Solid State Disks The Future of Storage Disk

Solid State Disks: The Future of Storage? Disk. Con September 2004

Agenda • • • About Texas Memory Systems The problem with latency Solution: disk + memory Economics of solid state disks The future of solid state disks World’s Fastest Storage®

About Texas Memory Systems: The basics Basic Information Products Founded in 1978 Private No venture capital or debt Services DSP 50 employees Industry leader in Solid State Disks World’s Fastest Storage® SSD

The Latency Problem: Moore’s Law Processor improvements follow Moore’s Law: Doubling Every 18 Months World’s Fastest Storage®

The Latency Problem: Gilder’s Law Aggregate bandwidth is following Gilder’s Law: Tripling Every Year World’s Fastest Storage®

The Latency Problem: Murphy’s Law Hard Disk access times are Increasing less than 10% every year World’s Fastest Storage®

The Latency Problem: The Performance Gap Latency “Money can buy bandwidth, but latency is forever” John R. Mashey, Chief Scientist SGI, “Big Data and the Next Wave of Infra. Stress”, USENIX, 1999 World’s Fastest Storage®

The Latency Problem: What customers say … Our Oracle app needs a We need speedy boost queries We need to speed up our I need faster database transaction log performance Looking for a very fast hard I am looking for drive a fast My database is I/O solution I/O bound! World’s Fastest Storage®

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 World’s Fastest Storage®

Solutions: Cache the disk drive • Performance of disk drives is improving with cache. • Peak IOPS as high as 370 (random reads) • Performance increasing as cache increases. 2 a 2 I 3 • Cache-to-disk ratios are extremely low ranging from 1/4000 to 1/9000. World’s Fastest Storage®

Solutions: Cache the Departmental RAID • Performance of departmental RAID systems increases with cache. • Departmental RAID units offer cache from 1 GB to 2 GB and result in peak performance as high as 2, 500 random I/O’s per second. 2 a 2 I 3 • Cache-to-disk ratios are low ranging from 1/300 to 1/2000. World’s Fastest Storage®

Solutions: Cache the Monolithic RAID • Performance of monolithic RAID systems increases with cache. • Monolithic RAID units offer cache from 16 GB to 256 GB and result in peak random IOPS as high as 200, 000 random I/O’s per second (from cache). 2 a 2 I 3 • Cache-to-disk ratios can vary from good (1/16) to bad (1/79). World’s Fastest Storage®

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. World’s Fastest Storage®

Solutions: Solid State Disk • Solid state disk systems store all data in memory, taking full advantage of memory performance. Single units with capacities as high as • 64 GB. Installations as big as 2. 5 TB. Performance per unit over 300, 000 random IOPS. 2 a 2 I 3 • Cache-to-disk ratio is 1/1. Solid state disks are used to accelerate the most frequently accessed data. World’s Fastest Storage®

Solutions: What is a solid state disk? • • • 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 World’s Fastest Storage® 2 a 3 2 I

Solid State Disk Benefits: IOMeter Results – Eight Server Test IOMeter Results - 100% Random Read 400000 1600 339, 756 1, 474 I/Os per second 300000 1, 504 1, 546 1400 297, 741 1200 1, 163 250000 Bandwidth (Megabytes per second) 350000 1800 1000 200000 800 150000 664 600 100000 94, 363 400 50000 24, 068 6, 182 0 '2 k' '4 k' '16 K' Block Size World’s Fastest Storage® '64 K' '256 K' 0 15 Outstanding IO(s) (IOps ) 15 Outstanding IO(s) (BW )

Solid State Disk Benefits: Storage Performance Council Test Super. Micro Opteron Servers Super. Micro Xeon Servers SPC-1 IOPS™ Results SPC-1 IOPS: 112, 500 $/SPC-1 IOPS: $1. 50 World’s Fastest Storage® 8 Fibre Channel Links (1 per server)

Solid State Disks: The Future of Storage? • So why aren’t solid state disks going to replace the disk drive? World’s Fastest Storage®

Economics: Cost of Solid State Disks World’s Fastest Storage®

The Future of Solid State Storage • The solid state disk market will grow 2 x-5 x 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… World’s Fastest Storage®