Essential Guide to Solid-State Drives

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Essential Guide to Solid-State Drives Managing the information that drives the enterprise STORAGE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO Solid-State Drives Solid-state drive technologies that will have the most impact for enterprise data storage administrators are highlighted in this guide. INSIDE 6 SSD trends 13 Wide stripe before you dive into SSD 16 DRAM SSD leaves FC in the dust 18 MLC NAND flash 22 When to recommend SSD 27 Vendor resources 1 , editorial | rich castagna s e c r u o s e r r The state of storage o d n e Solid-state storage is poised to revolutionize V data center storage with new and inventive implementations of NAND flash already available. D S S g n i d n e T’S SMALL, it runs cool, it’s power efficient and it’s lightning fast. There’s m an awful lot to like about solid-state storage. Put it head-to-head with m o traditional spinning media and it wins on nearly all counts, with admit- c e tedly some not yet fully resolved issues related to long-term reliability R and price. Still, few would question that solid-state is the direction that enterprise storage is headed. The real question is just how soon the transition from mechanical storage to solid The real question is state will take place. D just how soon the S Although new to the data center, NAND S i flash-based solid-state storage has been transition from M A around for a long time, used mostly in R mechanical storage D consumer and mobile products like smart phones, PDAs and MP3 players. The transi- to solid state will tion to data center quality storage prod- ucts involves more than just a matter of take place. scale as the technology employed in mobile products isn’t durable enough to stand up to the rigors of enterprise computing environments. But even at this early stage in its development, g n i solid-state storage does have something of a track record in enterprise p i r environments—demonstrated perhaps most notably by Texas Memory t s Systems that has been marketing DRAM-based storage arrays for more e d i than decade. In recent years, the company has also added flash-based W systems to its roster. But NAND flash has been criticized as being too unreliable to be used for enterprise-class storage. It can handle a limited number writes before it simply wears out, and its write performance lags its read performance considerably. Those issues, however, are being actively addressed by scores of solid-state chip makers and integrators with of novel approaches s d that yield reliability and performance improvements. Already, an impressive n e array of new NAND flash products is available—products that clearly exceed r t the performance of hard disks and match their reliability as well. D S The other criticism of NAND flash storage—and the one that’s expressed S most frequently—is that it just costs too much. If you compare NAND with hard disk storage on a dollar per gigabyte basis, the cost critics win the CopyrightStorage 2010,Essential TechTarget. Guide No partto Solid-State of this publication Drives may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from 3 the publisher. For permissions or reprint information, please contact Mike Kelly, VP and Group Publisher ([email protected]). 4 SSD trends Wide striping DRAM SSD Recommending SSD Vendor resources Storage Essential Guide to Solid-State Drives Solid-State to Guide Essential Storage Media Group. Media Storage Rich Ca andarecosteffective. maintained canbeeasily performance, sufficient arereliable,provide that systems storage have isto manager storage any for Thegoal solidstate. to move justthe alone areenoughto thosesavings Insomeshops, footprint. and production heat consumption, diskinpower spinning over tages drives? ofNANDflash orahandful disks spinning ofpricey more—alot whichcosts So go. theget from advantage speed aninherent ithas theapplication—and to wouldbeavailable on each andallthecapacity units fewer wouldrequirefar alternative A solid-state theapp’sneeds. partially satisfy willbeusedonly to disks high-speed sive expen- ofrelatively alot times.So, quickresponse ensure to those disks parts of theouter anduseonly disks ofhigh-speed may require dozens application ahigh-performance example, For andverysimple convincing. is argument That perdollarbasis. of comparisonisonaperformance validmeans theonly that say ofsolidstate Proponents storage. solid-state of attributes positive themany andalsoevades out ofcontext of storage types both takes kindofcomparisonreally Butthat handsdown. argument And even if the price was equal, solid state provides enormousadvan- provides solidstate equal, ifthepricewas And even sta gna ( rca [email protected] 2 ) is editorial director ofthe director ) iseditorial STORAGE 6 SSD trends Wide striping DRAM SSD Recommending SSD Vendor resources Storage SSD trends IN ENTERPRISE STORAGE Essential Guide to Solid-State Drives Solid-State to Guide Essential solid-state drivesarebeingusedinenterprise t aren’t archi- me,these systems Believe harddrive? fastest the thaneven 100times faster data canaccess that drive putinasolid-state to you’re going Allof asudden years. 