Fewer areas of storage have experienced as much hype as solid state drives (SSD), says Derek Rule, Xiotech's Country Manager. “By cost-effectively eliminating the storage performance or capacity trade-off, it is possible for businesses to purchase only the capacity they need, while benefiting from all of the advantages of shared, fault-tolerant enterprise-class storage.”
SSDs are traditionally considered to be expensive, with lacklustre capacity that locks business-critical data inside a server. “As a result, Hybrid ISE Storage Blades have been designed, using the best of both worlds, by fusing both hard drives for capacity and SSDs for performance into a single hybrid pool of storage that negates the trade-offs of both storage solutions,” says Rule.
Hybrid ISE Storage Blades ensure that multiple workloads, including virtualised environments, can run on a single storage system, explains Rule. “Continuous adaptive data placement ensures that the right data is in the right place at the right time for optimal performance. SSDs promise dramatic performance gains for I/O-intensive applications, particularly in virtualised environments, and when that is combined with the reliability of a traditional hard drive, you have a winning combination.
“There are, however, various aspects to consider when planning to invest in a pure SSD storage solution. Cost is the most prevalent concern, and the lack of proven technology and questions around capacity should also be considered,” says Rule.
Ask yourself the following questions before rushing into a purchase:
* Is the SSD solution really providing shareable, highly-available, disaster tolerant storage, or is it merely a cache enhancement for servers?
* Is the SSD vendor willing to offer a five-year warranty on their solution?
* Does the SSD vendor offer an intelligent means of placing data on SSD and hard drives in order to optimise application performance?
* Does the SSD vendor have a track record of delivering enterprise-class solutions supporting mission-critical applications?
Xiotech's continuous adaptive data placement (CADP) patented technology effectively creates a fusion of hard drives and solid state drives that is presented as a single seamless pool of storage. “CADP starts working the minute that data is placed on the Hybrid ISE storage blade and continues to optimise data placement as the workload alters, continuously providing optimal performance. Combining this type of technology into a formula that utilises the best of both worlds, it makes the use of a pure SSD or hard drive obsolete.”
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