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Enterprise SSDs: Are You Asking Too Much From Client Drives?

Enterprise SSDs: Are You Asking Too Much From Client Drives?
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Think back to high school. Seven periods. Five classes per term. Your varsity team is in the playoffs, the boy/girl you’ve been chasing just said yes to a first date, and you’re working 15 hours a week at the supermarket. Your growing brain and sleep schedule is completely maxed out—and then comes final exams.

As adults, many of us are used to this level of stress. We have jobs that feel like finals five days a week, spouses, kids, friends, volunteer projects, and all the rest. We look back on high school and think, “Really? I felt overwhelmed by that?” In many cases, a teen-ager can sprint faster than an adult, but when it comes to surviving the constant barrage of pressure in a high-stakes business environment, you want a grown-up for the job.

The same is true for top-tier storage in data centers. You wouldn’t place a mission critical job in a teen’s hands. Would you entrust one to a consumer-class storage device?

Many enterprises do. While solid state drives have been gaining traction in tier 0 and tier 1 storage applications, the higher cost of SSDs relative to hard disks have left many IT departments fishing for ways to contain costs. One such way is to turn to consumer-class client SSDs, which frequently exhibit spec sheet performance numbers even more impressive than their enterprise-class counterparts. Again, few adults can hope to out-sprint their younger offspring. But, as we’ll see, enterprise storage is not about sprinting, and there are many factors that need to be considered in determining drive value to an organization.

#1) Consistency in Performance

Read the works of Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek, et. al.) and you’ll find that he won the 1999 USA Chinese kickboxing championship in the 165 lb. weight class by not only drastically dehydrating himself prior to weigh-in and then rehydrating for the fight but also by “hacking” the competition’s rules and finding one method that would allow him to legally win against unsuspecting opponents. Did this mean that Ferriss would be likely to win in a street fight against the same opponents? Not likely. He determined the right way to win a specific test under a specific set of circumstances. There’s nothing wrong with that, and you have to admire his cleverness, but you probably also wouldn’t want to hire him to fill the role of most-qualified martial arts expert.

In other words, as a martial artist, Ferriss is likely to be highly inconsistent. His performance will vary considerably depending on the variables at hand.