Getting really flash in the datacentre
All-SSD datacentres are in the near future for many organisations, notes Stefan Bernbo
One reason for the explosive growth in data is the so-called Internet of Things, where wireless, network-connected devices become ever more synchronised with our lives. Gartner has suggested there will be 26 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020.
Housing the information generated by these billions of devices demands a new approach to data storage and management.
Datacentres are an integral part of a data-driven economy, facilitating everyday business transactions in all industries. The method has shifted from on-site tape storage and hard-disk drives (HDDs) to off-site datacentres that host petabytes of data.
Use of HDDs in the datacentre is reaching an inflexion point; SSD is showing promise when it comes to performance and cost. Enterprises requiring the fastest and most efficient mode of storage may soon invest in an all-flash datacentre.
When flash storage was first commercialised, spinning disks remained the server architecture of choice. Despite performance and efficiency gains, flash was still too expensive. So most datacentres continued to deploy HDD regardless.
The price has gradually reduced, however, from roughly $40/GB to less than $1/GB today. And some SSDs manage to use 1/16th of the energy of a comparable HDD. Although flash storage may burn out faster, implementation even in high-volume environments such as datacentres can be a reality.
Organisations will start transitioning from spinning disk to all-flash in the datacentre very soon, signalling the beginning of an age of all-flash datacentres.
Even today, industry players that rely on speed and reliability to maintain profit margins, such as telecommunications and internet services providers, are changing their perception of flash storage. For them, the idea of a flash-driven datacentre is becoming less of an attractive possibility and more of a business necessity.
However, a file-hosting service that delivers free web storage for consumers is likely focused on delivering large quantities of inexpensive storage, not high performance. The current trade-off is between price and capacity, but once flash catches up to the price point of spinning disk, there will no longer be a reason to avoid the switch.
At that point, SSD will replace HDD as the primary storage method.
Software-defined storage is another trend on the rise, and while it may be premature to say the two go hand in hand, this will provide organisations with the flexibility needed to go all-flash.
Software-defined storage migrates features typically found in the hardware layer to the software layer, reducing various redundancies built into the hardware layer.
It is a simple fact of life that hardware will fail at some point, regardless of design, and flash storage has an especially high rate of time-to-failure when compared to other storage technologies.
In a typical storage setup that does not have costly RAID cards, disk failure will prompt an error message that affects the end user's experience. But with a software-defined approach, problems of this nature can be remediated and rendered invisible to the user.
Furthermore, software-defined storage is hardware-agnostic. It can help users analyse business requirements and choose the precise components and software that satisfy growth goals.
While more technical skills are required, the flexibility can make for a simpler, better-performing and more cost-effective datacentre.
Administrators can use cheaper, commodity-type servers. When paired with lightweight, effective software, this can save a lot of money. SSD also takes up less space in the datacentre compared with HDD.
Network ecosystems, corporate concerns and budgets all fluctuate with the market. Having a rigid storage environment locked into infrastructure combinations determined by an external vendor hinders organisational agility.
Implementing a software-defined approach in storage architectures enables the use of a single name space across all the storage nodes. Customer organisations can run applications in the storage nodes, thereby converting them into "compustorage" nodes.
You can also run more applications on the same hardware.
Stefan Bernbo is founder and chief executive of Compuverde