Looking at the Benefits of Solid State Drives – Voxel Chats with Alex Mei, CMO, OCZ Technology Group | Voxel dot Net, New York, Singapore and Amsterdam

Nov-22-2011

Looking at the Benefits of Solid State Drives – Voxel Chats with Alex Mei, CMO, OCZ Technology Group

In general, what are the advantages of solid state drives when compared to other storage media?
Over the last decade there have been major advancements in computing technology, primarily in processors and networks. Storage, however, has not been updated at the same rate as most of the other components in the stack. In fact, storage has become a bottleneck in everything from high performance personal computing to the datacenter. SSDs offer numerous benefits to traditional storage options including superior reliability, durability, lower power consumption, reduced thermal emissions, and vastly superior data bandwidth.

How are SSDs changing datacenters?
Datacenters are one of the best examples of how enterprise SSDs can make a substantial improvement in reliability, data security and performance. Smart manageability and fail safes in the case of power loss make enterprise SSDs, like OCZ’s “Z-Drive R4”, a weapon in the war between the greater data throughput and ever-growing storage needs of modern applications and the cooling, power and cost constraints of IT departments and their datacenters. PCIe SSDs, in particular, provide a low-barrier solution to address this challenge of “big data” because they bypass traditional storage protocol overheads, reduce latency, and increase throughput all while bringing a better cost/watt and long-term ROI vs. other storage options.

SSD’s are known to be expensive. Will they become more affordable?

SSD technology has already become more affordable over the last few years and SSD drives have also increased capacity so that they are now able to replace traditional hard drives, not just replace boot drives or caches. New NAND processes have also helped bring down the cost of SSDs, and while they are still higher in price (per GB) than traditional rotational media, that delta continues to shrink…when you compare the price per IOPS (Input/output Operations per Second) there simply is no comparison. At OCZ our goal is to not only make the highest performing and most innovative drives, but also bring down the cost of SSDs and make them more affordable and easier to adopt by customers.

Will SSDs completely replace HDDs anytime soon?

SSDs will co-exist with HDDs for the foreseeable future. With SSD storage solutions, IT Architects now have a new tool to efficiently manage increasing amounts of data. By using NAND-based storage alongside traditional rotational media, data centers can improve performance and reliability while reducing costs associated with maintenance and recurring power and cooling charges. Using SSDs as part of a storage tier is a great example of how different drive types can co-exist. We are seeing more and more SSDs being utilized at Tier 0/1 to handle hot transactional data, while SAS and SATA based HDDs are used at the lower tiers for mass storage capacity.

What are the fastest growing interfaces when it comes to SSDs?

It really depends on the application and market type. In the enterprise, SAS continues to be a popular interface - clients can leverage their existing infrastructure and instantly replace traditional hard drives. In the datacenter, however, SATA is also popular. The fastest growing interface, however, is PCIe, as the interface eliminates bottlenecks associated with other storage protocols and allows customers to deploy an end-to-end storage solution complete with exceptional IOPS performance. For example, to achieve the same level of IOPS as a single OCZ Z-Drive R4, a datacenter would need to run a complete floor of short stroked hard drives. You can expect to see major advancements in PCIe design for the most mission critical and high bandwidth storage applications.

What role will SSDs play when it comes to caching?

That is a great question, and one that comes up as customers look to migrate over to SSD technology. Caching represents a way for customers to leverage some of the performance benefits of solid state storage with the capacity of traditional hard drives. While there are advantages to a pure SSD solution, there are many users that still value the high capacity of traditional HDDs. Solutions like our RevoDrive Hybrid pair a PCIe SSD with a built-on HDD for a storage solution with built in caching. Software is used to prioritize “hot” data to SSD storage while “cold” data is stored on the larger capacity HDD’s. This type of solution delivers both higher speeds and large capacity.

In closing is there anything that you would like to add?

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to Voxel’s customers! We are thrilled to be working with a leading hosting provider like Voxel and we share the company’s passion for delivering a premium user experience. By utilizing solid state drives in managed hosting, customers can expect superior performance and reliability, both of which is critical for today’s cloud computing and critical web applications.

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