Green Flash the next big thing? by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Sep 1 2010)

1. 

   Silicon wonks are talking about flash memory being the next big thing to save energy in a high-volume data storage environment.

    In a recent blog post, consultant Pallab Chatterjee talks about a recent discussion at the Flash Memory Summit focused on how to build a sustainable “non-commodity” market for flash memory.  Solid state drives (SSDs) are the “replacement of choice” for high-performance disk drives.  SSDs average 75 percent less power per terabyte than hard drives – less power, means less HVAC, so life is good all around.

   The Flash (Memory) crowd is pitching the idea of “sustainable storage” with a balance of power, staffing and architecture for storage.  SSDs have data throughput equal or larger than a high-performance disk drive, but in a smaller footprint – again, smaller footprint, no fans, less power, less cooling, life is good. You can pack up to one million IOPS into a single 2U footprint where it takes 208U of space using disk drives, says Chatterjee.

   Nimbus Data, one manufacturer showing off their latest-and-greatest storage solution at the conference, clams a dual benefit of up to 24 times greater storage performance and 90 percent lower energy usage when compared to traditional drive solutions.

   So what’s not to like? Flash isn’t cheap and there are software issues around high-speed I/O that need to be dealt with.  SDDs appear to be a better drop-in fit in a virtualization environment, but not so much in a retro-fit basis.  Flash appears to be best suited in a mixed or hybrid system with disk drives serving as long term storage with big wins coming from very high performance (i.e. supercomputing-style data bases) solutions. 

   The real question in my mind becomes when/if the price point of flash solutions can start to push out/displace hard disk drive solutions across the board.  While not even close to an apples-and-oranges comparison, flash solutions have yet to successfully displace traditional disk drives in the PC-based consumer world; disk drive manufacturers keep on coming up with tricks to keep spinning disks viable each time the flash guys show up with another promising solution.

   Bookmark or Share this article

Login to comment.

Related Articles