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AudreyCox

It’s Time to Move Your Critical Data to SSDs, Say No to Traditional Storage Arrays

 Today’s IT professionals are well aware that users expect fast, reliable access to ever-growing amounts of data – from web content, to videos, to business intelligence data and more. Meeting the challenges of this exponential growth is nearly impossible with existing, spinning media storage technology. Hard disk drive (HDD) storage technologies have been the standard in data storage for decades, but they can no longer satisfy: they create bottlenecks in data access, fail to meet the growing demands of broader content and higher user expectations - and consume lots of power and maintenance.

According to IDC, “The third platform is transforming the IT industry, and solid state drives (SSDs), a key enabling technology that is altering the overall storage landscape and making the third platform a reality. The SSD concept has been around since the 1980s, but it didn't see practical implementation until around a decade ago, largely because of price concerns. SSD adoption grew first in the consumer space, especially in laptops, because the drives were smaller and consumed less power than a standard hard drive, and they were much faster. That “instant on” response time often could justify any price differential.

 

Data Storage Challenges: Where are we now?

Recent Frost & Sullivan surveys of CEOs and IT decision-makers show that managing data is an important element of their businesses—in particular, the ability to make rapid decisions based on that data. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said their IT infrastructure must support business agility and market responsiveness, while 45 percent said competitor’s use of data and analytics represent the greatest potential to disrupt the industry.

The task of storing and accessing data is increasingly difficult due to this exponential data growth, causing performance issues for users and headaches for IT professionals. One way organizations gain speed is shifting from traditional hard disk-based storage to flash arrays, either in a hybrid HDD/SSD setup or all-flash arrays. Enterprise SSD is solid, mature, and as reliable as hard disk drive (HDD) technology (if not more so). It may well be the technology to make a business move in real time.

SSDs provide a clear advantage for managing, accessing, and storing data. Today many storage environments are optimized for HDDs but designing storage environments to include SSDs overcomes bottlenecks created by spinning media performance issues.

 

Are SSDs Really Worth It?

Adopting SSDs to transform the way that data is managed and stored has increased as IT becomes more aware of SSD technology benefits, especially for the most demanding, mission-critical applications. According to the Spiceworks survey2, the primary reason IT professionals have adopted SSD storage is the large number of performance issues with their existing storage drives – issues easily managed by SSDs.

Enterprise SSDs result in lower human resource costs by offering reliable 24/7 performance for demanding workloads and improved throughput with accelerated random read/write capability, solving key challenges that IT professionals face regarding cost and productivity. According to the Spiceworks survey, the top benefits organizations experience and expect to experience with flash-based storage include improved performance and speed, increased energy efficiency, smaller/lighter form factor, and increased reliability/resistance to shock and vibration.

Part of the challenge for flash adoption is getting past misconceptions. Because it's relatively new in enterprise scenarios, it's still considered unproven. However, there has been a massive effort on the part of some of the biggest players in the industry to mature the technology, and enterprise SSD has come up to speed very fast.

While it is true that flash costs more per gigabyte than hard disks, over time the operational costs offset the initial acquisition cost of a flash array. In the end, a storage array is all about IOPS. Hard disks average about 75 to 100 IOPS, based on a 7,200 rpm drive, while SSDs can manage more than 100,000. So you need fewer flash drives to achieve the speed you get with HDD, and in the end, the cost is less.

There are two costs involved in the move to all-flash arrays. First is the cost of switching over the architectures. That means not just new drives, but new control units, arrays, and so forth. The other issue is staff costs. There is a real cost during the transition period to support duplicate arrays. Overall, the move to all-flash has long-term benefits in both performance and long-term cost. Initial acquisition costs offset over time by lower power consumption, less breakage, and less heat that requires addressing.

 

The HPE Advantage- Peak performance for random data applications

HPE SSDs suits enterprise environments with highly random data under a variety of write-workload applications. The SSDs provide significantly better random read and write I/O operations per second (IOPS) compared to HDDs. While sequential read and write throughput is better over HDDs, the greatest benefit is in random data applications. As a result, this high-performance, low-latency, and low-power SSDs provide significant system benefits for applications that previously over-provisioned HDD capacity to achieve better performance. HPE SSDs monitor the amount of data written and report when the device may be nearing its maximum supported lifetime.

HPE SSDs are fully tested and qualified to enable compatibility with HPE ProLiant, HPE Synergy, and HPE BladeSystem solutions. HPE SSDs are among the best compared to products available on the open market. HPE firmware optimizes qualified SSD performance, wear leveling, and over-provisioning.

 

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AudreyCox