Which Storage Is Better Staying Hard Or Going Flashy?

By Author: sadie hawkins
Total Articles: 18
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With the recent revolution in data centre storage solutions are businesses at an additional of advantage staying with HDDs or making the move to all-flash SSDs?
In recent years businesses and customers alike have all been treated to a large range of recent technologies that are making tasks easier and thus simpler. A large number of corporations especially have seen the benefit from revolutions for example the Cloud and BYOD that have allowed larger productivity with less strain on IT resources. However, most of these new revolutions have not been equally matched by infrastructure and, most significantly, by data centre storage as yet.

What are Flash SSDs?

The intriguing acronym “SSD” stands for Solid-State Drive, flash SSDs are actually very similar to the USB dongles that have become trendy in recent years. thus if you are questioning why we are simply hearing of these SSDs now when flash drives have been around for a good number of years, it can be seen as a result of the fact they have only recently become cost-effective to use on larger scales.
On the surface it may appear that flash SSDs ...
... do cost more for an identical quantity of physical space. But consider the very fact that because of new deduplication and compression technologies these will actually increase space by 5-10x, these SSDs become less expensive per gigabyte than more traditional hard disk drives (HDDs).

What is the main issue with more traditional HDDs?

Traditional HDDs have served people well within the past; however more recent developments in technology are rendering this type of storage solution redundant. Most recent progressions like that of Big Data, Cloud computing and BYOD all need super-fast access to an ever-growing central storage location. Whereas HDDs are generally fairly reliable, they can in fact be quite slow at reading and writing data that leaves them struggling to keep up with the data demand. This is most often notably difficult after you have multiple devices connecting from remote locations; the read-write speed of HDDs simply cannot manage, which will result in inflicting painfully slow running of your applications.

There are different alternative benefits of using flash SSDs over traditional HDDs.

Scalable & versatile – add more capacity to the array as your future requirements grow and change. you can however deploy any type of combination or mixture of SSD, SAS, and SATA drives during a single array depending on your needs
cost Effectiveness – Flash SSDs use less electricity and alternative resources that successively cuts down on your OPEX
Easier to take care of – maintenance and support needs are much lower
Productivity boosting – with a lot of individuals able to work quicker on identical server infrastructure, SSD flash arrays will boost business performance by up to 300%

Can people tier their storage drives for performance and value benefits?

Whilst it is not a simple process to just switch out existing HDD for SDDs several corporations are considering a hybrid or tiered approach to their storage demands. However there can be a number of good reasons why not to consider this twice.

Disk drive operations take up to tens of milliseconds that may sound pretty fast, however flash arrays take sub-milliseconds – too fast to even comprehend. The variations between these operational speeds results in inconsistent and unpredictable performance of applications. The result is similar to that of a caffeine-addict attempting to hold a reasonable conversation with somebody who has only just woken up – it simply doesn’t really work.

In conclusion a simple switch to flash SSDs can enable you to keep up with your competition while reducing long-term costs and improve your performance.

For help with the set up and migration of your storage solutions to help improve the performance of your data centres contact OISG today.