Accelerating Enterprise Adoption of Solid-State Storage

Solid-state disks are starting to make their way into the data centers of enterprises that need high performance, but broader deployment will take time and be driven by a number of factors. The main inhibitor is the high price of solid-state technology, which currently runs several times the price of a conventional hard disk drive. Businesses also are considering other issues when looking at SSDs, including data center space restrictions and the drive to cut energy and cooling costs.

Still, price is the main issue -- but not the only issue. And the price equation isn't clear cut. Companies need to do more than a straight price-per-gigabyte comparison when considering whether to invest in the new technology, analysts say. "There is a price-point argument starting to emerge for enterprises with SSD," says analyst Dennis Martin with research firm Demartek . In some cases, a business can populate a disk array with a combination of flash drives, Fibre Channel or SAS (serial attached SCSI) drives, and lower-cost SATA (serial advanced technology attachment) drives for roughly the same cost as a disk array that is fully populated with Fibre Channel disk drives.

"The key to making it work is finding the right combination," Martin says. "You might use flash SSD where you need high IOPS [input/output operations per second] performance and offset the cost of this resource by inserting SATA drives for data that is slower moving."

Some enterprises are already moving in this direction. Email security company DigiTar is employing hybrid storage that uses a SSD drive as a front end to an array of SATA drives for a fivefold increase in IOPS. Richrelevance, which specializes in personalized advertising and Website research for online retailers, swapped out hard drives for SSDs to cut latency from 100 milliseconds to 16 milliseconds. It also gained the ability to more quickly compute mathematical models and translate the results into timely recommendations for cybershoppers.

"Every enterprise scenario is different," Martin says, "But enterprises can begin to analyze whether they can take advantage of SSD at acceptable price points by first identifying the applications that are a fit for the technology."This begins with locating those applications with extremely high hit rates from transaction log files and database indexes. "From there, the best approach is a systematic one," Martin says. "Start by moving one database and nothing else to SSD and then see if there is a performance benefit." The exercise is repeated with each resource or application to see which of them might benefit the enterprise with dramatically enhanced performance by residing on a SSD. At the other end of the spectrum are the slow applications and resources, such as disk backups and archiving, that are best served by using an inexpensive hard drive technology like SATA.

In the end, the overall goal is to balance the more expensive investments in SSD with the cheaper investments in SATA. For businesses that can find a balance -- using costly SSDs to deliver the performance needed by I/O intensive applications and resources and cheaper drives for slower applications that don't need all the horsepower -- there is an argument for deploying SSDs. The question for many businesses is how much more a hybrid system costs than a traditional hard drive system, and whether the performance benefits are worth the extra cost.

The lesson has not been lost on SSD suppliers, which were developing and promoting faster, larger, and cheaper SSDs for enterprise use in 2008 and will continue to do so this year. These suppliers are all scrambling to evolve their SSD product lines and deliver hybrid storage solutions that combine SSDs with hard drive technology for best of breed usage in the enterprise. They also are aggressively working to find the right price point through SSD-HDD "balancing."

If SSD prices continue to decline while the capacity, reliability, and performance of the drives continues to improve, solid-state technology should gain traction even in companies that don't require the highest performance right now. IT departments are always looking for better performance and if they can obtain it without spending much extra money; they may look at it as a good long term investment.

"Vendor packaging of these solutions with acceptable prices points is one way to broaden enterprise adoption of SSDs," says Martin. "Another way to spearhead adoption is through an internal advocate like a database administrator who is looking for better performance, does the research, and then goes to the CIO saying that there simply has to be better database performance -- and SSD is the answer."There are additional total cost of ownership arguments that can be used in pushing for deployment of SSDs, and one is the potential to save money by reducing energy use for powering and cooling the data center. Many companies have launched "green" initiatives, and SSDs use less energy and generate less heat. One major insurance company has gone so far as to create costs/energy measurements on a component by component basis throughout its data centers. Although there is no universal formula that businesses use to compute green savings, data center square footage, energy savings and savings in staff time are all factors that go into figuring TCO.

Another factor is the longevity of SSDs, which has been a concern for businesses that have a standard replacement cycle for hardware systems. That issue may decline in importance as vendors improve the reliability and lifespan of SSDs to where they match the five-year asset replacement cycle common for IT storage.

This may be the year when SSDs move from niche technology for a select few that need the highest performance to one that gains a larger foothold in more data centers, although the grim economy and tight IT budgets could slow down that march. But constant improvement in SSD technology and the steady decline in prices that are the hallmark of all tech hardware seem to indicate SSDs will be showing up in more data centers over the next few years.