Source of an article: http://www.infostor.com/disk-arrays/ssd-drives/top-10-enterprise-ssd-tips-and-trends-1.html
There is so much going on in the enterprise SSD marketplace that those seeking to procure more flash storage may be understandably confused about which brand or type of flash is right for them. And the vendors don’t really help. Most do a fine job of hyping up their products as being perfect for everything. But that is rarely the case.
Here are some of the top tips and trends in the enterprise SSD market that might help in the buying and implementation phase.
1. Examine Enterprise SSD Upgrade and Maintenance Programs.
There are a lot of flash options out there. Every week there are new flash configurations and enterprise SSD arrays being released. So who is who among this jumble of vendors?
The traditional storage stalwarts are well represented, as are a large number of startups and relatively new faces. The problem is, however, many offerings sound so similar.
Mark Peters, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, noted a trend within the market of expanded flash upgrades and maintenance programs as vendors seek to differentiate themselves from competitors. “This is where the fight is going to be,” said Peters.
2. Enterprise SSD Speed Is Less Important.
The hardware used in servers and storage used to be a major point of pride and product differentiation. But commoditization of hardware has changed that. Similarly, in the enterprise SSD space, fast flash has largely become a commodity, too.
“As flash continues to get optimized, it will be hard to fight by saying flash is fast, because all flash is fast now,” said Chris Tsilipounidakis, manager of product marketing at Tegile.
3. Performance Plus Is the New Differentiator.
Most vendors are emphasizing add-ons from mere speed in recent enterprise SSD announcements.
“New vendors are going one step further by offering aggressive programs that push on performance, capacity and economics,” said Tsilipounidakis. “Users should look at more than just product features and take advantage of creative programs that come with many flash arrays that can make the entire IT team’s job easier.”
4. New Enterprise SSDs Put Disk at Risk.
With the economics of flash continuing to improve steadily, some say the future of the hard disk drive (HDD) is at risk. But just as tape never went away, and in fact has lately gained a new head of steam courtesy of its suitability to long-term archiving, it is doubtful that disk will die, as some vendors proclaim.
That said, there is no doubt disk is being assailed on all sides as a viable home for many forms of storage. Disk took another hit with recent advances in enterprise SSD technology.
“SSDs are evolving with increased densities and lower cost per GB,” said Chadd Kenney, CTO, Americas, Pure Storage. “3D NAND further advanced the economic shift by providing better resiliency and an even better cost per GB. This trend is causing enterprise IT decision makers to pause and question if disk is still an option for performance-centric workloads.”
This shift enables users to utilize flash in a more widespread fashion throughout the enterprise. As opposed to purely high-performance needs, it is also finding itself a home to many capacity-based applications. Recent Wikibon studies are even suggesting that flash-based solutions with data reduction have crossed over the line and become cheaper per GB than disk.
5. Take Note of Parallelization.
Another trend to note is parallelization. Pure Storage, for example, has released a file and object solution, FlashBlade, which interfaces directly with NAND flash. Interfacing with the flash directly allows it to utilize parallelization of flash devices and derive better performance as each blade pairs compute and storage together. Blades can be added one at a time (fifteen per chassis), resulting in linear performance growth alongside capacity.
At less than $1/GB usable, said Kenney, this enables flash to be utilized outside of the traditional virtualization and database environments, and now apply the technology to the Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, software development and rich media.
6. Flash Can Be Tailored to Workloads.
Adam Fore, director of solutions and product marketing at NetApp, said that the ability to deliver predictable performance has enabled a new class of enterprise SSD storage by allowing users to assign capacity and performance resources to workloads independently. The SolidFire product from NetApp, for example, leverages these SSD characteristics to create performance and resource pools that can be dynamically applied to workloads based on service levels with predictable and consistent performance and capacity levels. SSD storage options like this may work well for service providers, for example, who want to deliver tiered services with flexible characteristics at guaranteed service levels.
7. Don’t Dash to All-Flash.
It appears that the natural conservativism within the storage industry is finally abating, and more and more enterprises are considering a rapid dash to all flash. But caution is advised as not all flash is equal. And not all enterprise SSD tools provide the same functionality. Some may be optimized to one type of workload, some to another. Due diligence must temper any tendency to rip and replace.
Keith Parker, director of product marketing at Violin Memory, advised anyone looking to migrate to all-flash to consider asking a few questions, such as: Is the array they’re looking at able to optimally support multiple workloads? Can that array support their database, web servers, email server, SharePoint, multiple applications on a single array — and provide optimum performance?
“There are going to be different needs depending on the application,” said Parker.
8. Databases Have Different Needs.
Many enterprise SSD deployments feel the need for speed. Those creating the storage to support a bunch of web servers, for example, will probably care more about throughput and IOPS. A database, on the other hand, is typically going to need extremely low latency, yet many make the mistake of neglecting this in favor of high throughput and IOPS.
Why is that? Databases don’t tend to push a lot of IOPs, said Parker. You can have a huge database and it’s only going to be using 75,000 to 100,000 IOPs. However, where databases are challenged is in response times – how long does it take between the making of a request to getting a response when you’re putting information into a form on a website, or some other similar function.
“It’s the time in between when you hit submit; getting that time down is important with databases,” said Parker. “The amount of data is trivial – it’s that time to the storage and back again ,which is why you need low latency.”
9. When Is Latency Good Enough?
Anyone moving from a disk-based system is probably used to plenty of latency. So any move to enterprise SSD is going to be an immense improvement. For databases and certain other workloads, it is vital to determine in advance what kind of improvement are you really looking for? Is 10 milliseconds of latency enough or do you need to take it that down to 1 millisecond or even lower?
“If you can go to less than half a millisecond, that’s the difference between a 10x improvement and a 20x improvement,” said Parker. “That small difference can make a huge impact on all of your users.”
10. Will You Scale Up or Out?
Scale up is where you buy a single box to start out small and add capacity. Scale out is where you can cluster multiple boxes together to increase both capacity and performance. Each alternative has advantages to it based on specific environments and workloads.
Some flash platforms favor scale out. Others favor scale up. A few do both well. But again, it’s a case of defining what you really need in advance. You may have to pay a little more for a platform that does both, so do you really need it? If so, it’s worth the investment. But the worst move would be to inadvertently purchase scale up when you need scale out, or vice versa.
“Look for a system that can meet your needs in terms of scale up or scale out,” said Parker.
Flashier Future
Those are some of the ongoing flash trends and a few tips to help you navigate through the vendor maze to choose the right option to fit your needs. But regardless of how much flash or what flavor you deploy, the one certainty is that we are all going to be seeing a lot more flash as time goes on.
“As effective flash dollar-per-GB costs drop, flash deployment in the enterprise is accelerating,” said Eric Burgener, an analyst at IDC.