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SSDs: The New King of the Data Center?

Posted by samzenpus on from the feeling-solid dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Flash storage is more common on mobile devices than data-center hardware, but that could soon change. The industry has seen increasing sales of solid-state drives (SSDs) as a replacement for traditional hard drives, according to IHS iSuppli Research. Nearly all of these have been sold for ultrabooks, laptops and other mobile devices that can benefit from a combination of low energy use and high-powered performance. Despite that, businesses have lagged the consumer market in adoption of SSDs, largely due to the format's comparatively small size, high cost and the concerns of datacenter managers about long-term stability and comparatively high failure rates. But that's changing quickly, according to market researchers IDC and Gartner: Datacenter- and enterprise-storage managers are buying SSDs in greater numbers for both server-attached storage and mainstream storage infrastructure, according to studies both research firms published in April. That doesn't mean SSDs will oust hard drives and replace them directly in existing systems, but it does raise a question: are SSDs mature enough (and cheap enough) to support business-sized workloads? Or are they still best suited for laptops and mobile devices?"

4 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Great for some apps (see netflix blog) by ron_ivi · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This blog article's very relevant: http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/benchmarking-high-performance-io-with.html

    TL/DR: "The relative cost of the two configurations shows that over-all there are cost savings using the SSD instances"

    at least for their use-case (Cassandra).

    At work we also use SSDs for a couple terabyte Lucene index with great success (and far cheaper than getting a couple TB of DRAM spread across the servers instead)

    1. Re:Great for some apps (see netflix blog) by SQL+Error · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You can build a 48-core Opteron server with 512GB of RAM for under $8000. Going over 512GB in a single server gets a lot more expensive (you either need expensive high-density modules or expensive 8-socket servers - or both) but if you can run some sort of cluster that's not a problem.

  2. enterprise class SSDs not the same by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The enterprise class SSDs are not the same as the "consumer" ones: http://www.anandtech.com/print/6433/intel-ssd-dc-s3700-200gb-review

    Don't be surprised if you stick a "consumer" grade one to a heavily loaded DB server and it dies a few months later.

    Fine for random read-only loads.

    And some consumer grade SSDs aren't even consumer grade (I'm looking at you OCZ: http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html ).

  3. Virtualisation by drsmithy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is being driven primarily by increasing levels of virtualisation, which turns everything into a largely random-write disk load, pretty much the worst case scenario for regular old hard disks.