Driving Business Value on Power Systems with Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives (SSDs) offer a number of advantages over traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). With no seek time or rotational delays, SSDs can deliver substantially better I/O performance than HDDs. Capable of driving tens of thousands of I/O operations per second (IOPS), as opposed to hundreds for HDDs, SSDs break through performance bottlenecks of I/O-bound applications. Applications that require hundreds of HDDs can meet their I/O performance requirements with far fewer SSDs, resulting in energy, space, and cost savings.

To demonstrate the benefits of SSDs, we ran experiments comparing SSDs with HDDs. The experiments showed a significant performance advantage with SSDs which resulted in a substantial reduction in the number of drives needed to meet the desired level of performance. Fewer drives translate into a smaller physical footprint, reduced energy consumption, and less hardware to maintain. The experiments also showed better application response times for SSDs, which leads to increased productivity and higher customer satisfaction.

Solid state drive (SSD) technology was introduced more than three decades ago. Until recently, however, the high cost-per-gigabyte and limited capacity of SSDs restricted deployment of these drives to niche markets or military applications. Recent advances in SSD technology and economies of scale have driven down the cost of SSDs, making them a viable storage option for many I/O intensive enterprise applications.

While the cost of SSDs is trending downward, the $/GB for SSDs is still substantially higher than that of HDDs. It is not cost-effective or necessary to replace all HDDs with SSDs. For instance, infrequently accessed (cold) data can reside on lower cost HDDs while frequently accessed (hot) data can be moved to SSDs for maximum performance. The appropriate mix of SSDs and HDDs should be used to strike a proper balance between performance and cost.

This paper provides information to enable you to integrate SSDs into your storage infrastructure so that you can immediately take advantage of SSDs to improve your application performance and increase productivity. We describe how to deploy SSDs in a tiered storage environment to allow you to leverage your existing storage with SSDs for maximum performance and minimum cost. The paper also discusses IBM tools and services available to assist you in deploying and managing a storage solution with SSDs.