Category: server

Posted on

Work and Entertainment From Coast to Coast

A week ago I was in St. Petersburg, Tampa and Miami Florida for a mix of work and relaxation along with Karen (Mrs. Schulz), visiting with my cousin and her husband who lives in the St. Pete beach area for a few days before back to work. While in the St. Pete and Tampa area, for fun, we did an afternoon at Busch Garden including a ride on Montu. For those who have not ridden on Montu, here’s a video I found that someone recorded to help give you a perspective of the ride. Other fun activities included stops or time at Billys Stonecrab and Seafood joint, Kayaking, lounging pool-side, shelling at Ft. Desoto and St. Pete Beach as well as a visit to the Hurricane among others.

In Miami, the pool area at the Four Seasons including a nice cabana pool-side spot to escape the cool breeze made for a great relaxing and catch-up on some work spot while Karen relaxed in the sun. Some of the restraunts in Miami we visited when taking a break from work included Gordon Birsch and Rosa for some outstanding, made at the table side fresh Guacamole en Molcajet!.

Speaking of work, the Florida trip involved doing keynotes at events in both Tampa and Miami with a theme of IT Infrastructure Optimization with both events being well attended. Themes included doing more with less, or, doing more with what you have, addressing data footprint and data management to boost productivity, how to address the continued growth in data and need to process, move and store more data and information. A discussion point prompted the thought of if there is a data recession or not (See previous blog post and here). Other topics of discussion and interested included converged networking for voice, data and general networking, security, server and storage virtualization, performance and capacity planning, data protection and BC/DR among others.

This past week involved a lunch and learn Keynote in the Minneapolis area with a local VAR, before a quick trip to the other (left) coast for another IT Infrastructure Optimization session and keynote, this time in Los Angeles. Some common themes heard from IT professionals at this past weeks events echoed those heard in Florida as well as concern about managing encryption keys not to mention securing virtual environments and software licensing models in virtualized server environments. The trip to LA also enabled a quick visit with friend Bruce Rave of Go Deep fame who provided a great tour and sightseeing of the Hollywood music scene.

Hollywood stops included dinner at Genghis Cohens (The duck and cashew chicken were outstanding) followed by visits to the Cat and Fiddle and Infamous Rainbow Bar & Grill next door to legendary Roxy. People watching was great as was the music and ambiance including a Nikki Sixx of Motely Crew sighting at the Rainbow as well as Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN seen in hotel lobby minutes after appearing on Larry King Live.

Thanks too everyone who came out and participated in the seminar events in Tampa, Miami, Minneapolis and LA, look forward to seeing and hearing from you again soon. Now its time to get ready to head off too the airport for this weeks events and activities including stops in Las Vegas and Milwaukee among others.

Cheers
Gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

Posted on

Update: EnergyStar for Server Workshop

Here’s an update from a previous post about US EPA EnergyStar program team looking for data center feedback on the draft specs for EnergyStar for servers.

Dear Server Manufacturer or Other Interested Stakeholder,

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will host an online stakeholder meeting on Monday, March 16 from 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. EST to discuss the recently released ENERGY STARÒ Draft 4 Computer Server specification.  

To participate in this online meeting, stakeholders must register no later than Thursday, March 12. Please RSVP to Rebecca Duff, ICF International, at rduff@icfi.com.  If registering colleagues along with yourself, please include names, email addresses, and whether phone connections to the audio portion of the meeting will be shared.  There will be a limited number of lines available so attendees representing the same company are encouraged to share a connection.

Instructions for joining the online meeting will be provided via email to confirmed attendees on Friday, March 13. The Draft 4 specification and supporting documents are available on the ENERGY STAR Web site at www.energystar.gov (Click on New Specifications in Development).  

For those stakeholders who are unable to join the discussion, slides and meeting notes will be posted to the ENERGY STAR Web site.  

Stakeholders with questions can contact Rebecca Duff, ICF International, at (202) 862-1266 or Andrew Fanara, EPA, at fanara.andrew@epa.gov and (206) 553-6377.

Thanks for your continued support of ENERGY STAR!

 

There you have it, get involved if inclined, provide feedback, comments, critique or what have you.

Cheers – gs

Posted on

Odds and Ends – Getting Caught Up, News and Other Updates

This post is a collection of various odds and ends, news and updates as Im getting caught up on some things.

