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The need for speed

Editorial Type: Opinion     Date: 03-2014    Views: 3293   







Enterprise-ready SSDs can help to eliminate the costly 'one size fits all' approach to storage infrastructures, argues John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk

It is estimated that 90 percent of the world's data has been generated within the last two years. Think about that for a second. The implications captured in this fact alone have effectively catapulted us into the era of Big Data. While there are many opportunities to leverage greater pools of data to inform business decisions, there are also many potential headaches. In fact, this extreme data growth has left many organisations in a bind, trying to meet new data centre realities with either old data centre approaches and technologies, or silver bullet-type solutions. However, each approach has led to new challenges surfacing as the data sets continue to grow.

"We are only at the early stages of becoming a data-driven society that wants instantaneous access to our information," commented Jeff Janukowicz, Research Director at IDC, recently. "To deliver real-time or near real-time insight to drive business decisions, organisations worldwide will need to consider high performance storage solutions, such as SSDs, thereby driving demand for these solutions in the coming years."

So how are organisations attempting to overcome these challenges today? For the most part, they are either leveraging massive amounts of traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in racks of servers and storage arrays, or they are deploying SSDs positioned as a one-size-fits-all solution to their data centre needs. I don't know about you, but I have yet to see a collection of HDDs that meet the performance and latency requirements needed in today's data centre environments. Plus, I have never seen a single 'silver bullet' solution that could solve all data centre challenges. What I do see is organisations spending money on multiple HDDs and SSDs without understanding their application needs, leading them to either spend more for "bells" they don't need, or buying something cheap and not getting enough "whistles," creating a budget sinkhole as drives burn out.

This is one reason why I am excited by the recent introduction of our new CloudSpeed product family. Not only does this make SanDisk the first vendor to ship 10 full drive writes per day (DWPD), 19nm-based enterprise SATA SSDs, but it also marks the first product announcement we've made following SanDisk's acquisition of SMART Storage Systems. There are several reasons why the CloudSpeed drives provide great options for customers' current data deluge challenges.

The CloudSpeed SSDs are designed to deliver business-critical performance for the mixed-use, read and write-intensive application workloads that have become increasingly prominent in today's enterprise data centres and cloud computing environments. Also, by combining our innovative flash management Guardian Technology Platform with industry-leading memory technology, the CloudSpeed products provide customers with longer-lasting drive operation at a better value.

The SanDisk CloudSpeed Serial ATA (SATA) product family offers the following range of endurance and performance capabilities:

• CloudSpeed Extreme - This high-endurance SSD achieves up to 10 full capacity DWPD with a 5 year warranty and delivers up to 75K/25K IOPS of random read/write performance for write-intensive application workloads such as Database Logging and High Performance Computing (HPC). It comes in capacities ranging from 100GB to 800GB and supports up to 14.6 Petabytes Written (PBW) to the drive over its life.

• CloudSpeed Ultra - This high-performance drive achieves up to 3 full DWPD with a 5 year warranty and is optimised for mixed-use application workloads such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), Financial Transactions, Email/Messaging, E-Commerce, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and Collaboration. The CloudSpeed Ultra is offered in capacities ranging from 200GB to 800GB, and delivers up to 80K/25K random read/write IOPS and supports up to 4.4 PBW.

• CloudSpeed Ascend - This high-end drive is designed for read-intensive application workloads such as File Servers, Web-based Applications and Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL). The CloudSpeed Ascend comes in capacities ranging from 240GB to 960GB, achieves up to 1 full DWPD with a 5 year warranty, delivers up to 80K/15K IOPS and supports up to 1.8 PBW.

• CloudSpeed Eco - This entry-level SSD is designed for read-intensive application workloads such as Web Servers, Web 2.0 Content Repositories, Photo Sharing, Media Streaming, Video on Demand (VOD) and Cloud Computing. The CloudSpeed Eco comes in capacities from 240GB to 960GB, achieves up to 1 full DWPD with a 3 year warranty, delivers up to 450/400 MB/s of sustained read/write performance and 80k/15k read/write IOPS and supports up to 1.0PBW.

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