No more dizzy spells: the remedy for the storage headache

05 Sep 2012

Spinning disks simply can’t keep up with the demands of today’s performance-hungry applications and platforms, says Brian Feller, vice president and general manager for EMEA at storage specialist Whiptail.

Most of us will remember that spinning round and round as a child was the ultimate in fun, but then of course came the inevitable dizziness, fall and perhaps a scraped knee – if you were lucky. Unfortunately, the laws of physics would win out.

The same goes for storage: even if you have a basic knowledge of where your documents are saved on your computer, you’ll know that traditional storage – the spinning disks that form the heart of the processing hub – have a habit of whirring rather loudly when you’re doing something particularly taxing on the CPU. And if you’ve ever been the victim of a disk head crash, you’ll know exactly what happens when you work it to hard or if RAM is too low. It falls over, because physics tells us that it cannot work any harder.

This was all fine and dandy in the 1970s, 1980s and even the 1990s, when data wasn’t yet ‘big’, games took up a mere 16k and mobile devices were something that you put above a baby’s crib. Today, it just doesn’t hack it.

The good news is those days are long gone, thanks to modern operating systems and solutions. The bad news is that the organisations we work for – and which we rely on daily for products, services and more – are still operating in this format to conduct daily IT tasks. Imagine how long processes take for media companies, mobile network operators or even your toothpaste manufacturer.

That’s because in the main, businesses are still operating on outdated, time-intensive and expensive legacy storage technologies, implemented long ago. Data is being stored on spinning disks that take up an overwhelming amount of power and rack space in the data centre, while still noticeably underperforming.

Part of the reason why there hasn’t been a revolution in storage in a very long time is because organisations have become accustomed to spending lots of time, money and resources on hard disk drives. Although it seems as though virtualisation and cloud computing have been around forever, they are still fledgling delivery models and so storage infrastructures are far behind in ensuring they perform to the required standard.

Businesses are hankering after storage that will scale both effectively and linearly, to enable them to handle such tasks as master data management (MDM) or desktop virtualisation projects. It is never easy to change a deep mindset when it comes to something like hard drives; nevertheless, the introduction of email into offices worldwide also suffered from resistance, uncertainty and a gradual adoption before it became the norm over ‘snail mail’.

By early 2008, the Flash storage revolution began to gain traction and provided organisations with a storage alternative. The way applications are deployed and consumed change by consolidating existing, cost-heavy storage arrays onto a smaller yet more powerful footprint.

Today, with developments in NAND Flash, Resistive RAM and other exciting lab-based innovations, organisations are well on their way to being able to use this new tranche of storage solutions at an attractive price point and save on operational costs, from simple power and cooling use to employee productivity gains.

An important advantage of Flash-based storage is the fact that it contains no mechanical parts, unlike spinning disks. This allows for data transfer to and from storage media to take place at a much higher speed, enabling applications to perform at a much higher level without any hardware storage tuning. But despite this speed, using Flash-based storage arrays means that larger numbers of spinning disks can be consolidated into a smaller array of Flash disks, reducing power consumption and cooling costs.

Perhaps the most significant benefit of Flash storage however, is productivity. Apart from the significantly reduced amount of systems administration time required to dedicate to getting the arrays to actually perform, if employees are accessing data at a much faster speed, they will naturally increase their productivity. This all impacts on reducing frustration with IT – and we all know how that feels – and increasing motivation and employee satisfaction with the resources they use.

So why haven’t more organisations made the switch? Again, as businesses we are conditioned to look at cost per byte when it comes to storage. Whilst this works for spinning disk, this is not the most effective way of evaluating the capital expenditure for Flash. Organisations should look at cost per input/output per second (IOPS), which measures how much data can be written and read from the storage medium in one second. For today’s performance-hungry applications and platforms, this is a much better indication into the true return on the storage array. Flash not only offers a significantly reduced cost per IOPS, it brings a much better total cost of ownership and return on the initial investment than spinning disk.

Storage needn’t make an IT decision-maker’s head spin any longer – the premise is simple. Carry on with spinning disk and a modern organisation will find itself in a difficult (or possibly calamitous) situation. The fact is, we will never beat the laws of physics. What goes up, must come down.

Join Whiptail at IP EXPO 2012, where the company’s EMEA systems engineer Mike Beevor will present in our Flash Storage Lab on Wednesday 17 October, on ‘The Realities of a Silicon Storage Array in Your Environment: Concepts, Technologies and Practicalities.’