Here’s a link to the first of what will be a series of up-coming short articles appearing at Byte and Switch related to my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC). The first installment appeared recently and is titled "Green IT & the Green Gap" and the theme of the installment is that in going green, you enable a business to grow, diversify, and expand its use of IT, all of which have economic benefits. Learn more about the green gap here.

Also over at Byte and Switch, Paul Travis recently did an article "Going Green & the Economic Downturn" that takes a look the shifting green focus to that around economic and cost cutting opportunities during current finical turmoil. Also on the Green front, Drew Robb has an interesting article talking about server and IT data center "Green IT Myths vs. Realities" appearing in ServerWatch. Another new green and economic sustainability for IT data center article can be found over at Greener Computing with a link here. While on the topic of my new book, writer and blogger, Heather Clancy has some comments about "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (CRC) over at ZDNET. Dave Simpson of InfoStor fame has a blog post as well that mentions my new book, check it out here. Also, check out this posting over at Datacenterlinks blogsite as well as a post over at Green Data Center blog site.

Meanwhile inventory and book availability continue to improve at Amazon.com and other venues around the world as back-logs from pre-orders and initial book sales resulted in some sell-out or initial limited availability. My publisher CRC informs me that plenty of books are flowing out and into the distribution supply chain to meet risking demand including bulk and special promotional and educational sales. Thanks to all of you have obtained copies of my new book, drop me a note with your comments and feedback when you get a chance. Also watch for additional book news, reviews, reports and other programs to be announced over the coming weeks.

For addressing data center bottlenecks, on the tiered storage and Solid State Device (SSD) front, that’s for both RAM and FLASH based, here’s an article over at Processor.com worth a look at. Here are a couple of other recent articles over at Processor.com addressing small form factor servers and refurbished servers, as well as freeing up data center space. Steve Kovosky has an interesting blog post over at Virtualization Conversation about Virtualization: Life Beyond Consolidation building on a previous blog posting I did a few weeks back pertaining to server and storage virtualization trends and directions. Here’s a recent article by Paul Shread over at Enterprise Storage Forum about T10 Object Storage Devices (OSD) and their current status or lack of progress including Sun’s shifting focus.

Speaking of data protection for physical and virtual environments, tape, data protection management, monitoring and managing IT resource effectiveness not to mention stretching your IT budget dollar, here’s a link to an article over at CTR in which yours truly provides some commentary. Also on the data protection theme, Walaika Haskins over at TechNewsWorld has a good article about "Figuring Out the Best Way to Stash Your Data". Data dedupe continues to be a popular topic for discussion and Cindy Waxer recently wrote an article appearing at Inc. Technology pertaining to Dedupe and Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continence (BC). Also on the dedupe front, here’s a industry trends and perspective solutions brief over on the EMC site pertaining to policy based data dedupe deployment (don’t worry, its not a data dedupe debate document, however I suppose some of the Drs’ and Divas’ of Dedupe may see it that way which will give them something to debate ;) ) with a focus around when to use which type or mode of dedupe processing to meet different applications requirements (may require registration, however its free, the document that is).

Learn more about the above and other related topics at the StorageIO In the news, tips, events and Industry Trends White Paper as well as Books and Blog pages.

Cheers – gs

Technorati tags: Trends

Posted on

Is There a Data and I/O Activity Recession?

Storage I/O trends

With all the focus on both domestic and international economic woes and discussion of recessions and depressions and possible future rapid inflation, recent conversations with IT professionals from organizations of all size across different industry sectors and geographies prompted the question, is there also a data and I/O activity recession?

Here’s the premise, if you listen to current economic and financial reports as well as employment information, the immediate conclusion is that yes, there should also be an I recession in the form of contraction in the amount of data being processed, moved and stored which would also impact I/O (e.g. DAS,, LAN, SAN, FAN or NAS, MAN, WAN) networking activity as well. After all, the server, storage, I/O and networking vendors earnings are all being impacted right?

As is often the case, there is more to the story, certainly vendor earnings are down and some vendors are shipping less product than during corresponding periods from a year or more ago. Likewise, I continue to hear from both IT organizations, vars and vendors of lengthened sales cycles due to increased due diligence and more security of IT acquisitions meaning that sales and revenue forecasts continue to be very volatile with some vendors pulling back on their future financial guidance.

However, does that mean fewer servers, storage, I/O and networking components not to mention less software is being shipped? In some cases there is or has been a slow down. However in other cases, due to pricing pressures, increased performance and capacity density where more work can be done by fewer devices, consolidation, data footprint reduction, optimization, virtualization including VMware and other techniques, not to mention a decrease in some activity, there is less demand. On the other hand, while some retail vendors are seeing their business volume decrease, others such as Amazon are seeing continued heavy demand and activity.

