Creating Highly Dense, Solid Performing Storage Infrastructures

With the advent of platforms such as software-defined service (SDS), Web cloud, and high-performance computing (HPC), storage demands are becoming ever more dynamic and challenging. These storage environments not only require increased density and performance, but they also must be deployed inexpensively.

When storing petabytes of information, for example, reducing costs by pennies per gigabyte can lead to huge savings for cloud-service, online-application and managed-service providers; the ability to squeeze more data into smaller data center floor spaces allows them to be more competitive; as does improving performance of the storage devices themselves. Addressing any one of these challenges, however, will not address their problems–adequately striking a balance between all of them is the key. Organizations want to achieve the lowest cost and density, but not while incurring a performance penalty and adding latency. A hybrid approach, which blends storage technologies, can achieve this balancing act.

The use of shingled magnetic recording (SMR) HDDs and flash technologies with caching software is an approach that provides low-latency writes and write optimizations specifically tuned for high-capacity, low-cost storage SMR HDDs.

SMR technology provides a significant bump in capacity compared with traditional HDDs. It does so, however, within the same form factor and price, allowing organizations to extend HDD capacities further than they originally expected. SMR is also great for handling sequential data, but it doesn’t do so well with random I/O. To address this challenge, data centers can leverage cost-effective high-capacity SMR HDDs and combine them with flash technologies such as the Nytro flash accelerator cards to mitigate the shortcomings that these HDDs have with random I/O. Adopting this approach would, in effect, be akin to using flash as a “shock absorber” for SMR, removing the performance penalty by having flash with specialized caching software take on the random I/O.

I recently spoke with George Crump, lead analyst from Storage Switzerland, to discuss these markets and why hybrid storage is well-suited for them. Check out this video below to see how we are approaching various models to sequester flash to keep the penalties of SMR HDDs at bay while simultaneously meeting cost initiatives and performance goals.