DiskCon September 2004 Solid State Disks: The Future of Storage?

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Agenda About Texas Memory Systems The problem with latency Solution: disk + memory Economics of solid state disks The future of solid state disks

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Products About Texas Memory Systems: The basics DSP Services SSD Basic Information Founded in 1978 Private No venture capital or debt 50 employees Industry leader in Solid State Disks

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Processor improvements follow Moores Law: Doubling Every 18 Months The Latency Problem: Moores Law

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Aggregate bandwidth is following Gilders Law: Tripling Every Year The Latency Problem: Gilders Law

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Hard Disk access times are Increasing less than 10% every year The Latency Problem: Murphys Law

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Money can buy bandwidth, but latency is forever John R. Mashey, Chief Scientist SGI, Big Data and the Next Wave of InfraStress, USENIX, 1999 Latency The Latency Problem: The Performance Gap

Worlds Fastest Storage ® The Latency Problem: What customers say … Our Oracle app needs a boost I need faster transaction log performance My database is I/O bound! We need to speed up our database Looking for a very fast hard drive We need speedy queries I am looking for a fast I/O solution

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Solution: Memory + Disk Various ways memory is used to decrease the performance gap: Use solid state disks Add memory to the RAID Controller Add memory to the disk drive Add memory to the server

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Solutions: Cache the disk drive a2 I 3 2 Performance of disk drives is improving with cache. Peak IOPS as high as 370 (random reads) Performance increasing as cache increases. Cache-to-disk ratios are extremely low ranging from 1/4000 to 1/9000.

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Solutions: Cache the Departmental RAID a2 I 3 2 Performance of departmental RAID systems increases with cache. Departmental RAID units offer cache from 1GB to 2GB and result in peak performance as high as 2,500 random I/Os per second. Cache-to-disk ratios are low ranging from 1/300 to 1/2000.

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Solutions: Cache the Monolithic RAID a2 I 3 2 Performance of monolithic RAID systems increases with cache. Monolithic RAID units offer cache from 16GB to 256GB and result in peak random IOPS as high as 200,000 random I/Os per second (from cache). Cache-to-disk ratios can vary from good (1/16) to bad (1/79).

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Solutions: Flexible External RAID Cache Performance and flexibility increase with the use of external RAID cache. External RAID cache can support from 1 LUN to many RAID units. Performance as high as 250,000 random IOPS (from cache). Cache-to-disk ratios vary from good to bad. Cache to disk ratio can scale to meet application performance requirements.

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Solutions: Solid State Disk a2 I 3 2 Solid state disk systems store all data in memory, taking full advantage of memory performance. Single units with capacities as high as 64GB. Installations as big as 2.5TB. Performance per unit over 300,000 random IOPS. Cache-to-disk ratio is 1/1. Solid state disks are used to accelerate the most frequently accessed data.

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Solutions: What is a solid state disk? a2 I 3 2 Store data in memory (DDR RAM, Flash) Non-volatile (disks + battery or inherently) Looks like a disk drive to the operating system Returns data in under.05 milliseconds Capable of huge bandwidth and IOPS with random and sequential data streams

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Solid State Disk Benefits: IOMeter Results – Eight Server Test IOMeter Results - 100% Random Read 339,756 94,363 6,182 24, , ,546 1,504 1,474 1, '2k''4k''16K''64K''256K' Block Size I/Os per second Bandwidth (Megabytes per second) 15 Outstanding IO(s) (IOps ) 15 Outstanding IO(s) (BW )

Worlds Fastest Storage ® SPC-1 IOPS Results SPC-1 IOPS: 112,500 $/SPC-1 IOPS: $1.50 Solid State Disk Benefits: Storage Performance Council Test SuperMicro Opteron Servers SuperMicro Xeon Servers 8 Fibre Channel Links (1 per server)

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Solid State Disks: The Future of Storage? So why arent solid state disks going to replace the disk drive?

Worlds Fastest Storage ® Economics: Cost of Solid State Disks

Worlds Fastest Storage ® The Future of Solid State Storage The solid state disk market will grow 2x-5x each year the economy is growing. The solid state disk market will double with each 20% drop in memory prices. New memory technologies take immense R&D investments to challenge incumbent media. …though we are rooting for MRAM…