Flash era: Traditional mechanical hard disk hard to meet the needs of cloud computing

Lead: US it website CNET wrote today that with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technology, traditional mechanical hard drives have been unable to meet current usage requirements, and faster flash memory will gradually become the main storage market.

The following is the full text of the article:

Flash memory will be an important part of cloud computing and virtualization, and it's time to discard traditional hard drives. Cloud computing and virtualization have dramatically changed the server infrastructure, but the real push for a recovery in the storage industry is the rise of solid-state drives and flash memory.

Flash will continue to bring much-needed impetus to the enterprise sector. Flash is becoming more and more important from Fusion-io last year's IPO, to Nutanix and Tintri, which have recently emerged in a series of venture-backed start-up companies.

With the increase in the number of applications and databases that are deployed through virtualization and cloud computing, traditional hard disk storage sequences are becoming a serious performance bottleneck and are gradually being marginalized by the market. Virtualization and cloud computing infrastructure can reduce server usage, which will have a greater impact on infrastructure based on mechanical hard drives.

Although the server, network, and processor performance follow Moore's Law, the performance of the hard drive has not changed much. Flash, on the other hand, can dramatically improve performance. For example, conventional solid-state drives are 400 times times faster than mechanical hard drives. This is also the Amazon AWS Cloud computing services of the new version of the DYNAMODB database using solid-state drives, and abandoned mechanical hard drive reasons.

Industry giants such as EMC and NetApp are also starting to offer "cache caching" solutions that can work with existing products. But critics point out that the two giants ' approach is flawed: adding flash memory to existing systems can be costly, while functionality is limited to reading the cache.

Berkeley, one of the early members of the raid, Tintri chief architect Aide Li Hu, a storage company, said the second flaw was critical. "Using flash memory as a cache, it is fortunate to have 30% of the application traffic benefiting from flash memory." Fundamentally, you're still getting the hard drive level performance, not the flash level. "he said.

As an alternative, many startups are developing solutions based on Flash. By consolidating technologies such as inline de-duplication (inline de-duplication) and compression, new solutions can reduce the unit storage cost of flash memory and deliver high-performance products at more competitive prices.

Many storage vendors, including violin memory and Solidfire, provide 100% of the flash sequence products, with emphasis on performance improvements. Although it is true, it does not solve the cost of unit storage space.

Tintri is promoting the so-called "intelligent flash" technology, can integrate flash and SATA, the price is much cheaper. According to Aide Li Hu, most of the time there is no need to use the full flash sequence, the simple use of flash to solve all problems will have a high cost.

"Consolidating data deduplication and compression into a hybrid system that automatically stores inactive data on a traditional hard disk provides the same level of performance as a full flash sequence and does not need to be manually adjusted like a hierarchy method (tiered approach)," he said. ”

The flash market is already very crowded, but it is still growing. EMC recently announced the Vfcache solution, a server-based Flash PCI card, similar to Fusion-io. NetApp, its main competitor, has hinted that similar schemes will be launched in the near future.

It remains to be seen what kind of scheme will prevail, but it is clear that the era of flash memory has arrived.

(Responsible editor: Duqing first)