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MS Researchers Call Moving Server Storage To SSDs a Bad Idea

Posted by timothy on from the professor-if-these-projections-are-accurate dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As an IT administrator did you ever think of replacing disks by SSDs? Or using SSDs as an intermediate caching layer? A recent paper by Microsoft researchers provides detailed cost/benefit analysis for several real workloads. The conclusion is that, for a range of typical enterprise workloads, using SSDs makes no sense in the short to medium future. Their price needs to decrease by 3-3000 times for them to make sense. Note that this paper has nothing to do with laptop workloads, for which SSDs probably make more sense (due to SSDs' ruggedness)."

34 of 292 comments (clear)

  1. Not every tool is right for every application?! by Tumbleweed · · Score: 5, Funny

    News at 11!

    1. Re:Not every tool is right for every application?! by VeNoM0619 · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's hardly the issue... notice how they say 3-3000 times cheaper. Meaning a $3000 SSD would have to cost $1 for them to consider it... Don't you love pulling numbers of your ass?

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    2. Re:Not every tool is right for every application?! by Cormacus · · Score: 5, Funny

      I dunno about that. I'm pretty sure that if your only tool is a hammer, all of your problems start looking like nails . . . allowing the hammer to be "applied" to every application . . .

      --
      Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
    3. Re:Not every tool is right for every application?! by AvitarX · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I actually don't think times cheaper makes any sense.

      I hear it all the time, but it is meaningless.

      3000 times cheaper than what? The current price?

      If I am selling something that is now "twice as cheap" is that half the price?, double the discount?, twice as shoddily made?

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    4. Re:Not every tool is right for every application?! by jebrew · · Score: 3, Funny
      So if it's $100, and they say 3 times cheaper, then it's got to be:

      $100 - (3 * $100) = -$200

      Hell, if they pay me $200 AND give me an SSD, I'll be a happy person.

    5. Re:Not every tool is right for every application?! by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 4, Informative

      They're not the only ones pulling numbers out of their ass. You also seem to be too, unless you're finding the absolutely most expensive drive in any given capacity class.

      For example, the 80GB Intel X25-M runs around $380, so is better than any of the prices you pulled up.

      Obviously, it doesn't make sense to replace every drive in a server farm with SSDs, especially if you want lots of storage, but you have to keep in mind that while SSDs may suck for GB/$, they do have major advantages in other areas, such as MB/S/$ - That Intel X25-M is FAST, and if you are primarily interested in serving lots of small transactions rather than storing big files, it's the way to go.

      For example, Slashdot is probably better off with an array of X25-Ms because it's only storing text and is getting LOTS of hits.

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
    6. Re:Not every tool is right for every application?! by trb · · Score: 3, Funny

      Funny, my other complaint is twice as slow.

      Yeah, I prefer "half fast."

    7. Re:Not every tool is right for every application?! by billcopc · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I love that term "Enterprise storage".

      A hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive. It doesn't matter whether you pay $79 or $799 for a drive, it is just as likely to crash, burn and lose all your data as any other. The sole difference between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives lies in the firmware. It might have more aggressive queue deadlines, or be configured to "fail" as soon as a single defect is identified (even though it can remap them with spare sectors). In many cases they are 100% identical.

      It's all just markup, and in some rare cases you might get an extra year or two on the warranty. I'd much rather buy ten cheap drives and have a bunch of spares, than buy the "enterprise" model and have it die just as catastrophically.

      There's no shortage of FUD threatening that if you use a cheap drive in a server, your wife will cheat on you with a Seagate engineer, your first-born child with "go gay", coworkers will laugh at you and call you "Cheapy McCheaperson" behind your back, and Larry Ellison will reach down from his bearded throne and slap you across the face with a greased-up midget.

      If an enterprise SSD comes with an enterprise-class warranty that justifies the cost, great! If not then you're a sucker for buying it, as the vendor laughs all the way to the bank.

      --
      -Billco, Fnarg.com
  2. How about a policy: NO PAYWALLS! by nweaver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is an ACM article behind a paywall.

    How about a slashdot policy of not linking to articles behind paywalls?

    --
    Test your net with Netalyzr
    1. Re:How about a policy: NO PAYWALLS! by Timothy+Brownawell · · Score: 5, Informative

      How about a slashdot policy of not linking to articles behind paywalls?

