[Editor's Note: Following is a guest blog from Consolidate IT Senior Pre-Sales Technical Consultant, Chris Bowles.]
Well, here we are 6 months after the 2nd year of the 2nd decade of the 3rd millennium. What better time to look at where we are with enterprise technology and where we are headed in the immediate future.
Firstly, one of the most significant shifts is in storage technology with the rapid move from hard disk drives to solid state media. An important reason for this shift is the fact that hard drive technology has not moved in the last 15 years. CPU and memory performance has increased according to Moore’s Law whereas hard drives have been stagnant at 15K RPM for the fastest SAS variants.
This has lead to data starvation in the datacentre with increased demands from server virtualization, transactional applications and the proliferation of Virtual Desktop and Cloud infrastructure. These demanding applications require data to be delivered at the speed of life and have no time to wait for drives to spin up. As well as performance, another major consideration is energy efficiency. The number of hard drives required to deliver sufficient IOPS usually results in the over-provisioning of capacity, just to deliver the necessary spindle count.
Mainly due to the huge energy consumption of hard drives, data centres have a large and growing carbon footprint. In 2008, McKinsey & Company stated that the energy consumption of data centres was increasing by 13.8 percent annually. If left unchecked, and current trends continue, the emission of greenhouse gases from data centres will grow by a factor of four by 2020. At that rate, the power demands for data centers alone will become a larger cause for carbon emissions than the entire airline industry by 2020.
The solution to both these challenges is the wide scale adoption of Solid State Drives (SSD) and flash technology. With the ability to deliver the required levels performance at low latency coupled with significantly lower power consumption, flash technology is the ideal choice for primary storage in the datacentre. The available capacities of Solid State Drives restricts their usage to the applications mentioned above, leaving slower SATA based hard drives for the bulk storage of large, dormant datasets such as photos and backup/archive etc.
A company at the forefront of performance and energy conservation is GreenBytes. With their intelligent Hybrid Storage Architecture (employing both SSD for performance and HDD for capacity) and now their all-SSD storage appliance, Solidarity, GreenBytes have designed storage arrays from the ground up to be both performant and energy efficient. In addition to the use of SSD technology, GreenBytes also holds patents for Power Consumption Innovation and Primary Deduplication Technology. With data deduplication factored in, companies can enjoy the benefits of SSD performance combined with the effective capacity of HDD storage.
With Flash-based storage already the de facto standard for mobile technology, Solid State storage is becoming the only choice for performance enterprise storage. Solid State will replace 15K SAS ‘dinosaur drives’ leaving cheap SATA drives to cater for bulk storage requirements. The way forward for storage technology is Solid State for performance (and energy efficiency) and low-cost SATA for capacity. In shifting up a gear we can enjoy the increased performance and reduced power consumption that SSD offers and have greener data centres in the process.
