IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - (Page 6) Focus on Storage Understanding the benefits of System Storage technology A Solid Future Solid -state d isks w ill b ecome integral t o m any e nterprise s torage infrastruc tures BY JIM UTSLER T hanks to its use in popular devices such as cell phones, MP3 players and laptop computers, flash memory is quickly becoming a common consumer-storage medium. Many people use small, dedicated flash drives to carry files. Little wonder, then, why companies are curious how flash memory, in one form or another, can fit into their IT infrastructures and benefit their larger, overall business goals. The easy answer might be that f lash memory is faster than hard-drive disks (HDDs) and processes more transactions with higher I/O throughput. Nothing is ever that simple. Af ter all, H DDs have been at the center of enterprise storage for 50 or so years, and they’re not going away in the foreseeable future. This is in part because of the relative per GB costs of HDDs versus those of flash-based solid-state disks (SSDs). Although the gap is closing, SSDs still cost more than comparatively sized HDDs. Recent advances in storage technology are making SSDs a viable complement to HDD-based storage conf igurations. This is especially tr ue in hightransaction, small-data environments, where time from query to response has to be faster than that allowed by spinning hard disks. As a result, any higher upfront costs associated with SSDs can be justified by the technology’s unique characteristics, beyond those typically associated with HDDs. A Few Bytes of Data Most enterprises continue to rely on HDD as their primar y storage medium. After all, it’s a proven technology that, according to Clod Barrera, chief technical strategist of IBM System Storage*, has been in use for around 50 years. And in many cases, it’s a perfectly suitable way for organizations to save, store and access data. “HDDs are good for applications like streaming video, because you can spread the data across multiple drives. When you have a large file, you put some of it on drive one, some on drive two, some on drive three, drive four, et cetera,” Barrera notes. “For example, the world’s largest supercomputers, which have very high throughput requirements, actually work with the cheapest, slowest disks you can find. They stripe the data across many disks, and in combination, when aggregated together, the performance is very good.” This is fortunate since the need for more storage capacity is only increasing. For example, there’s a growing need to capture data from and serve data to Web clients, including Web 2.0 applications that suppor t social-net work ing sites. Similarly, the banking industry is seeing an increase in online banking and ATM transactions. Other contributors include an increase in data-object sizes, particularly related to i mage a nd v ideo applicat ion s; regulatory requirements to retain and maintain data for extended per iods of time; and the replication of data for disasterrecovery and business-resiliency purposes. Over the years, HDD manufacturers have been keeping the costs of drives relatively constant while increasing their capacity, using technologies such as Tunnel Magnetoresistive-read heads, bit-patterned 6 AP RIL/MA Y 2 009 i bms ystemsmag . com /aix http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/aix
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