Blog

Wikibon’s own David Floyer has written an incredibly detailed article entitled Hybrid Storage Poised to Disrupt Traditional Disk Arrays. This article details a comprehensive baseline which:

• Provides a common definition of what constitutes hybrid storage,
• Provides detailed cost comparisons that explain why true hybrid storage system are ultimately less expensive than their traditional storage brethren as the need for more IOPS grows,
• Explains the architecture that comprises hybrid storage systems, and,
• Identifies the point at which hybrid storage becomes the cost leader.

The cost/performance factor

For CIOs, ensuring that the storage selection meets operational workload needs at a reasonable cost is of paramount concern, particularly since storage can often consume a not insignificant percentage of the IT budget. For many CIOs, storage capacity has become an almost secondary concern. Certain workloads are able to leverage modern array features such as deduplication and compression technologies to great effect, thus reducing the need to worry as much about capacity as was necessary in the past. For example, VDI workloads, because of the great similarity in the virtual machines that make up the solution, can often achieve 75% or higher data reduction rates in production, practically solving the capacity issue.

So, for CIOs, the great storage capacity expansion question is easing, if only a little bit.

However, storage performance demands for modern workloads have emerged as the next great challenge. Historical workloads in mainstream IT shops have been able to rely on spinning disks to provide enough IOPS to meet workload needs, at least with the right planning. Organizations could choose from low IOPS 7200 RPM SATA disks or 15K RPM SAS disks, which provide about double the IOPS of the SATA disks. As workloads demanded more performance, CIOs could simply add more spinning disks, generally in the form of another disk shelf.

Capacity and performance decoupled

That was OK when capacity growth and performance demand were growing as one. Adding more disks both increased overall capacity and added more IOPS to the storage pool.

However, while capacity growth is still happening, modern workloads are much more IOPS hungry than has been seen in the past in mainstream IT. Further, storage performance woes are no longer visible to just IT. Consider VDI initiatives. If VDI is implemented in an organization with the wrong storage, the end result is directly experienced by frustrated users who become subjected to boot and login storms, which come to life when storage cannot keep up with demand in such situations.

Without a change in storage buying options, CIOs would be forced to buy more and more disks just to meet performance demands. We have seen organizations take drastic steps, such as short stroking, to meet performance demands, even though such techniques had a negative impact on capacity. So CIOs were seeing hand-in-hand capacity and performance increases happening at different rates, thus requiring strategies to balance the two needs while still attempting to balance the economics of the overall solution.

In order to improve performance, some vendors began adding flash-based storage to traditional storage systems and using these drives as a sort of cache in front of the hard disk. However, as David explains in his article, this has not always been the best option.

A solution emerges

As you might guess from the title of David’s article, hybrid storage solutions have emerged as the sweet spot for many modern mainstream workloads. Although IT shops still have to meet capacity needs, modern hybrid storage arrays generally provide adequate capacity and, when coupled with a variety of data reduction features – deduplication and compression – capacity needs can be easily met. Where hybrid storage arrays truly shine for CIOs is on the performance side of the equation.

For comparative purposes, a true hybrid solution is defined as one that takes a flash-first approach to data storage and carries with it other characteristics. I won’t repeat here the full text, but refer to the VM-aware Hybrid Definition section is David’s article for more information. The section below provides additional information.

David goes into great depth and demonstrates the point at which a hybrid storage array begins to outshine traditional storage arrays from a cost/IOPS perspective. In his analysis, David uses a scenario that requires 10 TB of usable capacity and demonstrates that, at the 7,000 IOPS mark, a hybrid system and a traditional disk system have about the same price from a performance perspective. Beyond that mark, the cost of the traditional disk system continues to escalate as spindles are added to continue growing performance while the hybrid continues to have plenty of excess IOPS capacity to meet continuing needs.

For a CIO, perhaps the most critical and succinct part of the analysis is as follows:

• An environment requiring 15,000 IOPS from 1 terabytes of usable storage would require:
• 64 drives and 1 TB of flash in a traditional storage array with a flash cache;
• 16 drives including 2.4TB of flash in a hybrid storage array;
• The traditional storage array would cost more than twice as much as the hybrid ($190,000 vs. $88,000).

CIOs who are considering expanding storage or replacing existing storage need to carefully consider the full range of options before them with particular attention paid to true hybrid solutions that maximize both IOPS and capacity needs to provide outstanding performance for mainstream and emerging workloads. By doing so, CIOs can avoid simply throwing more spindles at older systems and achieve much better results at much lower overall costs.

This article was first published by Wikibon.