What a Solid State we store in

I’ve written about solid state drive technology in the past and I will continue to, for it represents the first major advancement in primary storage in a very long time. Serving on the Governing Board of SNIA’s Solid State Storage Initiative, allows me to help foster the growth and success of the market for solid state storage in both enterprise and client environments.

Our goals are to be the recognized authority for storage made from solid state devices, to determine and document the characteristics of storage made from solid state devices and the impact of these devices on system architectures.

So what can you expect if you were to ever upgrade to an SSD? Well, for starters your computing experience will be transformed with screaming fast random access speeds, multi-tasking proficiency, as well as fantastic reliability and durability… and you can choose between an external SSD or even a hybrid drive - so you’ve got some options.

A new SSD will make your system faster because the boot times will decrease, launching apps will be lightening fast, opening and saving docs will no longer drag, copying and duplicating file speeds will improve, and overall your system will have a new ‘pep in its step’. Furthermore, to promote being green, SSDs consume far less power than traditional hard drives, which means they also preserve battery life and stay cooler. Who doesn’t want and need that? They’re also very quiet, with none of the spinning and clanking you get with HDDs – for obvious reasons. SSDs are cooler and quieter, all the while being faster.

Since modern SSDs are Flash-based, there is no real hard-defined difference between Flash and SSD. Rather, as mentioned previously, Solid State Disk is essentially storage that doesn’t require moving parts and Flash is what allows that to exist. SSDs use Flash instead of RAM these days, since it’s a type of memory that’s super fast and doesn’t require continuous power, making it non-volatile.
A match made in solid-state heaven.

There are some fundamental aspects that folks expect from a robust flash-based storage solution. First off, I/O performance and efficiency for many applications, including database acceleration, server and desktop virtualization, and cloud infrastructure. You should also expect to speed up overall IT performance, boost responsiveness of performance-critical applications, and reduce power costs and over-provisioning. Furthermore, you will obviously use more high-capacity, low-cost SATA drives while improving utilization of your data center space. If you can achieve all your flash-based goals without changing your IT infrastructure management processes, then you’ve really got it good.

Flash storage has customarily had substantial aging issues. In a nutshell, a user could only write to the memory a certain number of times before they would just lose that section of the drive coupled with the fact that performance would degrade over time, too. However, a lot of these issues were resolved and companies started manufacturing SSDs out of Flash memory instead of out of RAM.

I’ve stated in the past that many people in the industry believe that flash SSDs will eventually replace traditional hard drives. By the time this happens other characteristics, such as slower write time and added cost, will likely have been eradicated or significantly diminished. Even today, an SSD can extend the life of a laptop battery, reduce the weight of the system, make it quieter, and increase read performance. When properly and optimally engineered, SSDs are now at least as reliable as traditional spinning hard drives. Relating to the faster speed, think of one starting up in seconds versus minutes.

Even the slowest current SSD gives you much improved real-world performance than does the fastest conventional hard drive, perhaps even 100x as fast. This allows for better user productivity, allowing for more work to get done in a fraction of the time. Furthermore, using flash in enterprise storage servers means you can support more users, do more work, and use less power so it’s no wonder that it’s become an important technology for business transactions. It’s a solid win-win-win.

SNIA’s Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) focus is to foster the growth and success of the Solid State Storage market in both enterprise and client environments. The SSSI also determines the standards that will be necessary to support the industry usage of SSDs by performing interoperability plug-fests as necessary in support of standards development. Collaboration is imperative. This SSSI works closely with 2 SNIA Initiatives, the Storage Management Initiative (SMI) to understand how SMI-S can be used to manage storage made from solid state devices and the Green Storage Initiative (GSI) to understand how storage made from solid state devices will impact energy use in computer systems.

This initiative performs benchmark testing that highlights the performance advantages of solid state storage, creates peer reviewed vendor neutral SNIA presentations and develops vendor-neutral demonstrations. For more information about what SNIA’s Solid State Storage Initiative is up to lately, be sure to check out the website at www.snia.org/forums/SSSI.