The most common questions we are asked at Storage Switzerland all relate to the use of solid state disk (SSD). Most IT Professionals will agree that SSDs are the new high performance alternative, but they also know that this high performance comes at a premium price. As a result they want to know that when they add SSD to their environment the performance gain will be worth the money spent.
The problem is that ascertaining the “SSD Worthiness” of an environment can be highly dependent on the specific workloads in it. Also the typical tools used to make these assessments, operating system utilities are inadequate for today’s rapidly changing, shared everything data centers.
Earlier this week we embarked on a series of articles whose purpose is to answer these questions with our article “How Do I Know My Virtual Environment is Ready for SSD?”. In the coming weeks we will be publishing articles that discuss knowing if your database environment is ready for SSD and another article on how to better manage file data.
The key takeaway from each of these articles is that operating system tools can’t cut it anymore. There are too many servers (virtual and physical) all accessing the same storage at the same time. Also these tools require a manual kick-off and manual data capture.
What is needed instead are tools that can monitor the I/O utilization of workloads continuously and record that utilization much like a DVR records TV. Then when performance degradation occurs the I/O and other resource utilization metrics can be “re-played”. This allows the IT Professional to see what caused the performance problem. In many cases it will indeed be storage, armed with this data, and these articles, the performance problem can be diagnosed and the appropriate type and amount of SSD can be applied.
If you have virtual performance problems, go ahead and read our first article in this series now, if you are experiencing database problems our article on knowing if your database environment will benefit from SSD will be posted soon. Then the final article in this series “Getting Rid Of Old Data” will show you how to better manage file data and potentially archive that data to a high capacity disk system or even tape to reduce the cost of online data storage. Moving this older data to a less expensive disk tier may free up data center budget to further help cost justify the the flash investments being made in Virtual or Database environments.
SolarWinds is a client of Storage Switzerland
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George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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