FalconStor and Violin Memory Just Made It Easier to Cost Justify the Deployment of SSDs
No one disputes that solid state drives (SSDs) are poised to play a larger role in networked storage environments. But with the price per terabyte (TB) of SSDs still running a factor of 10-15x greater than high performance FC and SAS drives, the ROI for SSD has to be pretty clear for an organization to justify its deployment. Providing that justification for SSDs should now get a little easier thanks to a new solution announced today from FalconStor Software and Violin Memory.
A recent article on the Network Computing website observes that performance is the main reason why enterprises plan to adopt SSDs. Early adopters of SSD have seen application response times drop by 50 - 100% or more. This is primarily the result of IOPS (I/Os per second) increasing from less than 200 IOPS using FC or SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) to as much as 20,000 IOPS or more using SSDs.
But the main reason why organizations hold off on their deployment of SSDs is that these 100-fold increases in performance that SSDs can deliver come with about a 10-fold increase in cost. Further, those applications that can take advantage of SSDs performance generally do not need to keep all of their application data on SSD at the same time.
Keeping 1 - 5% of their most active data on SSD will deliver the majority of the benefits that these applications need at a fraction of the cost of storing all of the application data on SSD. The trick is finding a solution that will enable organizations to accomplish that objective. This is what the solution that the new alliance between FalconStor Software and Violin Memory provides.
The foundation for this alliance is built upon the FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) that can virtualize any external or internal tier of storage, including SSD. This virtualized storage capacity can then be presented to an application server.
One of FalconStor NSS's unique capabilities is its HotZone feature, which creates a "hot zone" from SSD disk it has virtualized. This "hot zone" is then used to pre-stage actively read data by copying active application data from disk to this "hot zone" on the NSS appliance. Since the data is only copied to the "hot zone", once the data is no longer needed by the application, the NSS deletes it from the "hot zone" to free its space for the active data for that application or others.
This high performance cache also serves another function - a write cache. Using FalconStor NSS's SafeCache feature in this capacity, organizations can expedite the performance of write-intensive applications by first staging write I/Os to the SSD cache and then de-staging them to disk over a period of time.
FalconStor NSS's SAN acceleration capability solved this initial problem of speeding up reads and writes for performance intensive applications while eliminating the need to put all of the application data on SSD. However, using SSD that was internal to FalconStor NSS results in some limitations including:
The FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator solution from FalconStor also makes it possible for organizations to do more than cost justify SSDs for a few applications. Organizations can now extend the benefits of SSD to far more applications than they could before, use more low cost storage to store inactive data and, in the process, markedly lower the overall cost of storage in their network infrastructure while increasing the performance of all of their applications that use this solution.
A recent article on the Network Computing website observes that performance is the main reason why enterprises plan to adopt SSDs. Early adopters of SSD have seen application response times drop by 50 - 100% or more. This is primarily the result of IOPS (I/Os per second) increasing from less than 200 IOPS using FC or SAS hard disk drives (HDDs) to as much as 20,000 IOPS or more using SSDs.
But the main reason why organizations hold off on their deployment of SSDs is that these 100-fold increases in performance that SSDs can deliver come with about a 10-fold increase in cost. Further, those applications that can take advantage of SSDs performance generally do not need to keep all of their application data on SSD at the same time.
Keeping 1 - 5% of their most active data on SSD will deliver the majority of the benefits that these applications need at a fraction of the cost of storing all of the application data on SSD. The trick is finding a solution that will enable organizations to accomplish that objective. This is what the solution that the new alliance between FalconStor Software and Violin Memory provides.
The foundation for this alliance is built upon the FalconStor Network Storage Server (NSS) that can virtualize any external or internal tier of storage, including SSD. This virtualized storage capacity can then be presented to an application server.
One of FalconStor NSS's unique capabilities is its HotZone feature, which creates a "hot zone" from SSD disk it has virtualized. This "hot zone" is then used to pre-stage actively read data by copying active application data from disk to this "hot zone" on the NSS appliance. Since the data is only copied to the "hot zone", once the data is no longer needed by the application, the NSS deletes it from the "hot zone" to free its space for the active data for that application or others.
This high performance cache also serves another function - a write cache. Using FalconStor NSS's SafeCache feature in this capacity, organizations can expedite the performance of write-intensive applications by first staging write I/Os to the SSD cache and then de-staging them to disk over a period of time.
FalconStor NSS's SAN acceleration capability solved this initial problem of speeding up reads and writes for performance intensive applications while eliminating the need to put all of the application data on SSD. However, using SSD that was internal to FalconStor NSS results in some limitations including:
- Service disruption. Placing SSDs inside a FalconStor NSS appliance is supported but this configuration requires organizations to take NSS offline if it is already in production.
- Scalability. FalconStor NSS only has a limited number of internal slots so it is difficult to add more SSDs to the NSS should application needs for SSDs increase.
- Performance and cost. Organizations could overcome this scalability issue by placing SSDs in traditional external storage systems, virtualize them using NSS and then use NSS to configure these SSDs as the "hot zone". However, using external SSDs increases their cost and slows performance since the "hot zone" I/O traffic has to cross a FC connection and access the SSD within the storage system.
- Hot-swap SSDs. SSDs within the Violin 1010 are hot-swappable so if an existing SSD fails, administrators can swap out the failed SSD with a new one without taking the NSS appliance offline.
- Economical, non-disruptive scaling. Organizations can start out with a Violin 1010 sized to meet their current needs but then non-disruptively scale it up to as much as 8 TBs.
- No performance degradation for the NSS "hot zone". By connecting the Violin 1010 to the NSS via a PCI-Express connection, there is almost no performance degradation for reads or writes. This gives the NSS access to a "hot zone" that performs almost as fast as memory.
The FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator solution from FalconStor also makes it possible for organizations to do more than cost justify SSDs for a few applications. Organizations can now extend the benefits of SSD to far more applications than they could before, use more low cost storage to store inactive data and, in the process, markedly lower the overall cost of storage in their network infrastructure while increasing the performance of all of their applications that use this solution.
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