Fixing Modern SSDs for the Enterprise

[Guest]

Are modern solid-state drives ready for the enterprise situations? The market is beginning to combat the high price-to-performance ratios for solid-state technology, but that doesn't mean that SSDs themselves are ready to leap into business servers.

Fixing Modern SSDs for the Enterprise : Read more

 

[bustapr]

As long as it saves more energy and doesn't annoyingly crap up when you touch it from the bottom like hard drives , i'll take the ssd.

 

[TheFace]

Depending on their construction, SSDs can take a hit in their longevity. While single-level-cell SSDs have been estimated to hold a lifespan of approximately 100,000 uses, multi-level-cell SSDs compact more bits onto each individual flash cell to improve capacity and lower costs. The downside? Their total available writes can drop to the thousands range

Could you be a little more vague and wrong with this statement? 100,000 uses? Is that reads? No. Write cycles? Yes.

Also, your supposed BIG NEWS is that the Enterprise market is slow to adopt something? OMG what a shocker! Prudent business practices would dictate that you don't jump on the bandwagon of the new hotness (be it whatever, technology etc.) Until it's somewhat proven. SSDs still have a way to go in this respect. Additionally they're becoming much faster with each generation, as well as larger. The market will adapt, but it will take time.

There's no question that solid-state technology offers tangible rewards in certain use cases, but expect to be waiting a few more years before the technology pushes their appeal into the mainstream.

Thank you for your 11th grade report. You may take your seat. Now let Jimmy do his report on why the economic downturn is bad.

 

[hellwig]

TheFace says it much more straighforward than I would have. This article just seems like a rehash of every SSD review on this site.

SSD drives are not hot-swappable? That certainly is the #1 reason they aren't showing up in datacenters, if true.

Enterprise is always slow to adopt, because they know better than to get screwed over with all the other early adopters. You always let a product mature before moving it into a critical environment. I had one of the first 16X CD-ROMs, but it was terrible, would lose track on all my CDs. Had to replace it with a good ole reliable 4X.

Heck SCSI drives used to be so far behind in capacity it was embarrasing, but the reliability meant even though they were more expensive than regular IDE, they were worth it. Now we have a product thats more expensive, and less reliable, and people are surprised it isn't being bought up in mass quantities?

 

[Themurph]

[citation][nom]TheFace[/nom]Also, your supposed BIG NEWS is that the Enterprise market is slow to adopt something? OMG what a shocker![/citation]

Lordy. I'm not going to get into an Internet shouting match, but let's identify the news in this article real quick:

1) HP has piped in with an estimated date for SSD adoption
2) HP has identified the key areas where SSDs need to improve before they can be considered for widespread enterprise use
3) As a super-bonus, other research has identified two additional areas where SSD-related technology could benefit from improvement.

I'm not going to lie to you: A few of the issues plaguing SSD enterprise adoption are the same ones that have either *been* there from the beginning, or are the very ones that everyone's talking about in the consumer market as well. I nevertheless thought that the hot-swap and controller points were of special interest, as those were two threads that I haven't been hearing in many of the ongoing SSD discussions lately.

The enterprise is slow to adopt, as Hellwig points out. However, there's still a certain flurry of wide-eyed interest around SSDs that makes them seem like the savior of storage. These articles attempt to show why those in the industry agree and disagree, and more than that, what it will take to grow an SSD-friendly business environment.

 

[Kary]

I was somewhat confused by the drives being to slow (because of erasing to write) AND to fast for controllers to keep up with.

Admittedly I haven't worked on THAT many databases, but aren't most of them read only anyway.

I agree, this will be a niche market in the enterprise for awhile, but with costs coming down there should be more and more niches.

 

[blackened144]

It all depends on the application of the SSD as to whether it would be useful in a DC environment. We run supercomputer clusters at my place of business. Usually between 50 and 400 nodes. Data on these servers is only updated once a day, 5 days a week. At 100k writes, those drives would last us a long ass time. And since drive speed is usually the limiting factor of our clusters, SSD drives would be extremely nice. We are currently testing the FusionIO drive. It bypasses the SATA format and puts the SSD drive components directly on a PCIex card and it kicks some serious ass. Too bad they are so crazy expensive.

 

[blackened144]

I forgot to mention that the only reason we havent moved to SSD drives yet is because of the capacity. Went from 10k SCSI drives to 7200 RPM SAS drives because we needed more capacity and they dont offer spindle speeds faster than 7200RPM with 1TB drives. Hopefully that will change in the future.

 

[Guest]

"Fixing Modern SSDs for the Enterprise"?

OK, so which one of you broke them ??