Last Update: Apr 13, 2009 | 07:24
Viewed 564 times | Community Rating: 5
Originating Author: David Floyer
In January a year ago, EMC surprised the IT world with the introduction
of Flash drives. In the Wikibon Peer Insight this Tuesday (2/24/2009)
we heard that EMC had introduced 200GB and 400GB flash drives, and
reduced the price of flash drives relative to disk drives. Other leading
vendors such as HDS, IBM HP and Sun have all introduced flash drives,
and most if not all storage vendors have plans to introduce them in 2009.
Flash drives have two major benefits for reducing storage and IT energy budgets.
1. The ability to perform hundreds of times more I/O that traditional
disks and replace large numbers of disks that are I/O constrained. This
allows the remaining data that is I/O light to be spread across fewer
high capacity lower speed SATA hard drives. The impact is fewer actuators,
fewer drives and more efficient storage controllers., leading to lower
storage and energy costs.
2. The ability to increase system throughput by reducing I/O response times.
Flash can have a profound effect for workloads which are elapsed time sensitive.
One EMC customer was able to avoid purchasing 1,000 system Z mainframe MIPS and
software by reducing batch I/O times with flash drives. Others have placed
critical database tables on flash volumes and significantly improved throughput.
By eliminating a large proportion of “Wait for I/O” time, Wikibon estimates that
between 2% and 7% of processor power and energy consumption can be saved.
....
source wikibon.org
