SSD, Scale-Out Architecture To Grow

As SSD capacity continues to increase and prices drop, use of SSD for enterprise Tier 1 applications is going to become more and more common. At the same time, enterprises are adopting scale-out architectures. It's an exciting time to be involved in enterprise storage.

Moore's Law is definitely in effect when it comes to solid-state storage, and as the technology and market mature, the storage world is moving toward a place where SSDs are not just silicon disks but full solid-state systems, says Kurt Marko, a regular contributor to Network Computing and InformationWeek, as well as the author of the new Research: State of Storage 2012 InformationWeek report.

SSD technology will become much more diverse in its applications, with everything from internal cards such as the ones currently available from Fusion-io to complete solid-state Tier 1 systems that will look like a shared array on the outside but are nothing but silicon on the inside, he says. The growth of the SSD market really boils down to price, and the price per bit of solid-state storage has gotten to the point where it's not prohibitively expensive, although obviously still more expensive than commodity drives. Fact: SSD is past the novelty stage.

"Not only has it become the default storage medium for the growing army of mobile devices, it's rapidly displacing magnetic disks on laptops from the MacBook Air to Intel's new Ultrabooks," Marko notes in the report.

The vast majority of enterprises currently using or planning to use SSDs are using them for databases (61% of the 166 respondents who noted they are using or evaluating SSDs), followed by usage for improving overall server performance (57%) and automated tiered storage (34%). Other notable reasons included technical applications (29%), reducing power consumption (27%), video/multimedia editing (21%) and other transaction-heavy software (26%).

SSDs are replacing disks in high-throughput, high-IOPS systems, which are already very expensive. To get the throughput the applications need, enterprises typically need 10 to 12 SSDs in parallel, which provides an order or two of magnitude in improved performance. The price/performance is driving that adoption, he says.

Earlier this month, enterprise storage leader EMC unveiled VFCache, the PCIe/flash-based server cache technology formerly known as Project Lightning. Mark Peters, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, isn't sure about EMC's claim that this signifies the next era of enterprise flash technology, but he says this is EMC, and so the move is extremely significant for the entire industry. "It is now blessed directly by one of the industry giants, and that signifies that solid state will prevail as a key element for the foreseeable future in storage ecosystems. This matters to EMC, to other big vendors, to start-ups and, last but certainly not least, to users."

Another key trend we'll see during the next few years is the adoption of scale-out architectures, Marko adds. It's not a new concept, but a new generation of products supporting iSCSI, block storage on distributed file systems and cloud stacks that work in what is essentially a distributed file system are coming onto the market to join the NAS-based systems historically associated with scale-out architecture. "I think you're going to see those systems displace some of the big monolithic arrays for many applications, particularly unstructured data and maybe some big data apps like Hadoop and applications that are designed to take advantage or designed to use distributed data. Those can really take advantage of this build as you grow architecture," says Marko.

There is a revival of interest in the scale-out storage model. Traditionally used for file storage, scale-out architectures are no longer just for file systems--or for storage architectures, he says. Several vendors are offering appliances in 2U server form factor that support block file systems using SAN protocols and running local hypervisors for virtual machine workloads. The applications are becoming more diverse as adoption of the model gains a new following.

Other key findings in the report include small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) moving to consolidated storage, a shift that has already taken place at the Fortune 500 level. "We're still seeing that move to shared storage, NAS and SAN. Across all verticals, you're seeing consolidation in RAIDs driven by a number of things," says Marko.

Learn more about Strategy: Hadoop and Big Data by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports (free, registration required).