Rock Solid

Solid-state drives -- flash memory that mimics very fast hard drives -- are coming into their own in data centers as prices drop, reliability increases and more CIOs become aware of how the drives can enormously speed data access.

SSDs are still niche products, primarily because of their high cost (a Fusion-io 360-gigabyte drive costs around $12,000). But because of much higher memory bandwidth (typically 100 times or more than that of a typical drive), they can be extremely cost effective when used for databases, data warehouses, scientific applications or wherever super-fast access to data is critical or where the application is memory I/O bound.

For instance, working with Samsung's NAND flash technology, Fusion-io has created ioSAN, which is capable of replacing an entire enterprise storage area network using a single PCI Express card with integrated network ports. Other manufacturers of flash SSDs include Hitachi Data Systems, Intel, SanDisk, STEC, Sun Microsystems and Toshiba.

Spin Dynamics

David Flynn, chief technology officer of flash drive maker Fusion-io, points out that most databases are less than a terabyte in size, but that often the need for I/O performance leads to over-provisioning servers, disks and RAM in an effort to get enough memory bandwidth.

"One of the key indicators," Flynn says, "is you've got lots of servers in an array, and you find that any one of them is only using a small amount of CPU. You've got an excess of servers, an excess of RAM and an excess of mechanical spindles." In a case like this, switching to properly applied SSDs can save on the number of servers, the amount of RAM, the number of spindles -- and the cost of software licensing. Why? The answer is simple: Fewer servers mean fewer licenses.

There are also operational savings. SSDs require less cooling and use less energy, so the operational cost is low compared with an array of hard disks, especially the 15,000-rpm drives used to get maximum performance. The result is that in spite of the high costs of SSDs, a properly designed SSD installation can save money on total data center costs.

By the Case

The interest in these drives is growing in federal enterprise environments but is still relatively untested, says Joseph Unsworth, a research director at Gartner. A chief reason, he notes, is a lack of standards.

But the value is measurable, according Geoffrey Smalling, chief technology officer for Wine.com. An online and storefront seller of wine, Wine.com was one of the first companies to adopt Fusion-io's drives. The company's systems, which Smalling acknowledges were not well designed, could not keep up with the holiday rush and fell so far behind that invoicing and billing typically weren't completed until sometime in January.

The San Francisco wine vendor's storage supplier proposed a solution that would roughly double performance to about 1,900 I/O operations per second for between $60,000 and $80,000. But for about the same price, SSD drives could offer 80,000 IOPs. "That was pretty compelling," Smalling says. The company installed a total of 12 SSDs in its four servers. One result was that the time to post 100 orders to invoice dropped from two minutes to 10 seconds. Another result: Wine.com came through the last holiday season with no backlogs and maintained invoicing in real time with sales and delivery.

But Unsworth warns that not all SSD products are created equal. There are many manufacturers, no well-established standards and enormous variation in reliability, speed and other critical factors.

"There are hundreds of SSD vendors out there all claiming to have tremendous solutions," he says. "But there are only a handful of companies that can truly deliver."