4 April 2011

Download Are SSDs Ready for Enterprise Storage Systems

Anil Vasudeva

Computer architects dream of storage devices for their applications/workloads which can provide very high IOPs at minimal cost (IOPS/$/GB) and fast access (low latency). “Enterprise-Ready SSDs”©IMEX have started to fulfill that promise as they segment into SATA and PCIe based Storage products. A major factor for their quick adoption has been the advent of new controllers and firmware which have allowed them to transparently mitigate early issues related to reliability, endurance, data retention, performance, ease of management and interoperability with exiting storage interfaces.

But their real success in enterprise adoption comes from Automated Storage Tiering activated by monitoring workload I/O access signatures and behavior over time and then non-disruptive migration of hot data to SSDs, resulting in over 200% improvement in IOPS and 80% improvement in response time at peak loads.

Learning Objectives:

• The presentation provides an overview of SSD technology, storage characteristics and applications that benefit the most from its usage. It also provides techniques for workloads optimization using automated smart-tiering and system implementation in enterprise storage systems together with economics of SSDs usage in real life.
• The presentation illustrates how optimally selected hybrid storage of SSDs and HDDs can achieve 65% lower TCO, 475% higher IOPS and 165% lower footprint while achieving a whopping 800% in $/IOPs in SANs and other storage systems under different scenarios.