Been on a trip lately through an airport? Granted the airlines have instituted capacity management (e.g. capacity planning) and fleet optimization to align the number of flights or frequency as well as aircraft type (tiering) to the demand. In some cases smaller planes, in other cases larger planes, for some more stops at a lower price (trade time for money) or in other cases shorter direct routes for a higher fee. The point being is that while there is an economic recession underway, and granted there are fewer flights, many if not most of those flights are full which means transactions and information to process by the airlines reservations and operational as well as customer relations and loyalty systems.

Mergers and acquisitions usually mean a reduction or consolidation of activity resulting in excess and surplus technologies, yet talking with some financial services organizations, over time some of their systems will be consolidated to achieve operating efficiency and synergies, near term, in some cases, there is the need for more IT resources to support the increased activity of supporting multiple applications, increased customer inquiry and conversion activity.

On a go forward basis, there is the need to support more applications and services that will generate more I/O activity to enable data to be moved, processed and stored. Not to mention, data being retained in multiple locations for longer periods of time to meet both compliance and non regulatory compliance requirements as well as for BC/DR and business intelligence (BI) or data mining for marketing and other purposes.

Speaking of the financial sector, while the economic value of most securities is depressed, and with the wild valuation swings in the stock markets, the result is more data to process, move and store on a daily basis, all of which continues to place more demand on IT infrastructure resources including servers, storage, I/O networking, software, facilities and the people to support them.

Dow Jones Trading Activity Volume
Dow Jones Trading Activity Volume (Courtesy of data360.org)

For example, the amount of Dow Jones trading activity is on a logarithmic upward trend curve in the example chart from data360.org which means more transactions selling and buying. The result of more transactions is that there are also an increase in the number of back-office functions for settlement, tracking, surveillance, customer inquiry and reporting among others activities. This means that more I/Os are generated with data to be moved, processed, replicated, backed-up with additional downstream activity and processing.

Shifting gears, same things with telephone and in particular cell phone traffic which indirectly relates on IT systems particular for support email and other messaging activity. Speaking of email, more and more emails are sent every day, granted many are spam, yet these all result in more activity as well as data.

What’s the point in all of this?

There is a common awareness among most IT professionals that there is more data generated and stored every year and that there is also an awareness of the increased threats and reliance upon data and information. However what’s either not as widely discussed is the increase in I/O and networking activity. That is, the space capacity often gets talked about, however, the I/O performance, response time, activity and data movement can be forgotten about or its importance to productivity diminished. So the point is, keep performance, response time, and latency in focus as well as IOPS and bandwidth when looking at, and planning IT infrastructure to avoid data center bottlenecks.

Finally for now, what’s your take, is there a data and/or I/O networking recession, or is it business and activity as usual?

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

Posted on

On The Road Again: An Update

A while back, I posted about a busy upcoming spring schedule of activity and events, and then a few weeks ago, posted an update, so this can be considered the latest "On The Road Again" update. While the economy continues to be in rough condition and job reductions or layoffs continuing, or, reduction in hours or employees being asked to take time off without pay or to take sabbaticals, not to mention the race to get the economic stimulus bill passed, for many people, business and life goes on.

Airport parking lots have plenty of cars in them, airplanes while not always full, are not empty (granted there has been some fleet optimization aka aligning capacity to best suited tier of aircraft and other consolidation or capacity improvements). Many organizations cutting back on travel and entertainment (T&E) spending, either to watch the top and bottom line, avoid being perceived or seen on the news as having employees going on junkets when they may in fact being going to conferences, seminars, conventions or other educational and related events to boost skills and seek out ways to improve business productivity.

One of the reason that I have a busy travel schedule in addition to my normal analyst and consulting activities is that many events and seminars are being scheduled close to, or in the cities where IT professionals are located who might otherwise have T&E restrictions or other constraints from traveling to industry events, some of which are or will be impacted by recent economic and business conditions.

Last week I was invited to attend and speak at the FujiFilm Executive Seminar, no private jets were used or seen, travel was via scheduled air carriers (coach air-fare). FujiFilm has a nice program for those interested in or involved with tape whether for disk to tape backup, disk to disk to tape, long term archive, bulk storage and other scenarios involving the continued use and changing roles of tape as a green data storage medium for in-active or off-line data. Check out FujiFilm TapePower Center portal.

