Solid State Storage - Free Your Mind

Solid State Disk (SSD) is the most disruptive technology to hit data storage in the past decade, shaking up the status quo and delivering the breakthrough performance that long-established hard disk technology failed to achieve. In addition to massive performance improvements, SSD dramatically lowers energy costs and is more reliable since it has no moving parts. Their only drawbacks? They are more expensive for a given capacity and flash media longevity must be considered.

The data storage market has behaved predictably to the disruption created by Solid State Disk technology. Incumbent disk array vendors have reacted to SSD flash in the context of the previous generation of hard disk drive technology that they are intimately familiar with. Instead of focusing their R&D efforts on leveraging the full capabilities of SSD to enable new applications and markets, they have instead fixated on using it as a sustaining technology to overcome their I/O limitations and extend the life of disk-based storage systems. 

Ignoring the opportunity to re-architect storage systems to unleash the full performance of Solid State Disk, the storage market has shackled the technology inside existing, outdated, and unsuitable hard disk drive-based controller architectures. Incumbent array vendors have yet to realize that not only must storage array controllers be redesigned to handle the performance that potential solid state offers, but that practically every array-based function including data protection, thin provisioning, snapshots, replication, and deduplication can be dramatically improved by fully exploiting flash’s random-access nature.

As a result, the adoption of flash in enterprise storage so far has taken the form of adding a tier of SSDs into the storage array to cache hot data, and in some cases populating an existing disk-based array completely with SSD flash storage.  These stopgap approaches simply have the effect of relocating the storage performance bottleneck from the mechanical hard disk drive to the controller and do nothing in terms of adding new functionality. The array still goes the same speed; it just needs fewer spindles to get there.

None of these approaches recognize the real value of flash SSD nor the reason for its market disruption. It doesn’t just offer faster storage; done right, it yields better storage.  And that’s the challenge that the storage industry now faces: to do SSD right.   Simply incorporating flash SDD into storage infrastructures developed around HDDs is not the answer.  

The emergence of Solid State Disk has given the industry the opportunity to think differently about storage and to redesign storage arrays from the ground up to take advantage of the characteristics of this new technology and create data center infrastructures with balanced designs, without bottlenecks, and with performance equity across CPU, memory, network and storage components.

As with any transition to a disruptive technology, designing storage arrays to take advantage of all that SSD has to offer requires an approach that is counterintuitive when thought about in the context of current storage system features and limitations.   Adapting disk-based design concepts to solid state storage will produce arrays that are significantly faster than current disk-based arrays but are totally inadequate to meet the demands of future applications.  

In the context of today’s enterprise disk storage arrays, improving performance to 200,000 IOPS seems magnificent. But that’s like designing internal combustion engines to deliver one horsepower to replace a horse. Clearly there are reasons to have engines that produce far more power and lots of use cases for them. In storage, the goal for flash-based storage needs to be thought of in million of IOPS.

The history of computer evolution has demonstrated conclusively that every advancement in performance – whether CPU, memory, networking or storage – is used up by application developers who can never get enough computing horsepower. Previous disruptive technologies created use cases nobody had considered before as application developers leveraged new levels of performance to create new markets and solve business problems no one knew they had. For example, virtualized infrastructures paved the way for cloud computing.  Cell phones evolved into smartphones and the iPhone (News - Alert).  

The global communications capability of the Internet resulted in Facebook.  The latest example is the development of powerful, low-power mobile processors that enabled tablet computing and the iPad, creating a new multi-billion dollar market almost overnight. 

With SSD-centric storage arrays, storage architects and applications developers gain the freedom to imagine and design a new generation of enterprise applications that will generate enhanced business value but are impossible today because of storage technology limitations.What applications are enabled with SSD arrays done right? Here are a few to consider:

• Rapid time to insight:  useful analytics were impossible in cases where the results were out of date by the time the queries finished.   SSD makes real-time analytics possible for fraud detection, security, retail trends, real-time traffic updates, logistics, market analysis, and gaming.
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: Persistent desktop VDI deployed on SSD delivers a better-than-desktop user experience, while retaining control of intellectual property in banking, healthcare, engineering, and other industries. With intelligently designed flash storage arrays, the storage costs of VDI will drop dramatically.
• In-memory computing: Gartner (News - Alert) Inc. has named in-memory computing as one of the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2012. Traditionally the realm of DRAM, as best practices rapidly evolve many things can be done in SSD arrays for less money, allowing in-memory computing to expand to a much wider array of applications than it reaches today.
• Machine learning and recommendation engines: SSD arrays allow machine learning algorithms to run faster on a larger dataset for more effective data mining, quicker and more accurate predictions, and better recommendations for customers of e-commerce and on-line entertainment sites, such as Amazon, Netflix and Pandora (News - Alert).

The market disruption created by SSD technology has begun. The issue now is how to respond.  Vendors have done the easy responses already – putting SSDs into existing arrays and building boxes full of flash as “application accelerators” which offer nothing beyond raw performance.   This has left the task of creating the next generation of breakthrough enterprise storage technology to emerging vendors with the vision to see the application and customer benefits of SSD-optimized storage and the technical understanding of how to exploit the full potential of flash SSDs to make storage not only faster, but also more capable in every dimension.

Applications that were never imagined or feasible are enabled with properly designed SSD arrays. It’s time to start planning for the future of storage and IT.Start rethinking how you do things so you don’t get left behind competitors who are leveraging SSD storage to derive better business intelligence and gain a competitive advantage.

Josh Goldstein is VP of Marketing and Product Management at XtremIO. Prior to XtremIO, he served as VP of Marketing and Product Management at Cirtas (News - Alert) and before that as VP of Product Marketing at DataDirect Networks. From 2001 through 2007, Goldstein held a series of marketing and sales leadership roles at Ixia (News - Alert). Goldstein hold an MBA from the University of Southern California and a BSME from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.