Enterprise Adoption of SSDs Remains Slow

Storage industry analysts and vendor executives have been talking about solid-state disks as an exciting new storage technology for enterprises for years, it seems. But they haven't been offering many examples of customers using the technology. Many still say it is "too early" to check in with customers to see how SSD adoption is going, yet they maintain that there is a lot of interest among enterprise IT departments in using SSDs to boost storage performance. Still, it may take years before the use of SSDs becomes mainstream.

The most logical entry points for enterprise use of SSDs are in storage arrays that combine SSDs with traditional hard drives in a tiered storage environment, in servers that team SSDs with DRAM (dynamic rapid access memory) to extend the rapid processing of dynamic memory, and in stand-alone systems where enterprises simply bring on board racks of SSDs in a distributed storage environment, according to the Storage Networking Industry Association.

"In the next three years, major storage companies will take the concept of SSDs and determine how best to implement it in the enterprise," says Phil Mills, chairman of SNIA's Solid State Storage Initiative. "It is not going to be a case of just replacing hard drives with SSDs, because SSDs will never get down to the cost of hard drives on a dollar-per-GB basis. Instead, the value proposition for SSDs will expand where organizations are trying to realize dramatically improved performance in areas of the enterprise where that improved performance makes sense."

One enterprise area where SSD adoption makes sense is to replace "short stroked" storage. Short-stroking describes a technique in which only the other edges of a series of high-speed Fiber Channel hard disks are formatted, using only 20 percent to 30 percent of the available capacity on each drive. In this way, enterprises are able to improve performance by storing data on the faster part of a drive and by spreading the speed of access across several drives.

Short-stroking is an area where we have seen a lot of enterprise SSD adoption," says Scott Delandy, storage division senior product marketing manager at EMC. "What the enterprise does is take hundreds of Fiber Channel drives out [and] replaces them with four to eight flash drives." Enterprises realize an immediate benefit in total cost of ownership, with lower maintenance and software licensing costs, and also achieve equipment footprint reductions and lower power consumption in data centers.However, this does not mean that enterprises are engaging in wholesale replacement of hard drives with SSDs. "In today’s cost-sensitive environment, enterprises want to complement their existing storage environments -- not rip and replace," Delandy says. This corresponds with what SSD providers like IBM also are seeing. "We think some applications, like flash-DRAM hybrid drives, will never be cheaper than disk," says Clod Berrera, a distinguished engineer and chief technology strategist for IBM's systems and technology group. "Where enterprises will see the benefits are in specific applications where the dollars per IOPS [input/output per second] are less."

For many enterprises, this means identifying transaction-intensive applications that are either mission-critical or high revenue-producing -- to justify the dollar expenditures in SSDs. "We are indeed seeing that approach," says Jon Affeldt, senior director of marketing for BlueArc. "The highest enterprise adoption rates are in enterprises in Internet services, financial services, and entertainment and content distribution industries. These industries have a preponderance of high-performance, revenue-generating applications that require optimal performance storage like SSD."

Enterprises are also applying SSD solutions to extend cache memory, especially if they are looking for dramatic performance improvements in data access. "The benefit of deploying SSDs in cache is that you can have an entire working set of data sitting in cache for rapid access," says Michael Cornwell, lead technologist of flash memory at Sun Microsystems. Sun offers a tiered storage system that allows an enterprise with high performance database requirements to place metadata in cache, while allowing access to lower-demand data in other tiers of storage that are occupied by traditional hard drives.

Nevertheless, SSD vendors still must overcome several obstacles if they hope to sell their gear to enterprises IT managers. The most obvious barrier is price, which remains an uphill fight. Most SSD suppliers, when discussing total cost of ownership, usually include "soft" cost savings -- an argument that continues to pale when compared with the hard-cost fact that hard drives are just cheaper than SSDs on a per MB or per GB basis.

Secondly, SSDs and how they are best applied are still not well understood in enterprises. "There are so many acronyms and diverse technologies to choose from," acknowledges Affeldt. "This makes SSDs seem complicated, and it is forcing enterprises to take the time to perform evaluations of SSDs."Third, while larger enterprises have IT staffers that can capably deploy and manage SSDs in mixed storage environments, many medium and small-sized businesses lack such internal expertise. This creates reluctance to go out on the limb for newer and more expensive technology.

It is also one reason why the new frontier of SSD research and development is focused on software systems that are designed to automate the management of SSD resources when they are combined with hard drives and other media. Sun, BlueArc, and IBM all have software management system initiatives aimed at demystifying SSD deployment and management. "Certainly, there are database and storage administrators out there who understand exactly where the 'pinch points' are in their transaction systems -- and how SSDs can affect that," says IBM's Barrera. "But by adding automated provisioning of storage, the process is simplified."

In 2009, the value proposition for SSDs is slowly taking hold in enterprise IT thinking, and most suppliers say that they are seeing business technology managers spell out requirements and options for SSDs when they seek proposals for new systems. Vendors also say that virtually all of their customers are looking at SSDs as they make plans for new systems. Nevertheless, SSDs have been adopted by only a few enterprises that require the highest performance and most experts expect that the pace of adoption will remain slow this year. Optimistic vendors expect deployment of SSDs in mainstream enterprise IT shops to pick up steam in 2010.