20,30,40 thelast for harddrives around been architected b “Y Gartner Inc. Conn.-based Stamford, at director Unsworth, Joseph research to according ship thisyear, than300,000willlikely andfewer year shippedlast units than70,000SSD fewer theirlineups, to drives solid-states added have allserver vendors nearly Although andstorage needs. performance withthehighest thoseapplications for ect y theri Here’s alookatthelatesttrendsinhow ou needt “There’s still a lot of challenges outthere,” Unsworth said. ofchallenges “There’s stillalot ed t gi gabyte, solid-state drives often make sense only only sense make often drives solid-state gabyte, o tak gh OLID-STATE DRIVE(SSD) use f drop dramatically. dramatically. drop prise storage circles until approximately 18 months 18 approximately circlesuntil prise storage a data storageenvironments. t compan o have the right SSD, properly managed, supported managed, SSD,properly theright o have At the present cost of approximately $4per costofapproximately At thepresent g o, when the price of flash memoryo, whenthepriceofflash started to e a or d dvantage of that and exploit that.” that.” andexploit of that dvantage eca y. Enterprise servers and storage have serversy. Enterprise andstorage d By CarolSliwa es, but it was hardly a factor in enter- afactor hardly es, butitwas technology has beenin has technology STORAGE s e c r u o s e r r o SOLID-STATE DISK VS. FIBRE CHANNEL d n Still, the allure becomes apparent even when looking at the test results e V of one early adopter. Munder Capital Management in Birmingham, Mich., reduced data access time for its Microsoft Corp. Exchange Server by 89% on average during a 25-day test period of solid-state drives vs. 15K rpm Fibre Channel drives in its Compellent Technologies Inc. Storage D Center system. The response time for SQL Server plummeted by an S S average of 86%. g n i Munder tested 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K d Such a performance boost n and 64K I/O block sizes with 25 e m different workloads over a 24 hour is especially appealing for m period, varying between reading o c mission-critical trading e and writing, sequential and ran- R dom. It claimed the performance applications that need to of one SSD was equivalent to the performance of 10 to 16 Fibre process large amounts of Channel hard disk drives (HDDs), data and crunch numbers depending on the workload. D at lightning-quick speed. S Such a performance boost is S especially appealing for mission- M A critical trading applications that need to process large amounts of data R D and crunch numbers at lightning-quick speed. Munder also plans to use SSDs for Microsoft SharePoint Server and Exchange Server. “Right now, that’s the best bang for the buck,” said Michael Dufek, Munder Capital Management’s director of information systems. Until the cost of SSD drops, he added, “It’s not geared for everything.” With the Compellent system, the cost of a single 15K 300 GB Fibre g Channel HDD is $2,100; a single 146 GB SSD is $24,000, although savings n i in power consumption and software licensing fees help to offset a p i r t portion of the cost differential. s e The SSD that Munder Capital Management tested in its Compellent d i array is a type of flash known as single-level cell (SLC)—the technology W currently favored by most vendors that produce storage systems aimed at enterprise-level needs. DIFFERENT TYPES OF SSD TECHNOLOGY FOR ENTERPRISE DATA STORAGE While users such as Munder can take advantage of SSDs today, it’s still early days for the technology in enterprise storage. The technology is s d n still evolving, with different types of solid-state drives available—each e r with its advantages and drawbacks. t D The first type of SSD technology to gain any noteworthy foothold in the S S enterprise was Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) SSD. Texas Mem- ory Systems Inc. is a leading vendor of DRAM SSD. But the technology generally has been cost-prohibitive for all but those companies whose 7 Storage Essential Guide to Solid-State Drives STORAGE s e c r u o s e r r businesses depend on application performance for success. o d n The main distinguishing characteristic of DRAM SSD is its volatility. e V If the power supply is removed, data is lost. DRAM makes use of capac- itors, but because the capacitors leak charge over time, they must be refreshed continually to preserve the data. To address those issues, manufacturers typically build-in an alternate power source, such as a D back-up internal battery, and the ability to move data to an HDD or a S S flash-based memory system in the event of a power failure.
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