      Seriously, it's even worse than the "free registration required" links that we used to have problems with.

      Original PDF at http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/76522/tr-2008-169.pdf.

    2. Re:How about a policy: NO PAYWALLS! by ArsonSmith · · Score: 3, Funny

      "It's also tax deductible as a professional subscription."

      Sweet!! you mean I can send MS $200 to avoid having to send $40 to the government?

      --
      Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  3. Paid ACM subscription by eples · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Their price needs to decrease by 3-3000 times for them to make sense.

    Hm. I was thinking the same thing about the ACM subscription.

    --
    I'm a 2000 man.
  4. they already cost less per gig than some SAS drive by hxnwix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    SSD is already cheaper per gig than some SAS drives. Also, 3-3000 times? What the hell sort of estimate is that?

  5. What if... by Thelasko · · Score: 3, Insightful

    they don't use NTFS?

    --
    One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    1. Re:What if... by Anarke_Incarnate · · Score: 5, Funny

      FAT chance.........

    2. Re:What if... by Rayeth · · Score: 5, Funny

      ext-remely unlikely.

    3. Re:What if... by darthdavid · · Score: 5, Funny

      Stop with the puns or you'll end up in prison with Reiser.

  6. Re:they already cost less per gig than some SAS dr by Larry+Clotter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's called "pulling numbers out of your ass".

  7. 3 to 3000 percent? by erroneus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    My goodness! They have really done their research in order to produce data as accurate as that!

    The fact was, they said the same thing when it came to magnetic tape versus magnetic disks. These days, hard drives are cheaper than tapes and will hold their data longer and more compatibly.

    Microsoft fears change that they do not control. If they don't control the changes, someone might write them out of the story.

    1. Re:3 to 3000 percent? by lgw · · Score: 4, Informative

      These days, hard drives are cheaper than tapes and will hold their data longer and more compatibly.

      That's entirely false.

      Hard drives are vastly cheaper than tape drives, but enterprise quality tape is stil cheaper than enterprise quality HDDs.

      Enterprise tape has a proven 20-year shelf life, no HDD does.

      I wrote new commercial software that could (and did) work with IBM's 9-track tape format in 1994, 30 years after it released, and there is still hardware and software in use today that can read that hardware format - 45 years of compatibility. The abstract format - ANSI tape labels - is still in niche use for newly saved data today. DLT format is 25 years old, and while I'm not sure you can buy a new drive that reads the original DLT format, used drives are still easy to come by and you can connect them to new SCSI cards.

      How easy is it to read an MFM drive (assuming there are more than 0 in the world that still work)? That format is 30 years old, and it would be a real challenge to find a slot on a modern PC that would take an MFM controller, vastly harder than reading a DLT tape. FAT is also about 30 years old, but disk formats older than that are basically extinct.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  8. Re:they already cost less per gig than some SAS dr by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Funny

    What do you mean, an african or european ass?

  9. 3-3000 times? by dAzED1 · · Score: 3, Funny

    seriously? "we don't have enough people here. we need between 2-2000 times as many people in the configuration department." Does that sound like I have ANY idea how many people we need?

    Sorry, that is a *ridiculous* range to give.

  10. Re:XServe by DAldredge · · Score: 4, Informative

    Page 1 Microsoft Research Ltd. Technical Report MSR-TR-2008-169, November 2008 Not a thing to do with it.

  11. Inaccurate summary by chazzf · · Score: 4, Informative
    Hat tip to the anon for the Google cache link (http://tinyurl.com/d2py5r). The summary doesn't quote exactly from the paper, which actually said this:

    "Our optimization framework is flexible and can be used to design a range of storage hierarchies. When applied to current workloads and prices we find the following in a nutshell: for many enterprise workloads capacity dominates provisioning costs and the current per-gigabyte price of SSDs is between a factor of 3 and 3000 times higher than needed to be cost-effective for full replacement. We find that SSDs can provide some benefit as an intermediate tier for caching and write-ahead logging in a hybrid disk-SSD configuration. Surprisingly, the power savings achieved by SSDs are comparable to power savings from using low-power SATA disks."

    --
    No statement is true, not even this one.
  12. What it really means by HangingChad · · Score: 5, Funny

    Microsoft researchers provides detailed cost/benefit analysis for several real workloads.

