Data Center Feedback: Fewer Than 100 SSDs
Cost per gigabyte continues to be the barrier that prevents even large institutions from procuring thousands of SSDs at a time. But just because we don’t have access to truly massive deployments of solid-state drives doesn’t mean we can’t shed some light on SSD reliability in the real world based on smaller organizations. We put the call out to many of our IT friends and we managed to get some interesting feedback from a few data centers.
NoSupportLinuxHosting.com
No Support Linux Hosting doesn’t get specific about the number of drives it has installed, but company reps tell us it uses "an extensive number" of SSDs. We know they’re dealing with fewer than 100 SSDs, and usage is broken down in the following manner:
- 40 GB X25-Vs are used as mirrored boot volumes for blade serves and ZFS servers
- 160 GB X25-Ms are used as cache (L2ARC) drives in ZFS servers.
- 32 GB X25-Es are used as mirrored ZIL volumes in ZFS servers
All of these drives have seen at least one year of use, and some have recently passed the two-year mark. As of this writing, the company hasn't seen any failures.
When we asked what benefits the company is seeming from SSDs that couldn't be achieved with mechanical storage, we received the following response: "With ZFS and hybrid storage, SSD drives allow for huge performance increases over old-style spinners. We still use spinners for primary storage, so we are able to retain most of the cost benefits of spinners, while getting the performance benefits of SSDs. Eventually, we are planning to switch all of our SANs to purely SSD-based storage. For 2011, we will stick with hybrid storage using ZFS."
InterServer.net
InterServer only uses SSDs in its database servers. Specifically, it has Intel's X25-E (SSDSA2SH032G1GN) in its Xeon machines to take full advantage of high data throughput. How much performance are we talking about? InterServer tells us it is achieving an average of 4514 MySQL queries per second. On an older Xeon server equipped with IDE-based drives, it's looking at roughly 200-300 MySQL queries per second. We know these drives have been in use since 2009, and there are no reported failures thus far.
InterServer provided the following statement concerning SSD use.
Intel SSD's are night and day in failure rates when it comes to some other drives. For example the SuperTalent SSD drives have had an extremely high failure rate including model FTM32GL25H, FTM32G225H, and FTM32GX25H. I estimate about two-thirds of these drives have failed since being put into service. With these failures however, the drives were not recoverable at all. They generally disappeared completely, no longer being readable. Spinners die much more gracefully with an easier disk recovery. I cannot compare this to the Intel's SSDs yet since I have not experienced any failures.
