Topping the CIO's Most Wanted List

I sat on a financial services conference panel last month in New York City.  The discussion centered around data center efficiency and energy issues.  As we were wrapping up, the moderator asked each of us to pick one most wanted technology advance.

I had to bite my tongue as the bank CIO to my right answered;  "What I want most is Flash drives in my storage arrays." 

Since he is an EMC customer, I knew he was thinking about Symmetrix. 

I also knew that his wish was about to come true. 

Today, January 14th 2008, EMC announced the answer to this customer's wish.  It's a new class of enterprise storage that is "at least an order of magnitude faster than a disk drive" according to The Clipper Group white paper posted on EMC's web site.

How does performance relate to energy?

Well, it's a twofer.

One big advance is the promise of up to 10X application performance improvement with Flash technology. 

The second is that a single Flash drive does the work in IOPS of about 30 standard magnetic drives.

A single flash drive uses about 38% less energy than a typical hard disk drive (HDD). But if your interested in performance that's a side benefit. Right? 

Well, suppose you can get what you want from a single drive where you previously used 30?  Add that on an IOPs basis, Flash will use 98% less energy than 30 standard disks.

That's a good deal.

Most often, buying decisions for data storage revolve around capacity - cost per terabyte?  But if you need performance, and the way you get it today is by putting just a little data on a bunch of drives, you are not only wasting capacity but space and time and energy too. 

Flash drives (EMC is also calling it "Tier 0") are a way to get around that.  Of course the buying criteria is clearly different.  Dollars per IOPS, not per TB.

It may be a small number of applications that need the performance.  But they are the biggies: stock trading, credit card fraud, currency exchange are prime examples. 

For these, the speed improvements can translate to millions of dollars in transactions.

At that same financial services conference, one IT director told of an application user requesting his server and storage cabinets be moved closer together to try improving performance -  "He was asking us to improve on the speed of light."

This is why the CIO wished for flash.  As a bank, ultimate performance for key applications is always what he wants.  So, as a CIO with an energy issue, what could be better than providing that performance and using less energy too?

Energy use down 98% and response times down to 1 millisecond.

CIO to CFO: "We can process transactions about 10 times faster and save energy doing it."

"Waddya think?"

Comments

[Steve Hartell]

Dick - Will flash memory be as big a factor in energy savings in the data center as virtualization?

Great Blog!!!

[Dick Sullivan]

Flash drives will impact energy consumption for those who use it. Initially that won't be a big part of the market though because of the initial expense and because on a percentage basis Flash won't displace a big chunk of the traditional drives in any given data center. However, the costs are expected to come down more quickly than has typically been the case with hard disk drives. So the percentage will grow more quickly.