SSDs: The New King of the Data Center? 172
Nerval's Lobster writes "Flash storage is more common on mobile devices than data-center hardware, but that could soon change. The industry has seen increasing sales of solid-state drives (SSDs) as a replacement for traditional hard drives, according to IHS iSuppli Research. Nearly all of these have been sold for ultrabooks, laptops and other mobile devices that can benefit from a combination of low energy use and high-powered performance. Despite that, businesses have lagged the consumer market in adoption of SSDs, largely due to the format's comparatively small size, high cost and the concerns of datacenter managers about long-term stability and comparatively high failure rates. But that's changing quickly, according to market researchers IDC and Gartner: Datacenter- and enterprise-storage managers are buying SSDs in greater numbers for both server-attached storage and mainstream storage infrastructure, according to studies both research firms published in April. That doesn't mean SSDs will oust hard drives and replace them directly in existing systems, but it does raise a question: are SSDs mature enough (and cheap enough) to support business-sized workloads? Or are they still best suited for laptops and mobile devices?"
Great for some apps (see netflix blog) (Score:5, Interesting)
TL/DR: "The relative cost of the two configurations shows that over-all there are cost savings using the SSD instances"
at least for their use-case (Cassandra).
At work we also use SSDs for a couple terabyte Lucene index with great success (and far cheaper than getting a couple TB of DRAM spread across the servers instead)
enterprise class SSDs not the same (Score:5, Interesting)
The enterprise class SSDs are not the same as the "consumer" ones: http://www.anandtech.com/print/6433/intel-ssd-dc-s3700-200gb-review [anandtech.com]
Don't be surprised if you stick a "consumer" grade one to a heavily loaded DB server and it dies a few months later.
Fine for random read-only loads.
And some consumer grade SSDs aren't even consumer grade (I'm looking at you OCZ: http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html [behardware.com] ).
Price (Score:5, Interesting)
Pricing really needs to come down on these things. A single drive can easily cost as much as a server, and when you're talking about RAID setups, forget it. It's still much more effective to use magnetic drives and use aggressive memory caching for performance, if you really need that.
Another 3 to 5 years this idea might have more traction for companies that aren't Facebook or Google, but right now, SSD costs too much.
Re:Great for some apps (see netflix blog) (Score:5, Interesting)
So you're replacing RAM with SSD, not HD with SSD. Interesting.
And would you even be able to do this with DRAM modules? Normal PC motherboards don't support that.
Virtualisation (Score:5, Interesting)
This is being driven primarily by increasing levels of virtualisation, which turns everything into a largely random-write disk load, pretty much the worst case scenario for regular old hard disks.
Re:20x faster (Score:2, Interesting)
No, but then I can read and understand that "once the device runs out of untouched sectors" is not an "if" but a "when". An untouched sector is not the same as a spare sector either, because sectors which are used for reducing the write amplification are touched. An SSD maintains available sectors, not untouched or free sectors.
Re:Great for some apps (see netflix blog) (Score:5, Interesting)
You can build a 48-core Opteron server with 512GB of RAM for under $8000. Going over 512GB in a single server gets a lot more expensive (you either need expensive high-density modules or expensive 8-socket servers - or both) but if you can run some sort of cluster that's not a problem.
More Common Than You Think... (Score:5, Interesting)
SSD's might not be used as primary storage, yet. The cost of using a lot of SSD's in a SAN is still too high. However, that doesn't mean that SSD technology is not being used. Many systems started using SSD's as Read/Write caches or highspeed buffers, etc. The PCIe SSD cards are popular in highend servers. This is one way that Oracle manages to blow away the competition when benchmarks are compared. They put a PCIe SSD cards into their servers and use them to run their enterprise database at lightning speeds! ZFS can use SSD's as Read/Write caches although you had better battery backup the Write cache!.
Depending on a particular solution, a limited number of SSD's in a smaller NAS/iSCSI RAID setup can make sense for something that needs some extra OOMF! But I don't yet see large scale replacement of traditional spinning rust drives with SSD's yet. In many cases, SSD's only make sense for highly active arrays where reads and writes are very heavy. Lots of storage sits idle and isn't being pounded that hard.