SHARE

Deploying Enterprise Apps on Solid State Drives

Flashed-based solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming a big issue for enterprise storage users; a number of customers I work with are planning for this new “tier 0” data storage for a number of reasons. It could be as simple as IOPS per watt, IOPS per dollar, or for some applications, bandwidth per GB/sec of storage. […]

Written By

Henry Newman

Feb 1, 2010

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More

Flashed-based solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming a big issue for enterprise storage users; a number of customers I work with are planning for this new “tier 0” data storage for a number of reasons. It could be as simple as IOPS per watt, IOPS per dollar, or for some applications, bandwidth per GB/sec of storage.

SSDs have a number of disadvantages compared to traditional disk storage, the biggest by far being cost. There are those who claim that spinning hard drives will soon be a thing of the past because of flash SSDs, but I can’t see that happening anytime soon, and if it does, the devices that replace spinning hard drives will not be based on flash and won’t appear much before the end of this decade (see I/O Bottlenecks: Biggest Threat to Data Storage). Vendors have been claiming tape is dead for the last 20 years, but it continues to play a big role in data protection schemes. There will always be tiers of storage, it seems.

This is the first in a three-part series on planning for flash SSD deployment. The first article will cover applications that will benefit from flash, along with some of file system and other issues for deployment. The second article will cover hardware issues, and the third will cover SSD design issues and their use with SAS and RAID controllers.

Applications that Benefit from SSDs

We all know that parts of some applications, such as databases, benefit from high IOPS architectures, but what should you be considering when trying to bring flash SSDs into your architecture?

The real benefit of SSDs for applications involves latency for small block I/O requests. While the fastest 2.5-inch 15K RPM drive might be able to do 250 random IOPS, most enterprise SSDs should be able to easily sustain 40,000 IOPS for read and 30,000 IOPS for write in today’s world. Of course, you need to have the hardware to achieve this performance, and that will be discussed in part 2 of this series.

There are obvious parts of heavily used databases that can benefit from SSD technology, and the most obvious are database indexes. The second most obvious part of databases that can benefit from SSDs are database logs files. Both of these are generally smaller than the table space and are often placed on 15K RPM disk drives today, and even then are still frequently limited in performance. Performance tools such as iostat, sar and other performance monitoring tools are often used to evaluate the high latency found on storage attached to the LUNs associated with these devices.

Read the rest at Enterprise Storage Forum.

Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

FEATURE | By James Maguire,
December 16, 2020
AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
December 11, 2020
Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
Top 10 AIOps Companies

FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
What is Text Analysis?

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
Finding a Career Path in AI

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020

SEE ALL
ARTICLES

Henry Newman

Henry Newman has been a contributor to TechnologyAdvice websites for more than 20 years. His career in high-performance computing, storage and security dates to the early 1980s, when Cray was the name of a supercomputing company rather than an entry in Urban Dictionary. After nearly four decades of architecting IT systems, he recently retired as CTO of a storage company’s Federal group, but he rather quickly lost a bet that he wouldn't be able to stay retired by taking a consulting gig in his first month of retirement.