| How
Bad is Choosing the Wrong SSD Supplier? - by
Zsolt Kerekes -
March 24,
2009 |
How
significant is it - if you choose the wrong partner / supplier for your SSD
strategy?
It's a momentous decision. Don't kid yourself that high-end
SSDs are clones / generic products. Like thoroughbred horses they have
personalities. It takes time to get to know them and get the best out of them.
Rushing in to make a quick convenient choice - could backfire.
Here
are some examples of significant decision points that I've seen people make in
my career.
Is it as bad as bad as - choosing the wrong
microprocessor back in the mid 1970s?
Most companies hadn't
invested in too much software, by the end of the 1970s, when vendors started
touting their 16 bit micros. (Some real, some imaginary and some which would be
very late to get working.) Intel's marketers even had a conversion program - in
which they said - you could feed Motorola 6800 assembler in one end and see
Intel 8086 assembler coming out the other end - which actually ran faster than
on the Mot hardware. I don't know if anyone actually did that. Most engineers
at that time were quite happy to rip and replace their 1st or 2nd generation
micro designs and switch to something new.
Apple was
the big exception. Apple had created the consumer desktop PC market and was
locked into a huge investment of 8 bit assembler for - what turned out to be
a dead-end processor - the
6502.
Despite heroic efforts - that mistake lost them the ownership of the desktop PC
market - to Intel and Microsoft.
Is choosing the wrong SSD supplier as
significant as - choosing the wrong CPU/OS platform for your mid range
server in the early 1990s?
If you chose DEC's VAX (which looked
like a safe choice for many companies who already had such servers) - that led
to a merry dance which involved ditching VAX for Alpha and ditching VMS for
variously named flavors of Unix, and then finally ditching the whole lot.
Wintel didn't have fast enough processors or scalability in those days - and was
barely good enough as a single user PC platform.
SPARC was the
market's favorite vote - and peaked at over $20 billion annual revenue in 2000
before it failed for a bunch of technical, competitive and market reasons.
In
my view choosing the right SSD supplier for strategic projects is nearly as
important as any of the choices above were in their own time. A successful
implementation will enable your organization to do things better, faster and at
lower cost than your competitors. And in some projects the SSD will enable
applications which would not have been possible at all.
Although you
can switch SSD suppliers - by the time you realize that your initial choice was
a mistake - you could have lost valuable months of having a head start with the
new opportunities enabled by SSD technology. And - if things got really bad -
you could lose your reputation, your job and maybe your business too.
I'm
often asked - what
is the best choice of SSD? - My answer is - that it depends what you're
trying to do, what your current state of technical competence is relative to
SSDs and the apps you're trying to improve. Also - how much effort and resources
you're willing to invest to make it work for you. That formula gives a different
answer for everyone. So it's not surprising that in my article predicting the
SSD market
confusion in 2009 I said that customers are going to solve apparently
identical problems in completely different ways.
There are already
hundreds of articles
about the SSD market on
StorageSearch.com - and there are a
lot more articles and directories in the pipeline. But it can never be enough.
That's one of the reasons I started the recent
SSD Bookmarks Series
- to give leading people in the industry a way to share the views from
different vantage points in the multi-dimensional SSD landscape. They will send
you to many interesting places. But I hope you'll still find the
mouse site a
helpful starting point for your future SSD searches. |
|
| |
| the Problem with
Write IOPS in flash SSDs |
the "play it again Sam"
syndrome
Flash SSD "random write IOPS" are now similar
to "read IOPS" in many of the
fastest SSDs.
So
why are they such a poor predictor of application performance?
And
why are users still buying
RAM SSDs which cost an
order of magnitude more than SLC? (let alone
MLC) - even
when the IOPS specs look similar. |
 |
This article tells you
why the specs got faster - but the applications didn't. And why competing SSDs
with apparently identical benchmark results can perform completely
differently. ...read
the article | | | |
| . |
| Surviving SSD
sudden power loss |
Why should you care
what happens in an SSD when the power goes down?
This important design
feature - which barely rates a mention in most SSD datasheets and press releases
- has a strong impact on
SSD data integrity
and operational
reliability.
This article will help you understand why some
SSDs which (work perfectly well in one type of application) might fail in
others... even when the changes in the operational environment appear to be
negligible. |
|
| | |
| . |
 |
Can You
Trust Flash SSD Specs & Benchmarks? |
| Sadly no! - Many published benchmarks for
flash SSD are about as reliable as bank valuations of Collateralized Loan
Obligations (just before the onset of the Credit Crunch). |
There are many intrinsic technical
reasons why you can't believe most published benchmarks for flash SSDs
(whether done by magazines or vendors) and why
even the tests you carefully do yourself don't give reliable results
which correlate with how the SSD will perform in real-life
applications.
We warned you of it this problem here
on StorageSearch.com - and now other publications and vendors are starting
to take it seriously too. ...read
the article | | |
| |
