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Making the Case for an All-Flash Data

Center
 MAKING THE CASE FOR AN ALL-FLASH DATA CENTER

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Making the Case for

an All-Flash Data

T
Center

SSD s are unquestionably faster

oday ’ s
than their HDD counterpart, with 1 TB
delivering 400,000 IOPS vs. 150,000 for
HDDs, but are they reliable enough to take
over your entire data center’s storage?

In this expert guide, learn about the costs, speed, and latency factors
that are making an all-flash array your best bet for storage. Discover
how the decline of RAID, growing application workloads, and more
are pushing this trend forward.

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MAKING THE CASE FOR AN ALL-FLASH DATA CENTER

Jim O'Reilly, Cloud consultant

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In the early days of flash, prices were high, and drives wore out within a couple
Making the Case for of years. Now, drive prices are much lower, and the wear-out issue is effectively
an All-Flash Data
Center behind us; every company should have an all-flash data center.
Today, SSDs are much faster than any HDD, both in random I/O and band-
width. SSD capacity also far exceeds that of HDD. There are already 16 TB 2.5-
inch SSDs, and 100 TB 2.5-inch SSDs are on the distant horizon. The best an
HDD can achieve is 12 TB in a much bigger 3.5-inch form factor.
SSDs still wear out, but manufacturers have improved everything, from the
electrics of writing to error correction and internal redundancy. Most drives
can now survive about five years of pretty heavy write workloads.

WHY AN ALL-FLASH DATA CENTER?

SSD price per TB is still higher than HDDs; a terabyte drive sells for about $250,
whereas an HDD is $50. But saying that isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.
It's the equivalent of comparing a Ferrari to a golf cart.

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The 1 TB, $250 SSD is fast. It transfers 400,000 IOPS versus a paltry
150,000 IOPS for the HDD. And the SSD actually replaces an enterprise-grade
HDD that costs close to $450 and that isn't much faster than a consumer HDD.
In an all-flash data center, storage is faster and companies get more for their
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dollar.
Making the Case for Some might argue that an ultra-fast NVMe SSD -- which costs a lot more
an All-Flash Data
Center than $250 -- would actually replace that enterprise-grade HDD. But NVMe is
only necessary if the app it supports needs to perform in the 2 million IOPS
range. For many use cases, the $250 SSD is adequate.
RAID is declining. The old approach to data integrity is falling victim to
controller performance bottlenecks and a lack of flexibility, coupled with the
effect of 10+ TB drives. Software-defined storage will replace RAID with small
virtualized storage appliances, with a blurring between storage and server.
With the move to hyper-converged appliances and away from RAID arrays,
dual-ported drives are irrelevant in a data availability model. That means SAS
is deprecated in favor of either NVMe or SATA. Advances in NVMe approaches
and packaging have created compact flash drives in the M.2 form factor at close
to SATA 2.5-inch prices for equal capacity.

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WHERE'S THE FLASH?

Apart from the innate conservativeness IT staff show, the reason many com-
panies still don't have an all-flash data center might lie in antiquated software.
Most apps were written with single-threading, single-core computers in mind,
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on a model where I/O took an eternity. These programs won't attain the huge
Making the Case for benefits of SSDs without some rewrites.
an All-Flash Data
Center For example, an app built on the idea that an I/O to HDD takes 13 millisec-
onds will issue the I/O and then disconnect, effectively going to sleep. Com-
pound this for perhaps 20 I/Os, and that's a computer eternity. All of that state
swapping and idling eats up system overhead.
With an SSD, an app can get a whole bunch of I/O completed in the typical
100 microsecond slice granted by the OS before switching to another process.
The OS and compilers don't address these performance issues.
Still, even without rewrites, an all-flash data center would make apps run
faster, with few exceptions. The improvement seems to be between two and
five times, which pays for a lot of SSDs by saving on the cost of servers and
appliances.
Storage vendors have figured out that most systems don't use all the SSD
IOPS. They have applied the excess to a back-end process to compress objects,

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something slow HDD-based storage systems don't do well. This reduces the
total raw capacity required for a given effective capacity by a large factor, typi-
cally five times, both in primary and secondary storage. That's another large
savings, and there is also a comparable gain in network load and a reduction in
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latency for loading data to memory.
Making the Case for
an All-Flash Data
Center

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