This past week I was in the big "D", that’s Dallas Texas to do another TechTarget Dinner event around the theme of BC/DR, Virtualization and IT optimization. The session was well attended by a diverse audience of IT professionals from around the DFW metroplex. Common themes included discussions about business and economic activity as well as the need to keep business and IT running even when budgets are being stretched further and further. Technology conversations included server and storage virtualization, tiered storage including SSD, fast FC and SAS disk drives, lower performance high capacity "fat" disk drives as well as tape not to mention tiered data protection, tiered servers and other related items.

The Green Gap continues to manifest itself in that when asked, most people do not have Green IT initiatives, however, when asked they do have power, cooling, floor-space, environmental (PCFE) or business economic sustainability concerns, aka, the rest of the Green story.

While some attendees have started to use some new technologies including dedupe technology, most I find are still using a combination of disk and tape with some considering dedupe for the future for certain applications. Other technologies and trends being watched, however also ones with concerns as to their stability and viability for enterprise use include FLASH based SSD, Cloud computing and thin provisioning among others. Common themes I hear from IT professionals are that these are technologies and tools to keep an eye on, or, use on a selective basis and are essentially tiered resources to have in a tool box of technologies to apply to different tasks to meet various service requirements. Hopefully the Cowboys can put a fraction of the amount of energy and interest into and improving their environment that the Dallas area IT folks are applying to their environments, especially given the strained IT budgets vs. the budget that the Cowboys have to work with for their player personal.

I always find it interesting when talking to groups of IT professionals which tend to be enterprise, SME and SMB hearing what they are doing and looking at or considering which often is in stark contrast to some of the survey results on technology adoption trends one commonly reads or hears about. Hummm, nuff said, what say you?

Hope to see you at one of the many upcoming events perhaps coming to a venue near you.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved

Posted on

Server and Storage Virtualization – Life beyond Consolidation

Storage I/O trends

Ask someone what virtualization of IT servers or storage means and the typical response is to consolidate under-utilized physical servers or storage systems to reduce power, cooling, floor space and physical hardware costs.  However I commonly hear from IT professionals that not all of their servers or storage can be consolidated for various reasons. Some reasons why IT resources such as servers or storage cannot be consolidated include among others While consolidation is one the faces or capabilities, and certainly a common usage today, there are many other quality of service (QoS), performance, politics, financial ownership, security, software compatibility and vendor support to name a few.

In the big picture, the percentage of all servers (or storage) that can be  consolidated ranges from as low as 15% to as high as 35%, or perhaps higher (or lower) depending on whose numbers you subscribe to. Likewise, the percentage of virtualized servers that have been virtualized for consolidation purposes is generally considered to be in the high 77-94% percent range based on different estimates.

What this means, is that while the benefits of leveraging consolidation via server virtualization are well-known, not all servers can be consolidated for different reasons and the same holds true for storage and other IT resources. However, this does not mean that the majority of servers, storage or other IT resources cannot be virtualized to enable transparent management for maintenance, technology updates, load-balancing, supporting business continuance (BC) or disaster recovery (DR) along with other non consolidation centric functions. In other words, with consolidation, we are just seeing the tip of the virtualization iceberg (or mountain).

There are several faces or functionality of virtualization technologies beyond consolidation including abstraction, emulation and providing transparency for enabling enhanced management and flexibility of IT resources. For example, virtual tape libraries leverage abstraction and emulation to enable new disk based technologies that combine replication, compression and de-duplication to cut  data footprint and enable BC/DR to co-exist with existing backup and data protection software, processes and procedures. Another example is using server or storage virtualization to provide an abstraction layer to support BC/DR enabling transparent movement of applications for consolidated, as well as non-consolidated servers. Technology upgrades are another time consuming and disruptive process where virtualization can be used to more seamlessly move applications and data while reducing or eliminating application downtime. In other words, the focus today is clearly on consolidation to drive up utilization and reduce costs; however there are even greater opportunities on a go forward basis for using different aspects of virtualization

Note that this does not mean however that not all servers or storage cannot be virtualized, something that is a common misperception given the perception and industry messaging that incorrectly pigeon holes virtualization to mean consolidation, and consolidation to mean virtualization. To the contrary, the reality is that there is life beyond consolidation, there are even more scenarios and far greater market opportunity for non-consolidation virtualization deployments over time, then what has already been seen for first wave of consolidation centric virtualization scenarios.

