IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - (Page 7) media and heat-assisted magnetic recording. These magnetic recording advances promise to extend areal, or surface, densities, and keep HDDs on their declining price curve. Continued development in these technologies indicate ongoing areal-density compound-growth rates from 30 percent to 50 percent, according to Barrera, further pushing down HDD per GB price points. As he explains, “The cost of the drive itself doesn’t go down, but the cost of storage in dollars per gigabyte does.” This allows enterprises to economically deploy many HDDs to increase data-query response times for large data files. When it comes to smaller data files, however, that notion is upended. For example, to find a single record in an HDD environment, many actions must take place, including engaging the appropriate drive, running a seek on that drive, that 30,000-operations-per-second requirement. That’s a lot of wasted space and energy, and an increased data-center footprint,” Barrera says. Smart Technologies For these reasons, many organizations are considering adding SSDs to their storage mix. They’ve been around for quite a while, but the cost has been prohibitive for most organizations. This is in part because they were originally built using volatile DRAM memory and used battery backups, making them, as Barrera notes, “up to a thousand times more costly than highperformance disk drives with equivalent storage capacity.” Simple f lash memory is much cheaper than former SSD configurations, currently less than 10 percent of DRAM. It isn’t fast enough for typical write applications and has a short “When you deploy these types of smart technologies, you can improve the life for the entire DRAM/flash drive to three to five years.” —Clod Barrera, chief technical strategist, IBM System Storage moving the disk arm to the correct position and then waiting for the requested record to spin under the arm. Although today’s advanced HDDs can process around 150 operations per second, according to Barrera, that isn’t fast enough in high-transaction, small data-size environments, such as ATM banking or radio-frequency identification (RFID)dependent operations. “When something is scanned using RFID,” Barrera says, “we’re only talking about a few bytes of data, but because there are so many transactions taking place in quick succession or simultaneously, we’re now talking about many, many operations per second–more than HDDs can handle in an efficient or cost-effective manner.” One way to tackle this issue is to deploy more, cheaper HDDs. In this case, enterprises might deploy HDDs with operations per second in mind rather than storage capacity. For example, if a company is provisioning 5 TB of capacity, it would put five 1 TB disks in a RAID configuration, with an extra one as a spare. But if the company wants to process 30,000 operations per second against that five-disk RAID, keeping in mind the 150 operations a second HDDs are capable of, it wouldn’t come even close to meeting the 30,000-operations-per-second goal. “So what do I do? First of all, I use smaller drives, not terabyte drives. Maybe a lot of 150 gigabyte drives. So to get to 30,000 operations per second, I would need 200 disk drives running at 150 operations per second each. That’s 30 terabytes of capacity, when I only wanted five terabytes. I’m only using one sixth of what I have available just to meet lifespan, limited to the number of writes it can sustain. Reads to flash memory don’t shorten its life, but the writes do; flash cells must be reprogrammed using a “zap” of voltage each time they’re written to. This operation damages cells; after a few hundred thousand operations, the cells will essentially die, no longer being able to accept writes. Over time, all of the cells on a flash module will become non-functional. To address these issues, storage engineers are tinkering with hybrid flash/DRAM and smart software-based storage configurations to reduce and possibly eliminate writes. One of these methods is called “write elimination,” which involves using DRAM as a front-end cache to which writes are directed. In this scenario, only the last write would be applied to an SSD cell, with proceeding writes being overwritten on DRAM instead of the SSD, thereby avoiding multiple cell zaps. Another method involves over provisioning back-end flash. In this case, it appears as if there may be 300 GB of flash when in fact there are 500 or 600 GB of flash. As cells die off, the written data is moved to healthy cells, beyond the 300 GB of flash that were originally provisioned. This essentially extends the life of the entire flash module. A third way to address dead and dying f lash cells is by employing wear leveling. If one cell is being written to more than other cells, the data on that overused cell can be moved AP RIL/MA Y 2 009 i bms ystemsmag . com /aix 7 http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/aix Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems — AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 Editor's Desk: High-Flying Security Focus of Storage: Solid-State Disks Will Become Integral to Many Enterprise Storage Infrastructures Case Study: ProHealth Care Improves Backup and Recovery Processes by Deploying a Near Real-time Mirroring Solution. Cover Story: High-availability Offerings for Power Systems Running AIX Help Guarantee a Resilient Infrastructure. Feature: Dynamic Infrastructure Helps Companies Reduce Costs, Manage Risks and Improve Services. Administrator: A Systems-Management Approach to Symmetric and Asymmetric Keys Product News Advertiser Index Power Systems