DiskCon September 2004

Solid State Disks: The Future of Storage?

World’s 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

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ProductsProducts

About Texas Memory Systems:The basics

DSP Services

SSD

Basic InformationBasic Information

Founded in 1978

Private

No venture capital or debt

50 employees

Industry leader in Solid State Disks

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Processor improvements follow Moore’s Law:

Doubling Every 18 Months

The Latency Problem: Moore’s Law

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Aggregate bandwidth is following Gilder’s Law:

Tripling Every Year

The Latency Problem:Gilder’s Law

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Hard Disk access times are

Increasing less than 10% every year

The Latency Problem:Murphy’s Law

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“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

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The Latency Problem:What customers say …

Our Oracle appneeds a

boost

I need fastertransaction logperformance

My database isI/O bound!

We need tospeed up our

database

Looking for avery fast hard

drive

We need speedyqueries

I am looking for a fast

I/O solution

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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

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Solutions:Cache the disk drive

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• 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.

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Solutions:Cache the Departmental RAID

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• 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/O’s per second.

• Cache-to-disk ratios are low ranging from 1/300 to 1/2000.

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Solutions:Cache the Monolithic RAID

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• 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/O’s per second (from cache).

•Cache-to-disk ratios can vary from good (1/16) to bad (1/79).

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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.

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Solutions:Solid State Disk

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• 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.

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Solutions:What is a solid state disk?

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• 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

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Solid State Disk Benefits: IOMeter Results – Eight Server Test

IOMeter Results - 100% Random Read

339,756

94,363

6,182

24,068

297,741

664

1,5461,5041,474

1,163

0

50000

100000

150000

200000

250000

300000

350000

400000

'2k' '4k' '16K' '64K' '256K'

Block Size

I/Os

per

sec

on

d

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

1600

1800

Ban

dw

idth

(M

egab

ytes

per

sec

on

d)

15 Outstanding IO(s) (IOps )

15 Outstanding IO(s) (BW )

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SPC-1 IOPS™ ResultsSPC-1 IOPS: 112,500$/SPC-1 IOPS: $1.50

Solid State Disk Benefits: Storage Performance Council Test

SuperMicro OpteronServers

SuperMicro Xeon Servers

8 Fibre Channel Links(1 per server)

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Solid State Disks: The Future of Storage?

• So why aren’t solid state disks going to replace the disk drive?

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Cost/GB of Solid State Disks

$9,000

$6,000

$5,000

$3,000$2,500

$1,500

$5,000

$-

$1,000

$2,000

$3,000

$4,000

$5,000

$6,000

$7,000

$8,000

$9,000

$10,000

1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

Economics: Cost of Solid State Disks

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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…