SSD Implementation A Strategic Imperative For Growing Number Of Data Centers

If they don't already have it, virtually every data center with mission-critical, high performance applications that process high-volume transactions or require computer-intensive resources, has solid state drives in sight. This includes financial trading transaction data centers, airline and hotel reservation processing data centers, resource-intensive applications like movie rendering and scientific modeling, and Web serving application providers like Google. For many organizations, the I/O bottleneck that traditional hard disk (HDD) presents to servers has reached a pain point that is strangling their businesses. Meanwhile, Flash prices are dropping--pushing SSDs into mainstream consideration for data centers. "We are getting to the point where we are changing the memory hierarchy of these systems," said Jim McGregor, In Stat's chief technology strategist. McGregor predicts that within the next two years, companies serving large enterprise customers will start moving SSDs into their standard product lines.

Indeed, this is already happening. IBM recently announced that it will include SSD as a storage option across all of its product lines. EMC has storage options that include SSD. This legitimizes SSD in the eyes of fear-averse CIOs, and advances the case for SSD in enterprises.

"There is a set of customers whose businesses depend on performance, or that have some applications in the business that are responsible for revenue generation," said Woody Hutsell, President of Texas Memory Systems. "These applications can be in large enterprises or in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). "Part of the value proposition of SSD is its ability to use only a fraction of the power that hard drives require, while providing superior performance."

Cost of acquisition has been an obstacle for SSD--but in today's green initiative environment, even SMBs are starting to calculate technology over the  long haul in total cost of ownership (TCO) formulas that include data center power consumption and square footage. All of this plays favorably for SSD over hard drives.But there are also other factors--like architecture and integration.

"The architecture varies with the customer," said Hutsell. "Some customers have a content-oriented network where they are serving up a lot of Web pages, and they use a PCI Express card in each server. If one of the cards goes bad, it's no worse than a server having a problem and rebooting, while other servers cover. We also have people in the financial sector that use an Oracle or SQL server environment that focuses on transaction processing, with the host server  mirroring data to hard drives at the same time that it writes to SSDs. In still other implementations, we have large EMC shops that use asynchronous replication to another site for purposes of failover. In these cases, we help sites architect writes to both SSD and their EMC arrays. The end result is that their applications are much faster, with no loss of reliability."

Texas Memory Systems recently released its RamSan-6200 SSD system, which offers up to 1000 terabytes of Flash-based storage in a single 40U rack configuration that can sustain five million inputs/outputs per second  (IOPS) with 60 gigabytes per second throughput while using only slightly more than six kilowatts of power. "This changes the storage equation for large databases, science and research labs, seismic processing, video and Federal Government installations," said Woody Hutsell. The product is one of several that are poised for high performance computing (HPC) workloads.

But there is also the cost-conscious side of Flash, characterized by SandForce's commodity-based MLC (multi-level cell) Flash, which is significantly cheaper than standard SLC (single level cell) Flash.

"We provide a solution to enterprises that allows them to interface their host servers to commodity MLC flash for their IO-intensive workload applications," said Thad Omura, VP of Marketing at Sandforce."We are finding a big uptake here from customers because this is an area where SSDs have proven value, both in the IOPS per dollar and IOPS per watt that they can deliver when compared to standard technology like hard disk drives."Omura says that SandForce is proliferating the number of interfaces able to use commodity-based MLC Flash. "Today, we deliver native SATA SSD processing, and we can get to SAS through third party interfaces," he said. "We are looking at delivering an interface for native SAS and PCI Express...and we expect to see all of these interfaces widely used in data centers."

As SSD companies deliver better and more creative products with falling price points, some industry analysts are predicting an SSD market of $1.3 billion in revenue by 2012. If technology innovation and price drops join forces with legitimizing endorsements from major storage vendors, look for SSD uptake in enterprises to finally take off in 2010.