For decades, having the performance, capacity and processing speeds meant adding more server systems and therefore providing an efficient need. Now, businesses are re-thinking this old outdated model to encompass a major new role, energy efficiency. With cost for energy surging into the billions industry wide, most companies are re-evaluating their datacenters to reduce the cost in maintaining such large entities.
Big businesses are looking to the component level vendors in the push towards more energy efficient technologies; to drive and improve old technologies and to alleviate energy cost bottlenecks. One of the biggest concerns in todayfs data centers are the drives.
Based on a typical dual-processor 450W 2U server, drives account for the third most power consuming component of the server. Below is a chart that illustrates the wattage allocation to specific components.
For today’s IT organizations, infrastructure and cooling are two of the biggest issue that they face; the more drives the more cooling.
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Most of today’s datacenters are based on traditional rotating disk drives that consume upwards to 18W per drive. This is one of the major downfalls for traditional HDDs along with low performance in IOPS, making HDDs more of a legacy product moving forward. With demands for speeds in upwards of thousands of IOPS, the leading enterprise HDD can serve about 300IOPS.
Introducing STEC’s Family of Enterprise Solid State Drives. With the ability to increase transactional performance while greatly reduce energy, cooling, maintenance and hardware costs; STEC’s enterprise SSDs are quickly replacing HDDs as the solution of choice in all data centers. By significantly increasing reliability, consuming magnitudes less power than that of a traditional enterprise HDD and increasing performance to over 200 times that of an enterprise HDD, STEC’s Family of Enterprise Solid State Drives are revolutionizing the way businesses plan for the future of their data centers. |
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Enterprise Solid State Drive Performance Enables Significant Power Savings, Competitive Advantages and Improved TC
Request Power Advantage Whitepaper
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With current expansion of online transaction processing, Web services, data mining, and modeling simulations, HDD’s raw capacity and performance is just not enough.
IT manager must seek new ways of achieving operational results while maintaining budget guidelines. This often involves a radical departure from the accepted orthodoxy. |
Solid state drives (SSD) have emerged as the solution-of-choice for businesses that need the best performance for input/output operations per second (IOPS). SSD provides better results in:
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Lowest cost per IOPS |
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Lowest energy usage |
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Lowest recurring costs |
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Lowest data center space consumption |
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Lowest failure rate |
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This whitepaper paper shows how SSD solves the dilemma of HDD inefficiencies and does so at a significantly lower cost. For a typical application requiring 100,000 IOPS, SSD will achieve the following results:
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Reduce up-front procurement costs versus HDD |
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Eliminate recurring costs of using HDD |
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Reduce rack space requirements |
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Reduce storage system energy requirements |
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Improve IT productivity due to easier management of fewer devices |
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Enterprise Storage Leader gains significant system-level performance
and a 98% reduction in energy consumption with the adoption of
ZeusIOPS Solid State Drive For more than a decade, market leaders for high end enterprise storage systems know what it takes to be on top and that change is inevitably part of the process. But to further enhance performance while reducing the system’s power consumption would be a challenge. These leaders turned to STEC, a pioneering leader in
Solid State Drive (SSD) technology focused solely on the demanding enterprise storage space.
Energy efficiency advantages of the ZeusIOPS within the premier storage system per 100K IOPS Performance
Recently, the leading systems provider for high-end storage premiered in their flag-ship platform system the first ever enterprise-class deployments of solid state storage. This announcement is the result of more than a year of comprehensive testing and qualification. Because of their strong position as the industry leader in terms of performance and reliability is reinforced in its ability to integrate SSD into its existing systems and introduce this highest tier of storage to customers with the most demanding performance requirements.
STEC was able to provide the ZeusIOPS Fibre Channel SSD that was system compatible with the hard disk drives they were already using. More importantly, integration of ZeusIOPS into their premier high-end networked storage systems created unprecedented levels of performance and energy efficiency for their most demanding applications. They believe that flash-based solid state storage is a game changing technology and that STEC is at the forefront of the SSD market. Over the past year, extensive collaboration has ensured that the ZeusIOPS Fibre Channel drive meets the stringent quality, availability and reliability requirements of the enterprise storage market.
ZeusIOPS SSDs, in the same form factor as industry standard 3.5", 2.5", 1.8" hard disk drives, provide significant performance improvements, power savings and improved total cost of ownership. In terms of performance, while hard drive access times are measured in milliseconds, access times for ZeusIOPS SSDs are measured in microseconds, enabling significant improvement in data input/output and latency.
The ZeusIOPS is the fastest SSD available, based on all critical facets of sustained sequential throughput and, most importantly, sustained read and write input/output per second (“IOPS”). Given the transaction-intensive nature of high-end enterprise storage systems, the ZeusIOPS drives are optimized to deliver the highest levels of transactional performance.
Prominent product specifications include:
Up to 80,000 Sustained Random Read IOPS
Up to 350MB/sec sustained, sequential reads; 300MB/sec sustained, sequential writes
Interfaces:
Fibre Channel,
SAS and
SATA
Weight of less than 0.4 kg
STEC’s technology gives a significant advantage in system-level performance and further validates the surge in SSD adoption, marking an important milestone in the evolution of enterprise storage.