There is a very large market opportunity for virtualization of servers, storage and I/O networking in scenarios beyond consolidation for enabling transparent data and application movement, supporting BC/DR and other common time-consuming and disruptive IT infrastructure resource management tasks.

Ok, nuff said.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

Posted on

Do you have your copy of “The Green and Virtual Data Center” yet?

For those not familar with my new book, "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (Auerbach), or, for those who have already ordered your copy (Thank You and look for them to arrive soon) as today marks the offical publication date, or, I guess you could say the birthday for "The Green and Virtual Data Center".

Thus, I am pleased to share with you the news about the formal launch and publication (read the press release) of my new book, “The Green and Virtual Data Center”, which is released today by Auerbach/CRC-Press and is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, CRC-Press and other venues around the world.

The book focuses on the idea that IT infrastructure resources configured and deployed in a highly virtualized manner can be combined with other techniques and technologies to achieve a simplified and cost-effective delivery of IT services in a clean, green, and profitable manner. ?The Green and Virtual Data Center? covers these technologies and techniques that todays data centers should be considering while trying to maximize resources, such as power, cooling, floor space, storage, server performance, and network capacity.

Some of the topics include:
• Energy and data footprint reductions
• Cloud-based storage and computing
• Intelligent and adaptive power management
• Server, storage, and networking virtualization
• Tiered servers for storage, network, and data centers
• Energy avoidance and energy efficiency

Read more about the book here

Here’s some contact informaiton pertaining to the book:

General Questions:
Greg Schulz (That’s me if you were wondering)
StorageIO
twitter.com/storageio
greg@storageio.com
+1 (651) 275-1563

Press Interviews:
Georgiana Comsa
ClassyTech PR
www.classytech.com
georgiana@classytech.com
+1 (408) 435-1500

Book Reviews:
John Wyzalek
Auerbach/CRC Press
john.wyzalek@taylorandfrancis.com
+1 (917) 351-7149

Bulk or Special Sales:
Chris Manion
Auerbach/CRC Press

chris.manion@taylorandfrancis.com
+1 (651) 998-2508

In addition to the folks at Auerbach/CRC-Taylor Francis, I would also like to thank Theron Shreve and his crew at DerryField Publishing services who assisted with layout, copyediting and other manuscript pre-production activities, as well as all the other people who helped make the book a reality.

Cheers – gs

Posted on

Green Power and Cooling Tools and Calculators

In the course of doing research and consulting work with various IT organizations, VARs, trade groups and vendors over the past couple of years, not to mention in preparing for my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (Auerbach), I have come across (see a list here) several tools, calculators and modeling or sizing utilities pertaining to power, cooling, floor-space, EH&S (PCFE) also known as green topics.

Many vendors and organizations including APC, Dell, EMC, Emerson, IBM, HP and Sun among others have various types of green and related calculators in support of PCFE, performance and related sizing activities. These and other tools differ in what information they provide as well as the level of detail and configuration information, however, the tools are also evolving. As an example, EMC blogger Mark Twomey aka Storagezilla has a new post discussing an updated version of their updated calculator that is now web based tool for PCFE and green sizing.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved

Posted on

Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?

Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?
Server Storage I/O Network Virtualization Whats Next?
Updated 9/28/18

There are many faces and thus functionalities of virtualization beyond the one most commonly discussed which is consolidation or aggregation. Other common forms of virtualization include emulation (which is part of enabling consolidation) which can be in the form of a virtual tape library for storage to bridge new disk technology to old software technology, processes, procedures and skill sets. Other forms of virtualization functionality for life beyond consolidation include abstraction for transparent movement of applications or operating systems on servers, or data on storage to support planned and un-planned maintenance, upgrades, BC/DR and other activities.

So the gist is that there are many forms of virtualization technologies and techniques for servers, storage and even I/O networks to address different issues including life beyond consolidation. However the next wave of consolidation could and should be that of reducing the number of logical images, or, the impact of the multiple operating systems and application images, along with their associated management costs.

This may be easier said than done, however, for those looking to cut costs even further than from what can be realized by reducing physical footprints (e.g. going from 10 to 1 or from 250 to 25 physical servers), there could be upside however it will come at a cost. The cost is like that of reducing data and storage footprint impacts with such as data management and archiving.

Savings can be realized by archiving and deleting data via data management however that is easier said than done given the cost in terms of people time and ability to decide what to archive, even for non-compliance data along with associated business rules and policies to be defined (for automation) along with hardware, software and services (managed services, consulting and/or cloud and SaaS).

