Have you considered adding solid state drives and/or flash storage to your workstations and into your data center? If you haven’t already adopted flash and SSDs in place of some of your hard drives (spinning disks), you may be missing out on a ton of benefits. You can lower your total cost of ownership (TCO), replace multiple hard drives with fewer SSDs, and enjoy some space and resource savings by reducing your footprint in the data center. The performance gains, particularly with an NVMe™ SSD connected to the server’s PCIe bus, are really evident in application performance.
If you consider your organization or your job to be data intensive, there are many advantages to using solid state drives. There have been significant advances in solid state drive technology over the last few years, and the price per GB gap between SSD and HDD has come down. With advances in 3D NAND technology and the NVMe™ protocol, newer solid state drives can offer better CPU utilization and really maximize your IT budget.
It is definitely a delicate balance when planning for your storage needs and management. Capacity and cost are major factors for most organizations in deciding what type of solution to use and how to implement it. Solid state drives can handle heavy workloads and their IOPS (I/O operations per second) are astounding when compared with legacy hard disk drives (HDD). In addition to the performance and speed increases, the benefits of solid state drives also include lower power consumption, less heat produced, and faster boot up times. No vibration or sound are benefits as well, since there are no moving parts in an SSD.
The performance of an SSD is the factor that really stands out. A ballpark example of the max sequential read and write speeds will show us that traditional hard drives are around 200 MB/s, SATA SSDs are around 500 MB/s read and 475 MB/s write, and NVMe™ SSDs are a fantastic 2,600 MB/s read and 1,000 MB/s write.
Whenever you are working with data (transacting, querying, modeling, writing, and re-writing), think about how much better these operations would be if they took just seconds instead of minutes. Although it applies in several fields, I believe that research institutions, engineers, scientists, teachers, audio/visual professionals, artists, designers, healthcare professionals, and many others have gained productivity and saved time with SSDs. If time and resources can be easily saved, wouldn’t you want to leverage this technology every day? As your data grows, and the more complex your usage of that data becomes, you may find yourself in need of better and quicker access to some of your data. Solid state drives may enable you to do more and do it more quickly.
The bottom line is that the benefits will add up to cost savings when you replace several HDDs with just a few SSDs, and you get fast and reliable storage with better service levels within your organization. SSDs can help you save precious time, deliver better results, and reduce lag time and down time.
You do need to be careful, however, to select the right solution and drives for your usage, and that is where we come in. As you re-evaluate your application and business system requirements, we can help you navigate the options. Our friendly Account Managers and engineers are ready to assist you. Let us be your trusted advisor to bring your storage and storage management to the next level!
Matt Grolljahn
Matt Grolljahn is a Senior Product Manager at Connection with more than 23 years of experience in computing storage technology, specializing in DRAM memory and NAND flash products. He also holds a VMware VSP accreditation. In his free time, Matt enjoys skiing, attending his children’s sporting events, and fostering and rescuing dogs.