    If Microsoft researchers report that SSD's are not cost effective storage, it means that Microsoft is not getting any revenue from SSD storage. Or that they're behind on incorporating SSD's into the server stack. Or they caught blind-sided by the trend like they did with netbooks and are now scrambling to explain why they didn't see it coming. Oh, we found that wasn't cost effective, so we didn't incorporate it.

    I really miss the days Microsoft had it together. There was a time they were great to work with. Now they seem like the Three Stooges Do IT. SSD, eh? Oh, a wise guy! SMACK! Wo-wo-wo-wo!

    --
    That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
  13. Re:Tell that to someone running an OpenStorage SAN by drsmithy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Windows 2020 will have the same features as Open Solaris 10, just wait and see. They will be able to use a SSD as a cache reader I swear!

    They could call it... ReadyBoost.

  14. This is probably a reaction to Sun's L2ARC by kroyd · · Score: 4, Informative
    Sun has been making quite a bit of noise in the storage architecture world with their use of SSDs as intermediate cache to improve reading and writing speeds.

    http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test has some background information, and http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/l2arc_screenshots and http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/my_sun_storage_7410_perf has some performance numbers.

    Basically, what Sun is claiming is that by adding a SSD cache layer you can improve IOPS by about 5x, for what amounts to a really small amount of money for say a 100tb system. This is being marketed quite heavily by Sun as well. (The numbers look convincing, and the prices for the Sun Storage servers are certainly very competitive, well, compared to say NetApp.)

    IMHO this is just a repeat of the well known Microsoft tactic of spreading massive amounts of FUD about any competing technology that you can't reproduce yourself - you'll have to wait until Windows Server 2013 for this.

  15. Cherry-picked analysis by David+Jao · · Score: 5, Informative
    This paper is biased and premature even by the prevailing low standards of typical CS papers. For example, they model SSD failure, but completely ignore mechanical drive failure, which is far more devastating and commonplace. I kid you not:

    Since this paper is focused on solid-state storage, and wear is a novel, SSD-specific phenomenon, we include it in our device models. Currently we do not model other failures, such as mechanical failures in disks.

    The correct approach to incomplete data is, of course, to gather complete data, and they have no excuse here, because there is PLENTY of data on mechanical drive failure rates. However, if you are not willing to do that, the least you can do is ignore the data equally on both sides. The authors' failure to treat both sides equally leads to a hopelessly biased and skewed analysis.

  16. Read the Paper by kenp2002 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I just finished the reading the paper.

    The paper boils down to this:

    SSD disk when measured against IOPS, Watts, and Capacity in relation to cost based on several different server types is not cost effective yet. Depending on the type of server costs need to come down at least 3 fold, and under some scenarios as much as 3000 times. Hosting MP3s that are largely sequental, low write storage SSDs are 3000 times over priced. For insaine random IO scenarios that need to come down 3 fold to make it worth it compared to conventional drives.

    Depending on the type of server they can perform worse then standard mechanical disks.

    They found no advantage to 15k RPM drives versus 10k RPM drives when cost is factored in.

    SSD drives pay for themselves in power saving in about 5 years, well past their expected longevity.

    Mechanical disks wear out more or less independant of their data load, SSDs wear out proportional to their data load.

    SSDs do not handle tiny files very well due to how data is written.

    I see nothing in the paper that is pro-microsoft, rather straight dealing on the drives themselves.

    I would suggest MOD-TROLL any evanglest on any side of the OS wars as this paper doesn't seem to deal with OS touting.

    It was a boring but informative read.

    --
    -=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
    1. Re:Read the Paper by amorsen · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They tested precisely one brand/model SSD, as far as I can tell from the paper. It did 351 random writes per second, which is pitiful (but probably typical). Intel claims 3300 random writes per second for the X25-E.

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    2. Re:Read the Paper by careysub · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It is informative, but there is one aspect that they omit from their analysis - the effect of device performance of the cost of the server farm needed to provide service.The whole analysis is based on the storage device cost only (there are good reasons for this, but limits the relevance of their analysis). If higher read rates of an SSD translate into higher server transaction rates then fewer servers are needed at possibily dramatic additional savings.

      Here is a specific scenario to make this concrete.

