Aug 26 2010

Green Flash – the driving trend

Published by at 12:58 am under Uncategorized

At the recent Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, the topic of how to build a sustainable non-commodity market for flash was discussed.  The concept of Green Flash has to do with power requirements for data centers world wide.  SSDs made with Flash are the technology of choice for replacement of high power 15K HDDs.  The SSDs average 75% less power per TB than HDDs which is essential to address the number one concern of data center managers – Air handling and air conditioning costs.
A new driving idea for data centers is sustainable storage.  This is a redesign with a balance on power, staffing and architecture of the storage array.  The advantage of flash based SSDs is they have the data throughput equal to or larger than a 15K HDD but in a smaller footprint.  For a modern data center, flash delivers 1M IOPS in a single 2U chassis, where 1M IOPS requires 208U of equivalent space with 15K HDDs.  The benefit in space and power is not without cost however.
Flash is more expensive as a media than HDDs.  Additionally, the SDD solution requires new software for real time de-duplication, real time compare, thin client provisioning and creation of a unified scalable file system.  These issues are difficult on a retro-fit basis, but are straightforward to address when building and deploying a virtualization environment.  These environments have Flash in a mixed or hybrid system with HDD to support the long term storage and the short term high bandwidth needs of the virtualized data center.
PC

At the recent Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, the topic of how to build a sustainable non-commodity market for flash was discussed.  The concept of Green Flash has to do with power requirements for data centers world wide.  SSDs made with Flash are the technology of choice for replacement of high power 15K HDDs.  The SSDs average 75% less power per TB than HDDs which is essential to address the number one concern of data center managers – Air handling and air conditioning costs.

A new driving idea for data centers is sustainable storage.  This is a redesign with a balance on power, staffing and architecture of the storage array.  The advantage of flash based SSDs is they have the data throughput equal to or larger than a 15K HDD but in a smaller footprint.  For a modern data center, flash delivers 1M IOPS in a single 2U chassis, where 1M IOPS requires 208U of equivalent space with 15K HDDs.  The benefit in space and power is not without cost however.

Flash is more expensive as a media than HDDs.  Additionally, the SDD solution requires new software for real time de-duplication, real time compare, thin client provisioning and creation of a unified scalable file system.  These issues are difficult on a retro-fit basis, but are straightforward to address when building and deploying a virtualization environment.  These environments have Flash in a mixed or hybrid system with HDD to support the long term storage and the short term high bandwidth needs of the virtualized data center.

PC

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