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Tier SSDs to support enterprise storage needs

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Deepa
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BANGALORE, INDIA: In today's information age, we are experiencing a phenomenal data growth. This data is being created and consumed by both consumers and businesses at a tremendous speed.

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According to IDC, the amount of information created and replicated is expected to more than double every two years, reaching 7.9 zettabytes by 2015.

Creation and usage of data are not the only significant parameters here. Storage and availability of data anywhere, anytime are the next set of critical factors in the data game. As data grows, its storage will grow too, at the same exponential rate.

Adding to its projection above, IDC says that the number of virtual and physical servers worldwide will grow tenfold and the amount of information managed by enterprise data-centres will grow fifty-fold in the next ten years. On data availability, today's mobile-savvy user wants instant access to the data from everywhere, be it from home, office or while on the move.

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In such a dynamic scenario where data volumes involved are gigantic, the question for businesses that are into data storage and management is how will they keep up pace with this growth? Will they be able to provide the relevant infrastructure? Is technology in the storage domain growing at the same pace...?

 

The SSD Option
The need at present and in future will be to have faster, smarter and more efficient data-centres. One of the solutions which is gaining popularity is the use of solid state drives or SSDs. These are being used by data-centres to increase the performance of applications such as cloud computing, server virtualization, data warehousing, content delivery networks and online transaction processing.

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An SSD has been around for some time but it came into prominence only recently. Unlike a traditional hard-disk drive (HDD), an SSD is made up of semi-conductors and does not have any moving parts which makes it highly reliable and provides instant access to data. The enterprise SSD market is quite fragmented at present with different vendors presenting their wares and claiming to give the same performance as client SSDs.

This is not true and SSDs should be built specifically to take the load and deliver performance required for enterprises. These should be built on industry standards and be able to integrate seamlessly with the existing infrastructure.

Price was seen as a major deterrent to the wide-scale adoption of SSDs but its features have overcome the perception and enterprise SSDs are now being used extensively in the data-centres. According to IDC, the enterprise market is seeing an increasing use of SSDs and it expects the trend to continue as prices fall and performance increases.

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From 2010 to 2011, the SSD market saw a year-on-year growth of 105 per cent in a market of USD 2.4 billion.

As I said before, SSDs offer unprecedentedly high performance but due to the high cost, users can not shift all their data to the SSDs. The solution lies in using SSDs for most critical data, a concept called tiering.

The Tiering Solution
Today, the concept of tiering is being used successfully by data-centres in balancing workload and performance. By using a combination of HDDs and SSDs, the tiering software monitors the data activity to the drives and shifts the busiest data blocks to the SSDs. This ensures that the highest disk activity is managed by the SSDs, accelerating the overall disk performance many times.

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This tiering function runs all the time ensuring SSD data allocation happens dynamically and the user is freed from continually monitoring the system for optimum disk space management.
A tiering is not an ‘install and forget' solution. It requires regular monitoring for which experienced professionals are required.

As a technology, tiering is still evolving. It gives the option to storage businesses to add flexibility and more value to their storage solutions than simply providing fixed boxes.

Conclusion
Tiering has become an important component of the storage subsystem. It may not have eliminated all the management challenges of multiple performance levels of storage, but it is improving. The solution has already evolved from the first level to an effective and efficient advanced one.

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As technological advancements happen, tiering and SSD technologies will no doubt evolve further. But for now, enterprise SSDs coupled with tiering is able to offer an efficient and effective solution to the enterprises in today's times of data boom.

The author is country manager, India & SAARC at Seagate Technology.

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