Perspective: Growing Solutions to Reduce Risk IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems — AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 (Page Cover1) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems — AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 (Page Cover2) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems — AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 (Page 1) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems — AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 (Page 2) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems — AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 (Page 3) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems — AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 (Page 4) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Editor's Desk: High-Flying Security (Page 5) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Focus of Storage: Solid-State Disks Will Become Integral to Many Enterprise Storage Infrastructures (Page 6) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Focus of Storage: Solid-State Disks Will Become Integral to Many Enterprise Storage Infrastructures (Page 7) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Focus of Storage: Solid-State Disks Will Become Integral to Many Enterprise Storage Infrastructures (Page 8) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Focus of Storage: Solid-State Disks Will Become Integral to Many Enterprise Storage Infrastructures (Page 9) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Case Study: ProHealth Care Improves Backup and Recovery Processes by Deploying a Near Real-time Mirroring Solution. (Page 10) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Case Study: ProHealth Care Improves Backup and Recovery Processes by Deploying a Near Real-time Mirroring Solution. (Page 11) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Case Study: ProHealth Care Improves Backup and Recovery Processes by Deploying a Near Real-time Mirroring Solution. (Page 12) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Case Study: ProHealth Care Improves Backup and Recovery Processes by Deploying a Near Real-time Mirroring Solution. (Page 13) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Cover Story: High-availability Offerings for Power Systems Running AIX Help Guarantee a Resilient Infrastructure. (Page 14) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Cover Story: High-availability Offerings for Power Systems Running AIX Help Guarantee a Resilient Infrastructure. (Page 15) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Cover Story: High-availability Offerings for Power Systems Running AIX Help Guarantee a Resilient Infrastructure. (Page 16) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Cover Story: High-availability Offerings for Power Systems Running AIX Help Guarantee a Resilient Infrastructure. (Page 17) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Cover Story: High-availability Offerings for Power Systems Running AIX Help Guarantee a Resilient Infrastructure. (Page 18) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Cover Story: High-availability Offerings for Power Systems Running AIX Help Guarantee a Resilient Infrastructure. (Page 19) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Feature: Dynamic Infrastructure Helps Companies Reduce Costs, Manage Risks and Improve Services. (Page 20) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Feature: Dynamic Infrastructure Helps Companies Reduce Costs, Manage Risks and Improve Services. (Page 21) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Feature: Dynamic Infrastructure Helps Companies Reduce Costs, Manage Risks and Improve Services. (Page 22) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Feature: Dynamic Infrastructure Helps Companies Reduce Costs, Manage Risks and Improve Services. (Page 23) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Feature: Dynamic Infrastructure Helps Companies Reduce Costs, Manage Risks and Improve Services. (Page 24) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Feature: Dynamic Infrastructure Helps Companies Reduce Costs, Manage Risks and Improve Services. (Page 25) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Administrator: A Systems-Management Approach to Symmetric and Asymmetric Keys (Page 26) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Administrator: A Systems-Management Approach to Symmetric and Asymmetric Keys (Page 27) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Administrator: A Systems-Management Approach to Symmetric and Asymmetric Keys (Page 28) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Administrator: A Systems-Management Approach to Symmetric and Asymmetric Keys (Page 29) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Product News (Page 30) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Advertiser Index (Page 31) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Power Systems Perspective: Growing Solutions to Reduce Risk (Page 32) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Power Systems Perspective: Growing Solutions to Reduce Risk (Page Cover3) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Power Systems Perspective: Growing Solutions to Reduce Risk (Page Cover4) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Power Systems Perspective: Growing Solutions to Reduce Risk (Page RF1) IBM Systems Magazine, Power Systems - AIX digital edition - April/May 2009 - Power Systems Perspective: Growing Solutions to Reduce Risk (Page RF2) http://www.nxtbookMEDIA.com
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