OCZ Storage Solutions have issued a newest whitepaper written by Joost Van Leeuwen and Scott Harlin which focuses on utilizing flash to its fullest potential in a SAN environment by identifying key SSD opportunities for HDD replacement.


With the increase of data storage volumes and the need for faster data processing, more and more IT managers are focusing on the advantages of flash-based solid-state drives which offer significant and immediate return on investment (ROI). The new whitepaper aims to bring a better understanding on how to best utilize flash-based SSD technology in a Storage Area Network (SAN) and identifying key opportunities for HDD replacement. While SSDs are designed to offer much better read and write performance compared to traditional HDDs, thus making them much better choice for SAN environments.




The new whitepaper provides insight into sequential and random data performance which is offered when enterprise SSDs are paired up with caching software. While HDDs are designed for straightforward data streams and well-suited for handling sequential read and write, it does not do well when it comes to random read and write performance. In general, SSDs can easily deal with both sequential and random data have dramatically lower access times as well as higher input/output operations per second (IOPS), compared to HDDs.

The new whitepaper also talks about the "I/O blender effect" that happens in HDD arrays when the combined storage access requests from users are consolidated into one data stream by the virtualization layer creating random access to disks. Before SSDs, IT managers had to either limit the number of virtual machines on each host system, refrain from placing sensitive loads in the virtual environment or purchase the abundance of HDDs in order to satisfy server IOPS performance demands, thus raising the total cost of ownership (TCO).

The whitepaper also talks about the SAN-Less environment which makes sense when application needs to fulfill a large I/O load but has an overall dataset which is not extremely large, but which can also be handled by a basic server with flash-based SSDs, rather than with an external SAN.




It also focuses adding intelligent software and delivering uninterrupted services, reducing maintenance and pre-warming the cache for peak usage.

Conclusion drawn by the new whitepaper is that IT managers can achieve an increase in server utilization as well as a reduction in both SAN and maintenance costs by eliminating storage bottlenecks in an enterprise environment through the utilization of flash-based SSD technology. While cost-effective HDDs can be deployed for capacity with the desired I/O performance and storage virtualization enabled by SSD flash resources.




When virtualization is added to the mix, the number of VMs that can run on host infrastructure increases which can be solved by OCZ's VXL Software which provides high availability services required by virtualized environments at the host layer, and in conjunction with OCZ’s Z-Drive
R4 PCIe flash-based SSDs, easily generates the IOPS requested by each VM eliminating the need to deploy costly, high-end SANs with heavy virtualization services at the SAN layer.

In case you are interested in more details you can download the full whitepaper below.



Source: OCZ.com.