SSDs in the enterprise: It's about more than just speed

@Paul Crawford

Thank you. I wasn't sure who sponsored the outdated advertising article I just read, but I'm glad to see that I'm not the only person who thinks in terms of real money being spent.

SSD's have good and bad about them, as do normal hard drives or even some of the newer tech drives (Helium, etc). Any of them can do the job, but it moves the compromises around depending on what you use and how it's configured.

The writing has been on the wall for a while now.

Stationary silicon will replace rotating rust. Despite my early experience with problematic SSDs I'm going all in for the future. No more purchases of HDDs will take place here.

SSD's also saved jobs....

... For the first time - spending a moderate amount of $$$ - delivered a noticable performance increase all the way up to the application while hiding all the architectural sins of your predecessors (at least for the time being).

IT managers could finally shine in front if their business stakeholders while regurgatating terms such as "disruptive technology", "agility" , "time to market" - or whatever their storage vendor dreamt up.

Don't forget the CPU

The article does point out that the power drain of a system is rather more than than storage alone. However the speed of SSD can ironically allow the deployment of less powerful CPUs and still achieve the same overall performance. With a less powerful CPU one may need a smaller PSU with fewer losses which in return require less cooling to create a virtuous circle in overall power requirements.

And of course

You can play Open Cities mod in Skyrim with affecting your FPS too much.

Not all about performance

I'm sure I remember reading an article here a few years ago where someone from Facebook was talking an a semiconductor conference about there needs for storage. He put forward a use case for SSDs saying they had vast qualities of data that was effectively write once, read hardly ever. All those millions of photos of peoples cats they posted and no one looks at after the first few minutes. They were after being able to save all the power that went in to keeping all that rust spinning.

The upfront cost of SSDs is very visible, but for many customers it is more difficult to quantify the cost saving from the power consumption. BTW the figures you quote don't seem to make sense. You talk about a 90% power reduction but only a 30% heat output reduction, surely these figures need to match. Cutting down on the heat out also reduces the power bill from the AC.

SSD Burn out

How does the known end of life date of SSD's caused by Flash Degrade (As opposed to a "Perfect" hard drive running indefinitely) factor into the TCO at the Enterprise level?

I've got an 8tb SSD based NAS back home, been using it for over a year now.

The days of large storage on SSD are here.

SSDs do NOT enable de-duplication as the article states.

spinning rust

Spinning rust is about 18 months from extinction. Good riddance.

Power is small beans

a 10TB hard drive (cost $200) uses <200Kwh of power per year. At $0.20/kwh (high end of US cost) and PUE of 2 (1Kwh of AC for each Kwh of gear) that's $80/year of power. The equivalent (capacity, ent feature set) SSD Samsung's PM863 3.84TB costs $2000. Even if it uses no power at all the payback is MANY years.

SanDisk’s Extreme Pro is a direct successor to the Extreme II (see below). Just like its predecessor the drive lives up to the expectations implied in the model name. It is slightly ahead of the Extreme II in most areas with sequential read speeds of 550 MB/s and write speeds of 520 MB/s (4K random read/write 100K/90K IOPS), although you will hardly notice the difference in everyday tasks.

More importantly though, SanDisk is confident enough to offer a 10-year warranty with the Extreme Pro – a unique offer in the consumer segment. The 19nm MLC NAND is allegedly good for writing 22 GB of data per day for 10 years. Consequently, when this drive finally wears out in the average system built today, the SATA interface will be long since obsolete.