One of the major energy problems with datacenters of today is that 85% of centers use legacy products. Memory modules utilized in most datacenters consume an average of 2.4V to 1.8V per module. However, with STEC’s 1.5V DDR2 modules, power consumption is reduced to help create more energy efficient servers. See chart below for the illustration of energy consumption for legacy product vs. STEC’s 1.5V DDR2.
| DDR vs. Standard DDR vs. Low Voltage DDR
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With price expenditures for cooling datacenters growing into the billions, IT organizations are looking for new and better ways to reduce power consumption because of increasing electricity cost. Reducing power consumption can possible reduce operation cost, infrastructure cost, cooling cost and reduce natural resources.
Servers currently utilize DDR2 1.8V and in some cases legacy DDR 2.4V, with the reduction to 1.5V, servers are able to reduce energy consumption by 15% and 30% respectively. |
Entering the generation of green datacenters, most IT organizations are looking for newer and better modules to supply the needs of datacenters for the future. Study shows that 60% of (pre-2005) datacenter facility will not be able to supply the needs of future demands. With STEC’s 1.5V DDR3, datacenters are able to increase performance and reduce power consumption by 45% over legacy DDR and 15% over legacy DDR2.
Not only does DDR3 continues the evolution of the DDR and DDR2 technologies to provide continued improvements in power reduction but also leads the way for higher performance. DDR3 offers increased transfer rates of PC3-6400 (2.5 ns clock), PC3-8500 (1.875 ns clock), PC3-10600 (1.5 ns clock), and PC3-12800 (1.25 ns clock).
Four standard operating frequencies for the DDR3 SDRAM Memory Module specification were developed to provide the use with the most suitable option: PC3-6400, PC3-8500, PC3-10600, and PC2-12800.
PC3-6400 memory module configurations utilize DDR3-800 components to achieve the highest performance, with a peak bandwidth of 6.4GB/s when used in systems operating on 400MHz memory clock frequency.
PC3-8500 memory module configurations utilize DDR3-1066 components to achieve the highest performance, with a peak bandwidth of 8.5GB/s when used in systems operating on 533 memory clock frequency.
PC3-10600 memory module configurations utilize DDR3-1333 components to achieve the highest performance, with a peak bandwidth of 10.6GB/s when used in systems operating on 667 memory clock frequency.
PC3-12800 memory module configurations utilize DDR3-1600 components to achieve the highest performance, with a peak bandwidth of 12.8GB/s when used in systems operating on 800MHz memory clock frequency.
With the continual increase in performance, DDR3 technology is a great new outlook for system designs that are performance driven but with the energy cost savings with 1.5V.
See chart below for a direct comparison between DDR2 vs. DDR3 in both performance and power consumption.
In the search for future products that is more energy efficient; IT professionals and organizations are looking towards smaller solid state products such as memory cards and embedded flash modules. With solid state products reaching the performance similar to that of a hard disk drive and consuming less than 90% power, solid state flash is the next iteration in HDD technology replacement.
STEC offers a wide and diverse array of products suited for hard disk drive replacements with the ability to reduce power consumption to as low as 3mA compared to 12.8V for HDD.
Revolutionizing the way CompactFlash is used, STEC’s new MACH4 CompactFlash platform is a high-performance industrial NAND flash storage device suitable as a hard disk drive replacement or alternate storage device in a wide variety of industrial applications.
Because the MACH4 CompactFlash uses NAND flash technology, it has very low latency compared to a traditional hard disk drive and consumes far less power (approximately 200 milliamps or 1 watt compared to 12 watts for a standard 7200rpm ATA disk drive).
With its small footprint, high capacity (up to 32 gigabytes in Type 2 format), and throughput up to 80 megabytes per second, the MACH4 CompactFlash is an ideal hard disk drive replacement or alternate storage solution in space-constrained applications or those requiring less capacity than available hard disk drives offer including blade servers and embedded PCs.
STEC Industrial Grade Secure Digital Memory Cards are small, removable and non-volatile flash memories with a high performance interface.
Available both in small and large capacity, STEC's Industrial Grade Secure Digital cards are specifically designed, manufactured and tested to withstand extreme environmental conditions and to improve system reliability, endurance and power consumption. STEC’s small cards are the most energy efficient solutions for HDD replacements boosting low 3mA power consumption.
STEC embedded flash products provide non-volatile, solid-state storage ideal for embedded applications. New applications for embedded flash modules are rapidly emerging due to the low cost per megabyte, lower power consumption, and inherently greater reliability than rotating hard drives. Most applications running embedded operating systems such as VxWorks, Windows, XP/embedded, and Linux don't have large data storage requirements, and a cost savings can be immediately realized. Applications such as Casino Gaming machines, Single Board Computers, and Networking Equipment, all of which require high-performance, uncompromising reliability, and a storage solution that lasts for the long life of these embedded systems.
