How to choose a good storage product?

In addition to hardware and software solutions, system integrators also provide support and consulting services. The main question for enterprises and research institutions is what storage technology they should use.

The answer is always as complicated as the technology people talk about. There is no right or wrong answer when choosing a storage solution, but the choice of the enterprise will have an impact on its performance.

Fatal combination

Enterprises need some high-performance storage hardware, such as solid-state drives (SSD), hard drives (HDD) and tape. Here is a summary, because these technologies do have a lot of descriptions about them.

If an enterprise needs a lot of performance and less capacity, then the lowest cost method is to use an SSD hard drive, whose input / output operations per second (IOPS) cost is much lower than disk or tape. Of course, the capacity per megabyte is much more expensive, and things start to get a bit more complicated.

Data centers that use solid-state drives for storage will be very expensive. Similarly, using mechanical hard drives to achieve performance is not necessarily the most cost-effective method (although it can be done, which is mixed with customer performance and capacity) . Although storage depends entirely on the applications running on the system and the types of workloads that may be exposed to the storage system, it is usually recommended to mix SSD hard drives (for performance) and HDD hard drives for capacity.

For example, in HPC storage systems, people often use SSD hard drives to obtain metadata, but still use HDD hard drives to provide capacity. This is sometimes used in conjunction with the SSD layer for very small or recently used files. In addition, most storage area network (SAN) storage array users have technology that allows SSDs and HDDs to be automatically added to the same disk pool, moving "hot block" data to a faster (but more expensive) SSD layer. Useful for more traditional enterprise storage needs.

As the capacity of SSD hard drives becomes larger and larger, their cost effectiveness becomes higher and higher, and prices will fall further. You may see a decline in the adoption of mechanical hard drives. Now we have launched a 12TB SSD hard drive. In the past three years, the SSD hard drive capacity has doubled, but its access speed has not yet reached faster (basically halved the performance per TB per minute).

In most cases, people still use 6TB SSD hard drives to get the combination of capacity and performance customers demand, but in the near future, people see customers using SSD / flash cache devices in front of large hard drives to get the best results . As the size of SSD hard drives grows larger and their prices become cheaper, people can't help but ask, can they completely get rid of the disk hierarchy and run the flash + tape mode?

There are currently some very specific applications, and the use of flash memory and tape is by far the most cost-effective storage setup. According to the prediction of the research institute IDC, the price difference of flash memory will drop from the current 6.6 times to 2.2 times compared to disk drives, which may mean that the flash memory + tape combination is a feasible for traditional three-tier storage , A cost-effective alternative.

Of course, such a critical point has not yet been reached, and this solution is suitable for every enterprise, but the demand for these solutions is growing for enterprises and research institutions.

Many organizations have performance and capacity use cases for all of the above technologies. The challenge is to integrate all of these technologies together in a unified manner to avoid inefficiency due to low utilization of many different storage systems. There are many file systems, visualization technologies, and even devices that combine many of these technologies to help minimize the management and efficiency costs of using multiple technologies today.

Unfortunately, there is no universal answer for a perfect storage media combination, but as people see the price of SSD hard drives fall, the capacity of HDD hard drives rises, and the cost-effectiveness of tapes, people will continue to build high-performance storage solutions. development of.

If you want to know more, our website has product specifications for storage, you can go to ALLICDATA ELECTRONICS LIMITED