, tape does better on data retention than hard drives. They design for unpowered use with tape. They don't for hard drives. Tape also devotes more to ECC than hard drives. However, it is easier to verify hard drives that are powered up.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday October 15 2016, @07:19PM
And CD-R is better than both. Even consumer grade CD-R. Quality grade consumer burnable media is good for up to 100 years says Kodak, and guarenteed 70 years by Taiyo Yuden as well as others.
The amount of ECC data can exceed 30% of total capacity depending on the standard [cdrlabs.com] you choose for recording.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.