In a bid to maximize the speed advantage of solid-state storage, more vendors are promoting approaches that move it closer to the CPUs that process stored data.
STEC and OCZ Technology Group both introduced flash storage components for PCI-Express (PCIe) this week, with STEC moving into this market for the first time. It is making a splash with both its own line of hardware modules and a software platform that can work with solid-state components from other vendors.
Rather than a simple replacement for spinning disks in centralized storage arrays, solid state increasingly is being looked at as a component within servers to store heavily used data or act as a cache. Fusion-io led the way with this approach, and STEC, one of the biggest suppliers of flash to system vendors making traditional SSDs, is now joining in.
Solid-state storage adds some upfront costs, and building it into servers can add others, but there may be eventual savings for some enterprises, according to Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Mark Peters. The payoff can come in reducing delays.
“We’ve been so brainwashed in the business that the way you measure storage is cost per gigabyte,” Peters said. “No one’s storing anything for the sake of storing it. You’re storing it because you may use it.” A storage architecture that gets the data to the server more quickly, such as a PCIe card in the server, can justify the added expense.
STEC’s EnhanceIO software, which is also sampling to early access customers, is likely to have a bigger impact than the PCIe cards because it will work with hardware from many vendors, Peters said.
Interest in server-based SSDs is growing, but it ultimately may not be the best strategy for enterprises with large, virtualized data centers, he said.
“You lose shareability, because it’s now fixed to that server,” Peters said. Centralized SSDs offer more management flexibility and don’t have to be included consistently across all the servers in a data center to realize their benefits. For smaller organizations with fewer servers, server-based SSD caching may work well, he said.