Going Green with NAND Flash

Gary Orenstein is VP Products, Fusion-io.

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From 2005 to 2010, electricity usage at data centers worldwide increased by about 56 percent, accounting for more as much as two percent of all energy used in the U.S. ¹ These figures are expected to increase as organizations implement new processes that generate more business critical data.

The Need for Performance and Consolidation

Modern computing workloads across database, virtualization and web applications require delivering the right data to the right user in the right amount of time - usually instantly. While classic disk drive-based architectures cannot keep up with this demand, flash memory has filled this gap, placing process critical data close to the CPU for dramatic performance gains.

But the performance flash provides is only half of the story. The other half is the infrastructure consolidation that happens when a single server can do the work of many. A key benefit to using less infrastructure is lower power consumption—one of the most pressing costs for data centers today.

Application and data center architects have an opportunity to address environmental challenges today with flash memory based solutions that significantly reduce server sprawl and power consumption. Let’s explore in more detail.

The Growing Issue in the Data Center

Performance and infrastructure-challenged systems typically manifest the following symptoms:

Case Studies of Flash Usage

Both large and small companies may see benefits from deploying flash memory in the data center, as shown in the following examples.

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A leading consumer question-and-answer website faced challenges keeping MySQL query response time low and maintaining replication for availability. Without flash memory, servers reached around 350 queries per second. Comparatively, a flash-enabled server could run 3,500 queries per second. This enabled a server reduction from 20 to 5 servers. Improving queries by ten times reduced the application’s average response time by 30 percent, a direct benefit to end-user engagement.

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A credit reference agency's SAN-backed system averaged 6,000 to 7,000 IOPS running batch processes and never broke 7,500 IOPS. The batch process on the flash enabled system sustains over 16,000 IOPS with peaks in excess of 25,000 to 35,000 IOPS. Realizing that I/O was no longer a bottleneck, optimizations on the 80 core CPU system improved sustained performance to 23,000 IOPS and peak performance to 46,000 IOPS. This eliminated reliance on a 70 disk SAN that could be re-purposed.

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A prominent Japanese e-commerce retailer faced data center space and power restrictions. Search demands were driving excessive disk and server scale out. Transitioning to a flash centric architecture allowed the company to:

Infrastructure Efficiency Opens New Business Opportunity

For years, organizations have faced such significant challenges just keeping up with performance, they have adopted a mind-set of saving money. While saving money is a big part of the business picture, making money is even more important. Better infrastructure efficiency, created by reducing energy and associated costs, helps businesses explore new market opportunities that were not previously available.

Today, more and more companies are not only reclaiming budget, they are also looking at re-purposing budgets to build new applications and serve new markets with flash-based solutions in ways previously not possible.

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Notes:
All images courtesy Fusion-io.
(1) Koomey, Jonathan. 2011. Growth in Data center electricity use 2005 to 2010. http://www.analyticspress.com/datacenters.html>