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.

Zeus^IOPS is a great addition to a VoD system. By placing only the most popular and thus, the most frequently accessed media content onto Zeus^IOPS 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 Zeus^IOPS solid state drive will eliminate the I/O bottleneck. Moving the entire database to a Zeus^IOPS is a great idea when high-performance quality of service is important. Best of all, adding a Zeus^IOPS means extra servers and their purchasing and maintenance costs and licensing fees are not incurred. Zeus^IOPS 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 Zeus^IOPS SSDs 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 Zeus^IOPS SSDs. 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 up front hardware costs of the HDD system is about 6 times the cost of the Zeus^IOPS 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 Zeus^IOPS system on an annual basis.

Zeus^IOPS 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.