      You have a search engine application that accesses a relative static index (small parts refreshed daily maybe, all of it refreshed monthly). The ability to randomly read blocks determines how many queries per second your server can handle. The 17-fold speed advantage of the SSD over the Cheetah 15K is a huge win here. Of course you can set up a RAID 0+1 of Cheetah's but your server box only holds 4 data drives (out of 6, you mirror 2 more for redundant storage of the OS and application). So you need to buy four times as many servers using Cheetahs than SSDs, which use more than 4X the power and take up extra data center space (which is not free).

      Or you could stuff a dozen or more Cheetahs into a RAID chassis that costs several times more than one server box.

      Either way the cost of the Cheetahs themselves is trivial compared to the cost of the hardware required to actually make use of them.

      --
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  17. Re:they already cost less per gig than some SAS dr by Lord+Ender · · Score: 5, Funny

    They could grip it by the husk!

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  18. Solid State Disk Benchmarks by JakFrost · · Score: 3, Informative

    One thing about this research paper is that they used only one model MemoRight GT MR25.2 in 8/16/32 GB capacities to do their testing before 2008-11-11 publication of the paper in the United Kingdom.

    I'm concerned that the research test and results are largely skewed against SSDs because they used only that one model to do all their testing with based on only one price point for the SSDs.

    There is a very large difference in performance between many various SSD drives based on the original flawed JMicron JMF602 chipset (stuttering/freezing on write), newer JMF602B (smaller stuttering), Samsung's chipset, Intel's chipset (fastest random writes by 4x), and the newest Indilnix Barefoot chipset (balanced sequential/random read/write). Additionally the huge drops in prices in the last 6-12 months ($1,500->$400) is a big change in the SSD arena. These price, capacity, and performance changes are going to continue fluctuating for the next few years yielding much better drives for the consumers.

    I believe that the research in the paper will be shortly obsolete, if it isn't already, given the latest products on the market and price points and the Q3/Q4 new upcoming products from Intel and others.

    I'm helping a friend of mine build an all-in-one HTPC / Desktop / Gaming system and I've been doing research into SSDs for the past few weeks based on reviews and benchmarks so I wanted to share my info.

    Basically there are only two drives to consider and I list them below. A good alternative at this time is to purchase smaller SSDs and create RAID-0 (stripping) sets to effectively double their performance instead of buying a single large SSD. The RAID-0 article below shows great benchmark results to this effect.

    Intel X25-M

    The Intel X25-M series of drives is the top performance leader right now, and the 80GB drive is barely affordable for a desktop system build if you consider the increased performance of the drive.

    Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G1 80GB SATA Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail - $383.00 USD ($ 4.7875 / per GB)

    OCZ Vertex

    The new OCZ Vertex series of drives with the newer 1275 firmware is the price/performance leader and they are much more affordable than the Intel drives. When you combine two of these smaller 30/60 GB drives into RAID-0 (stripping) you get double the performance at still acceptable prices.

    OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX30G 2.5" 30GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail - $129.00 USD ($ 4.3 / per GB)

    OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail - $209.00 USD ( $ 3.483 / per GB)

    Reviews

    Required Reading:
    AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ

    AnandTech - Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives

    AnandTech - The SSD Update: Vertex Gets Faster, New Indilinx Drives and Intel/MacBook Problems Resolved

    RAID-0 Performance:
    ExtremeTech - Intel X25 80GB Solid-State Drive Review - PCMark Vantage Disk Tests

    BenchmarkReviews - OCZ Vertex SSD RAID-0 Performance
    (Be Warned about BenchmarkReviews! Synthetic benchmark results only, no real-life benchmarks such as PCMark Vantage.)

  19. MS Researchers Call Moving Server Storage To SSDs by falconwolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "As an IT administrator did you ever think of replacing disks by SSDs? Or using SSDs as an intermediate caching layer?

    SSDs aren't big enough for some uses as mass storage but they could speed up things if used as a cache.

    Note that this paper has nothing to do with laptop workloads, for which SSDs probably make more sense (due to SSDs' ruggedness)."

    I think laptops are where SSDs can come into their own. There shouldn't as much need to large mass storage and SSDs extend battery life. Having said that, I replaced the 160GB HDD in my 1 1/2 year old laptop with a 320GB drive, the biggest I could find.

    Falcon

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