Where To Learn More

View additional NAS, NVMe, SSD, NVM, SCM, Data Infrastructure and HDD related topics via the following links.

Additional learning experiences along with common questions (and answers), as well as tips can be found in Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials book.

Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials Book SDDC

What This All Means

Ok, nuff said, for now.

Gs

Greg Schulz – Microsoft MVP Cloud and Data Center Management, VMware vExpert 2010-2018. Author of Software Defined Data Infrastructure Essentials (CRC Press), as well as Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press), Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier) and twitter @storageio. Courteous comments are welcome for consideration. First published on https://storageioblog.com any reproduction in whole, in part, with changes to content, without source attribution under title or without permission is forbidden.

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO. All Rights Reserved. StorageIO is a registered Trade Mark (TM) of Server StorageIO.

Posted on

The Many Faces of Solid State Devices/Disks (SSD)

Storage I/O trends

Here’s a link to a recent article I wrote for Enterprise Storage Forum titled “Not a Flash in the PAN” providing a synopsis of the many faces, implementations and forms of SSD based technologies that includes several links to other related content.

A popular topic over the past year or so has been SSD with FLASH based storage for laptops, also sometimes referred to as hybrid disk drives along with announcements late last year by companies such as Texas Memory Systems (TMS) of a FLASH based storage system combining DRAM for high speed cache in their RAMSAN-500 and more recently EMC adding support for FLASH based SSD devices in their DMX4 systems as a tier-0 to co-exist with other tier-1 (fast FC) and tier-2 (SATA) drives.

Solid State Disks/Devices (SSD) or memory based storage mediums have been around for decades, they continue to evolve using different types of memory ranging from volatile dynamic random access (DRAM) memory to persistent or non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) and various derivatives of NAND FLASH among other users. Likewise, the capacity cost points, performance, reliability, packaging, interfaces and power consumption all continue to improve.

SSD in general, is a technology that has been miss-understood over the decades particularly when simply compared on a cost per capacity (e.g. dollar per GByte) basis which is an unfair comparison. The more approaches comparison is to look at how much work or amount of activity for example transactions per second, NFS operations per second, IOPS or email messages that can be processed in a given amount of time and then comparing the amount of power and number of devices to achieve a desired level of performance. Granted SSD and in particular DRAM based systems cost more on a GByte or TByte basis than magnetic hard disk drives however it also requires more HDDs and controllers to achieve the same level of performance not to mention requiring more power and cooling than compared to a typical SSD based device.

The many faces of SSD range from low cost consumer grade products based on consumer FLASH products to high performance DRAM based caches and devices for enterprise storage applications. Over the past year or so, SSD have re-emerged for those who are familiar with the technology, and emerged or appeared for those new to the various implementations and technologies leading to another up swinging in the historic up and down cycles of SSD adoption and technology evolution in the industry.

This time around, a few things are different and I believe that SSD in general, that is, the many difference faces of SSD will have staying power and not fade away into the shadows only to re-emerge a few years later as has been the case in the past.

The reason I have this opinion is based on two basic premises which are economics and ecological”. Given the focus on reducing or containing costs, doing more with what you have and environmental or ecological awareness in the race to green the data center and green storage, improving on the economics with more energy efficiency storage, that is, enabling your storage to do more work with less energy as opposed to avoiding energy consumption, has the by product of improved economics (cost savings and improved resource utilization and better service delivery) along with ecological (better use of energy or less use of energy).

Current implementations of SSD based solutions are addressing both the energy efficiency topics to enable better energy efficiency ranging from maximizing battery life to boosting performance while drawing less power. Consequently we are now seeing SSD in general are not only being used for boosting performance, also we are seeing it as one of many different tools to address power, cooling, floor space and environmental or green storage issues.

Here’s a link to a StorageIO industry trends and perspectives white paper at www.storageio.com/xreports.htm.

Here’s the bottom line, there are many faces to SSD. SSD (FLASH or DRAM) based solutions and devices have a place in a tiered storage environment as a Tier-0 or as an alternative in some laptop or other servers where appropriate. SSD compliments other technologies and SSD benefits from being paired with other technologies including high performance storage for tier-1 and near-line or tier-2 storage implementing intelligent power management (IPM).

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press, 2011), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press, 2009), and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier, 2004)

twitter @storageio

All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2012 StorageIO and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved