Enterprises that need to maximize performance from their colocated servers have begun implementing solid state drives to increase overall performance.
When your servers use SSDs, your applications will likely see an increase in performance as SSDs can handle more disk I/O operations (sometimes referred to as IOPS) than traditional servers hard drives.
As a result, network administrators have begun building out their storage arrays using SSDs as a way to shorten system boot up times and reduce system bottlenecks.
One larger question remains to be answered: Are SSD’s ready for the data center?
Are SSD’s ready for the data center?If SSDs are indeed ready for primetime, what strategies must administrators utilize in order to protect against SSD failure? Should your business begin using SSD hard drives in its next roll out? Let’s examine some of the latest research and opinions available on SSDs being used within the data center.
The Controversy Over SSDs in Enterprise Hardware
The viability of solid state drives overtaking mechanical hard drives is a highly contested topic among enterprise storage enthusiasts. In fact, tech pundits at Network Computing and Computer World have blogged two totally different perspectives on the future of solid state drives.
With talented IT people having polar opposite opinions in regards to solid state drives, it’s difficult to predict the future of SSDs being used within enterprise technology. There are a few things we do know for certain:
- Hard drive manufacturers are heavily investing in solid state technology. In fact, Seagate just released a 60TB solid state drive built for servers.
- Despite concerns raised by SSD critics, both consumers and enterprises seem enthusiastic about SSDs. AnandTech says that total shipments of SSDs went up 32.7% year over year since 2015.
- SSDs may have a higher total cost of ownership when compared to traditional server hard drives. Google’s experience with SSDs suggests that over 1 in 5 SSDs will develop uncorrectable errors over a four year period.
Should You Use SSDs in your Enterprise Workloads?
Given the fact that some of the world’s biggest online companies have used SSDs in their public facing servers for years; most notably, Facebook and Google, it’s safe to use SSDs in much of your network hardware.
As a general rule, you’d want to take all of the same redundancy measures that you would with a traditional storage system, such as using a RAID array to compensate for multiple disk failures.
Constantly assess the health of your SSDs using various open source apps that collect SSD drive diagnostics. Regularly review these logs and consider replacing drives that are throwing an unnecessary amount of errors.
One popular app for SSD health is called SSDlife, which is available as a free download.
Backup Early and Often; Expect to Pay More
Don’t forget to schedule regular backups on your SSD media. Since backup disks are not frequently used, many enterprises elect to use slower HDD technology to store long term backups.
You may also elect to upload this data onto a colocated backup server or put the data on tape and send it to a safe repository. Keeping your SSD data backed up should be your top priority when electing to use this technology for critical data storage.
Follow all of the best practices of backing up your data on different mediums in different places.
Although prices for SSD technology seem to be rapidly falling, solid state drives are still relatively early in the game terms of overall implementation and development. Consequently, hard drive manufacturers are investing heavily in research and development of the next generation of solid state drives.
Take a Realistic Approach to Using SSDs in Servers
Your organization may use SSD drives in its storage arrays but it can’t turn a blind eye to the relatively high probability that you will encounter some sort of SSD disk failure.
In fact, your IT team must prepare for an SSD disk failure and factor it in as a cost of doing business. If you happen to purchase SSDs that do not fail, you’ll need to look at it as a cost savings but still have replacement disks available while taking regular backups.
In order to get the most of your investment in SSD, your organization must look at the SSD failures as a trade off for the boost in performance that your business gets by investing in this up and coming server storage technology.
