Enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) provide superior performance and durability compared to traditional rotational drives, utilizing advanced technology such as SLC and MLC NAND flash. They offer significant cost savings in terms of energy, space, and maintenance while improving data safety and reliability, making them suitable for critical applications. Optimizing storage systems with tiering strategies and thin provisioning can further enhance total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI).

1. Enterprise Solid State Drives
(c) 2010 Damir Lukic

2. Flash drive vs. Rotational
Enterprise Solid State Drive FC/SATA 7.2/10/15krpm
new (old) technology existing technology, widely accepted
~0 ms data access high latency data access
performance $/IOPS capacity $/GB

3. Enterprise SSD – Inside look
Enterprise SSD components:
- dual port FC interface
- control logic + multiple parallel IO channels
- DDR SDRAM cache with battery backup
- SLC NAND Flash

4. Enterprise SSD – Technology history
• SSD technology dates back to 1950
– Core memory
– Card Capacitor Read Only Store (CCROS)
– development stopped due to high costs
• Flash-based SSD is re-introduced in
1995 (M-Systems, now SanDisk)

5. Enterprise SSD – Technology
insights
• SLC – single-level cell
– speed
– relatively low capacity
– enhanced wearability (100.000 erase/write cycles)
– enterprise class drives
• MLC – multi-level cell
– high capacity drives
– lower wearability (1.000 - 10.000 erase/write cycles)
– consumer class drives

6. Enterprise SSD – Reliability
and durability
• Wear leveling – Enterprise SSD use
advanced wear-leveling algorithms
that have almost no impact on
performance
• 400GB * 100k E/W operations = 40
PB of data per drive in its lifetime!

7. Enterprise SSD – Reliability
and durability
• Average ~150 years drive durability
for 400GB drive
– (400*109) * 100.000 / 4 kB / 2000 IOPS / 365 /
24 / 3600
158 yr
Average life expectancy of 400GB
Enterprise SSD drive

8. Enterprise SSD - Performance
• 2500-5000 raw IOPS
• >300MB/s throughput per drive
• Enterprise SSD performance gains are visible in random
read-miss cache enviroments
(block size up to 16kB)
– OLTP
– high-volume email systems
• read-hit vs. read-miss cache
• short-stroke FC vs. Enterprise SSD
– 30x FC 15k drives have the same throughput as only one
Enterprise SSD drive
– small capacity drives are used for short-stroking

9. Enterprise SSD - Performance
Drive type IOPS
SATA 80
FC 10k 120
FC 15k 180
Ent SSD 5000

10. Enterprise SSD – Cost savings
• Energy
– electricity, UPS sizing
– cooling, air conditioning
• Space
– rack space, drive enclosures, drive count
• Cache memory
– less read cache memory used
– more memory can be used for write cache
– enhanced storage array performance
• Enterprise storage software is often licensed per raw capacity
– less raw space leads to less spending on software licenses
• ~15x faster than typical 15k FC drives
– 15x less Enterprise SSD drives needed to achieve required performance

11. Enterprise SSD - Data safety
• Less impact during degraded RAID operation
– faster rebuild times
– performance impact on RAID groups using Enterprise SSD drives is less
noticeable compared to FC/SATA drives
• No start/stop problems in case of power loss/power
off
– powering off a storage array is needed during datacenter migrations
– one of the worst problems that magnetic drives have to deal with are
starts/stops after a long time of being powered on
– large numbers of magnetic drives fail to initialize (Y2K example, customer
example)
• ECC – error correction codes
– detects 5B/512B
– corrects 4B/512B

12. Enterprise SSD – Application
candidates
• Good candidates
– heavily utilized tablespaces
– temp files
– redo logs
– indexes
– typical applications
• Oracle, SQL, DB2
• Exchange, Domino
• Sharepoint
• Bad candidates (not necessarily!)
– sequential data (reads/writes)
• multimedia files (audio, video)
• archive logs
– static documents (DOC, XLS, PPT, PDF)

13. Enterprise SSD – Summary
Enterprise SSD technology is ready for use
• better performance using fewer drives
• enhanced reliability compared to traditional drives
• adopting tiering strategy can lower TCO and ROI
• visible cost savings on energy, space, maintenance and
administration
• not necessary to use Enterprise SSD for all application data
– only critical elements should be kept on Enterprise SSD
• Recommendation
– if possible, use thin provisioning and automatic tiering
technologies on your storage systems