Storage servers

Building better boxes

Trade
Image: Stockfresh

13 November 2014

Is disk dead and solid state inevitable? Or is the strong performance of hybrid arrays the preferred solution? As some suppliers already argue that solid state is now as cheap as disks, how are the opportunities for channel partners for the rest of 2014 and into 2015? How prepared are they to deliver on those opportunities and what can they do to develop them further? We asked a number of industry figures for their views.

Mark Carragher, technical director at Qualcom, says the growth of solid disk has been a result of falling prices coupled with performance gains. Nevertheless, hard disk drives (HDDs) are still the mainstream source of storage for various reasons. Cost per Gb is significantly lower than for solid-state disks (SSDs), “but another factor to note is array capacity”. A single tray of HDDs will host large capacity storage compared to the same physical tray of SSDs. In addition, because SSD is still relatively new, the real world life expectancy of the technology is difficult to verify compared to standard disks that have existed for years.

Hybrid storage has been adopted by all types of businesses from SME to enterprises because it can provide SSD performance with hard disk capacity. “The business gets all the benefits with a cost point to match,” Carragher claims. But the technology hasn’t matured to support a SAN of fully populated SSD disks running at millions of IOPS for all businesses. Controllers to manage this amount of throughput and IOPS require backplanes and cache technology that doesn’t exist outside of large scale corporates. Until the controllers and technologies catch up and mature to allow mass SSD adoption, they will remain in the field as cache devices.

For their part, partners can sell and integrate highly adaptive and high-performance solutions that exploit SSD technology, but standard disks will remain for some time because data capacity is still the main issue companies face today, performance is secondary.

Premature
For Gerry Harvey, general manager, Commtech, the disk is not dead, but it is on the ‘wounded’ list. He expects usage of hard disk drives (HDDs) to decline along a profile similar to the ‘demise’ of back up to tape. “And look how that particular technology has been prematurely declared ‘dead’,” he remarks.

The most common use cases for solid-state arrays (SSAs) are online transaction processing (OLTP), analytics and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), with performance being an inordinately important factor in the selection.

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie