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Array Vendors: Get out of SSD’s Way
ARRAY VENDORS THAT USE DISK-FORM-FACTOR SSD’S JUST DON’T GET IT
By Gareth Taube, Vice President Marketing, Kaminario
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In his blog entry entitled Are SSD-based arrays a bad idea? Robin Harris argues that packing arrays full of disk-form-factor SSD’s is counterproductive. Why? He cites several reasons, including latency, bandwidth, reliability, and cost, but mostly it boils down to squeezing a fast storage media into a slow architecture—much like driving a race car through rush hour traffic or putting wings on a bicycle. Cost and reliability come into play as well, because shoving flash into a disk form factor is less space efficient, less reliable, and more expensive than mounting it on a board.
Enterprise SSD is a young, rapidly evolving market and will continue to evolve until the industry agrees on the perfect SSD architecture and creates standards around it. Expect that to take several years. In the meantime we at Kaminario believe we have come pretty close. We agree with Harris that board-mounted flash makes a lot of sense for reasons of cost, performance, and reliability. That’s why we pack the K2 full of board-mounted PCI flash cards and DRAM. We also hold down cost with our N+1 HA architecture, RAID 10HD data protection (See What You Need to Know About SSD HA and Data Protection and Why Kaminario’s DataProtect is a Big Deal), and the use of industry standard components, the PCIe bus, and market leading Fusion-io technology.
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There are some interesting discussions revolving around Robin Harris’s StorageMojo blog—too bad he’s taken a vacation just when the discussion’s getting really good. The topic is SSD architectures and whether disk-form-factor SSD arrays can possibly provide the kind of performance speed-hungry applications require.
