[THIN] OT: Effect of Solid State drives
- From: "Rick Mack" <ulrich.mack@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2007 07:54:11 +1000
Hi,
Pardon this off topic post, but I think there are ging to be some
interesting changes in our server environment with the advent of almost
affordable solid state flash dirves (SSD)
Both Samsung (in production) and SANDisk (near production) have announced 64
GB solid state drives in a 1.8 and 2.5 inch form factor.
I thought it'd be fun to comment and speculate on some of the things that
are likely to happen.
The main push for these drives is into the laptop market, but I think the
impact will be much greater once people realise that they will solve major
server bottlenecks.
At the moment they'll probably cost about $10-15 a GB but considering the
total cost of your average server, that's really not going to break the
bank.
With 100 microsecond "seek" times and *sustainable* data transfer rates of
45 MB/sec (now) they are going to blow small (72 GB) server disks out of the
water. Very fast seek times means no seek optimization is required so the
performance difference between parallel IDE, serial IDE and SCSI (serial or
parallel) for random i/o will be irrelevant.
Imagine an IDE-based blade that blows a SCSI blade out of the water.
Or a dual quad core server that can actually use all that CPU horsepower.
Smaller and more reliable power supplies because we don't have to deal with
disk startup surges.
Hard disks that can be treated like USB flash drives.
A 1000000 hour MTBF, "instant" spinup time means very fast and reliable disk
storage systems can can start being power optimized.
SANs will be slow compared to local hard disks and no more reliable.
Considering the cost per GB of your average SAN and the observation that if
we disregard the management software their main claim to fame is
reliability, I think it's fair to speculate there will be a shakeup in the
SAN market. The main claim to fame for SANs is their reliability, but what
if we've got an even more reliable technology that's much faster. An SSD
based SAN would be sufficiently simple that it shouln't cost a lot more.
Smaller, faster, quieter.
Bank 10 SSD (1.8") drives together with RAID 0 and we're talking about a
disk subsystem that can maintain disk i/o at nearly data bus speeds. Lets
put 50-100 SSD disks into a SAN and suddenly a lot of things have to change.
Fibre channel won't be fast enough and using a traditional switch fabric
just won't hack the pace. We're likely to see SAS or SATA direct connect
options into a SAN, with as many SAN connect interfaces as we have
SAN-requiring hosts. Or a distributed SAN infrastructure, maybe based on
iSCSI.
Traditional hard disks will only be used for temporary or very high capacity
storage. Unless Seagate and Maxtor produce some interesting 3 layer (RAM
cache, Flash Cache, disk) hybrid technology to make up the performance
difference, their shares are going to plummet.
I can hardly wait ;-)
regards,
Rick
--
Ulrich Mack
Commander Australia
Other related posts:
