by Jun Alejo, BiTMICRO Networks
In an article titled "No Waiting: Considering the Benefits of Solid
State Disks,"(1) authors Ramon Sandoval and Maneesha Lee
highlighted the growing popularity of solid state disks (SSDs) as
accelerators for enterprise databases. The authors cited the rapid
expansion of the SSD industry as a result of relational database
applications, with SSDs being deployed as storage devices for hot
files(2). In particular, Sandoval and Lee revealed that
a major portion of enterprise SSDs are installed in high-end database
applications running Sybase, Oracle and Informix, along with SAP
running on top of these databases.
Aside from this write-up, several reports and white papers emphasizing
the performance benefits of SSDs have already been published, and
hard disk drive makers such as Samsung have expressed interest in
this storage line. The only remaining question is, are SSDs a viable
alternative for price-conscious buyers who are running performance-hungry
OLTP apps?
The objective of this article is to examine the benefits of utilizing
flash SSD-enabled storage system as cache storage in an enterprise
environment. A comparison will be made between conventional storage
systems (featuring HDDs) and solid-state disk-based network storage
in terms of performance and overall cost per IOPS.
Market Trends
Storage users are buying more midrange and lower cost systems, according
to International Data Corp.'s (IDC) quarterly worldwide disk storage
systems report released December 2004. Revenues grew 3.5 percent
year-over-year to $3.4 billion in the third quarter of 2004. Although
revenue growth was smaller compared to previous quarters, IDC noted
rapid growth in storage capacity, rising 50.5 percent year over
year to 310 petabytes. It is the largest growth rate posted over
the last seven quarters, the report said.
IDC analyst Brad Nisbet says the results confirm the slow but steady
growth of midrange and lower segments, like ATA-based storage. "We
saw an increase in the growth of petabytes shipped, which is yielding
the largest dollar per gigabyte pricing decline in seven quarters
and points to a growing share of higher-capacity, lower-cost disk
drive deployments and a broader variety of products offered by the
major vendors," he explains.
Another contributing factor to the growth of networked storage,
in particular midrange systems, is the stiff price competition among
sellers in their bid to corner a slice of shrinking IT budgets.
Price consciousness is also echoed in the way enterprises handle
their storage requirements. Consolidation is now a must as it increases
storage manageability, maximizes capacity utilization, and lowers
overall TCO.
However, this strategy puts a strain on server performance, especially
for I/O intensive applications such as:
- Aerospace, telemetry and data acquisition
- Data backup and recovery as well as migration
- Energy exploration and geosciences
- Medical sciences, including healthcare and imaging
- Online transaction processing (OLTP)
- Paging, log, journal and index files
- Still and moving video surveillance
- Video editing and processing, including post-production
- Video on demand and video services
- Weather forecasting and simulation
OLTP is a critical segment in enterprise storage as most banking,
trading and supply chain transactions are now transferred online,
with users demanding faster and more responsive systems. In selecting
the most cost-effective, high-performance storage device for this
application, IT and data center administrators have HDDs and SSDs
as options. The wide variety of available models in the market and
lower price per unit makes the HDD as the most logical solution for
enterprises, providing the best return on investment. Or does it?
Cost Analysis
Let us examine a setup involving a generic SAN attached JBOD setup
comprised entirely of 15,000RPM rotational HDDs as opposed to a BiTMICRO
E-Disk®SAN S2F-J featuring flash-based E-Disk SSDs. The objective
of this analysis is to compare the capital investment needed to acquire
a networked storage solution that can offer peak performance of 100,000
IOPS in a typical OLTP/database I/O application. Hardware
Specifications
The tables below detail the technical specifications of the drives
and JBOD modules used in our comparative analysis.
1 Source: http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/0b1feat3.html
2 Defined by techweb.com as "a database or data file
that is currently being heavily accessed by users"
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