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Current Filter: Storage>>>>>> Tiered Storage: at the Heart of the Data Centre Editorial Type: Opinion Date: 09-2013 Views: 3061 | |||
| Nick Spittle, Director of Toshiba Electronics Europe, Storage Products Division examines how a tiered storage architecture can exploit the best features of both SSD and HDD, allocating data according to access needs
The world of storage is changing rapidly; data is being created and shared at a phenomenal rate. With increasing internet speeds, workplace reliance on IT systems, access to HD and 3D video content and the rise of social media, digital data production and storage is at an all-time high - and businesses are at risk of being overloaded by data. Market analysts IDC estimate that the amount of data created or replicated in 2011 was 1.8 zettabytes, the equivalent of 57.5 billion 32GB iPads filled with 200 billion high definition movies. Businesses are increasingly asking how to meet the ever-increasing storage demands in a cost-effective manner that meets all performance needs such as data availability, speed of access, security and data redundancy. The majority of digital data is still stored on HDDs, the foundation of almost every enterprise data centre. However SSDs offer compelling advantages such as lower energy consumption and faster data access times. The solid state drive (SSD) has been hailed as the future of the storage market but is it truly the right technology to meet the digital avalanche that is coming our way?
PERFORMANCE Because the read/write heads have to move into position and the disc needs to 'spin up' to speed, there are inevitable delays (latencies) in data writing and retrieval. Drive access times are slowed by command processing, seek times, rotational delays and data transfer times. Conversely, SSDs have no moving mechanical element to their design, removing any seek time and rotational delays. SSDs store data on NAND flash memory, which is accessed via a chip/block/page layout and cluster/sector construct, where under eSSD architecture a cluster is the minimum readable unit (8 sectors). The boost in data flow rate and input/output per second (IOPS), is one of the major selling points of this technology. However, SSDs face their own limitations in terms of life expectancy. Workload, especially in the enterprise sector can be extreme and involve high volumes of transactional data storage, which could be weighted towards write operations over read. For SSDs the frequency of this data change predicts the life of the device in the field.
COST SSDs are still predominantly limited to high-end devices due to the fact that they're more expensive but as NAND prices fall and device sizes shrink, this is changing. Of course, device cost does not incorporate the total cost of ownership and usage, where the increased speeds and efficiency of SSDs begin to make the argument more favourable.
CAPACITY
ENERGY CONSUMPTION
LIFETIME
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