Enterprise computing and storage applications have performance and availability requirements that are far beyond that of any other application. For some of these enterprise applications it's all about performance at any cost, for some maximum capacity is a must, and for others the most critical factor is measured performance, usually called cost per transaction.
In general, servers typically deal with many concurrent requests for data. These requests are typically for small files and because there can be thousands of requests per second; the data pattern is very random. Delivery of data from hard disk drives in a typical storage system is delayed as the hard disk drive (HDD) rotates the platters to position the data under the read/write heads.
Enterprise servers demand a lot from their storage media. While HDDs deliver a good value for raw capacity, their performance is almost always the I/O bottleneck. STEC's ZeusIOPS SSD will change the way you view enterprise computing and storage by dramatically reducing latency and increasing I/O per second
• Portable Computing
• Super Computing/HPC
• Video on Demand
• Banking/Financial Services Databases
• Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)
• Structural Analysis, Modeling and Simulation
• Microsoft Exchange Servers
• Metadata Logging
• High Performance Servers
• Data Warehousing/Data Mining
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• Demand for higher storage performance
• Tier storage based on access requirements of the data
• RIncrease server utilization of storage resources
• Simplify asset management
• Containment of rising infrastructure costs
• Complete more transactions in less time
• Relieve performance bottlenecks to gain application
and server efficiencies |
• Ideal for demanding multi-threaded applications
• Reduces access times to data
• Improve performance by storing frequently accessed files
on ZeusIOPS
• Increased server utilization up to 75%
• Drop-in replacement, managed just like any HDD
• Outstanding access times means existing servers are
no longer starved for data
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Video on Demand (VoD) systems vary widely in their ability to handle hundreds to thousands of concurrent content requests. As with many other server applications, there are periods of time that are more demanding than others. And like most storage performance issue, scalability is an expensive proposition most systems is that they don't scale very well. To add more subscribers or users to the system, more servers are required to handle the load.
VoD systems utilize hard disk drive technology. Disk drives are good at streaming data sequentially but are less than ideal for random applications. At first glance, VoD seems to be a sequential application: you start a movie and watch it from beginning to end. But VoD systems now offer the ability to pause, rewind and fast-forward the media. Multiply these actions times hundreds or thousands of users watching hundreds or thousands of different content files and you can see that this application is much more random in nature.
ZeusIOPS SSD is a great addition to a VoD system. By placing only the most popular and thus, the most frequently accessed media content onto ZeusIOPS SSD drives and using hard disk drives to store the remaining content, fewer servers, disk drives, and copies of content are needed to scale the system upward to handle increasing concurrent subscribership.
Relational databases for trading, banking, purchasing and other online transactions serve data to many distributed users. In these applications where time and availability is everything, disk drive access times keep processors and applications waiting for data. Particular time periods, when request activity may peak, only exacerbates the problem further frustrating customers as they wait for their data.
Decreasing access times to indices, frequently accessed tables and redo logs of the database makes a huge difference in database performance. Moving these critically important files to a ZeusIOPS SSD will eliminate the I/O bottleneck. Moving the entire database to a ZeusIOPS SSD is a great idea when high-performance quality of service is important. Best of all, adding a ZeusIOPS SSD means extra servers and their purchasing and maintenance costs and licensing fees are not incurred. ZeusIOPS SSD provides an immediate performance boost across the board and lowers your total cost of ownership.
Often, storage systems are architected to deliver pure performance. To do this, system designers will aggregate (RAID) hundred, sometimes thousands of disk drives to raise the performance of the system to the required levels. Many times, the capacity yielded by these systems is not needed or the value or accessibility of the data on this extra capacity does not warrant the cost.
Below is a comparison of two storage systems each designed to deliver 100,000 IOPS or transactions per second. One system is configured with STEC ZeusIOPS SSD's and the other configured using 36GB, 15,000 RPM enterprise-class disk drives.
Just looking at the number of drives needed to sustain 100,000 IOPS, you can quickly get a sense that at 300 IOPS per HDD, it is going to take a lot of drives to get the job done compared to just two ZeusIOPS SSD. Aggregating the performance of 334 HDDs means you will need 24 JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) disk enclosures each with their own heat generating 500 watt power supplies. Once you have all of this storage assembled, you will need to aggregate these with Fibre Channel switches and some layer with one or more RAID controllers. Add a couple of data center racks to house everything in and you can see the upfront hardware costs of the HDD system is about 6 times the cost of the ZeusIOPS SSD system.
Now let's look at the recurring costs. All those HDDs and related hardware will generate lots of heat. And in a data center, the air conditioning works very hard to replace that heat with cool air since heat is not conducive for good electrical component health. Recurring cost comparing the two systems shows that the enterprise HDD system will cost about 24 times that of the ZeusIOPS system on an annual basis.
ZeusIOPS SSD means less servers and storage are needed to scale performance. It also means less server acquisition and maintenance costs, less volatile power and cooling cost, and fewer software licenses to buy.
