Tuesday, April 21st 2009
OCZ Technology Announces Vertex EX 2.5-inch SLC-based Solid-State Drives
OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and computer components, today unveiled OCZ Vertex EX 2.5" Solid State Drives that is designed to meet the stringent demands of server environments and enterprise applications. These new premium offerings are the pinnacle storage option excelling in performance, reliability, and power consumption that offer professionals and enthusiasts an unparalleled computing experience.
"The advantages of SSD's over traditional hard disc drives including performance, reliability, no cooling requirements, and lower power consumption, are all highly beneficial to enterprise applications and enthusiast consumers looking for the ultimate storage solution," commented Alex Mei, CMO of the OCZ Technology Group. "The new OCZ Vertex EX is designed to deliver unparalleled performance and reliability, featuring the latest-generation architecture and SATA interface utilizing single-level cell NAND flash memory for unmatched overall system responsiveness and stability for enterprise grade server solutions."
Offering a server-class storage upgrade from traditional hard disc drives, OCZ Vertex EX SSDs have a compact form factor and no moving parts resulting in a quiet storage solution with significantly higher performance. For crowded server environments, the OCZ Vertex EX SSDs offer space and cost-savings with a compact form factor that use significantly less power thanks to the benefits of high-quality flash-based storage.
OCZ continues to expand its reach to all areas of computing interests and system preferences by going beyond the enthusiast PC to professional server and workstations. Building on the advantages of SLC flash-based storage, the OCZ Vertex Series EX is the result of the latest breakthroughs in SSD technology, delivering incredible performance that translates to professional-class data storage enthusiasts have come to expect from OCZ's premium Solid State Drive offerings. These next-generation drives feature speeds up to a 260 MB/s read and 210 MB/s, while delivering lowered power consumption, increased responsiveness and data access, and superior durability compared to conventional hard drives. Initially available in capacities of 60 GB and 120 GB, Vertex EX offers ample room to create the ideal storage array for all your data.
For more information on the OCZ Vertex EX SSD, please click here.
Source:
OCZ Technology
Offering a server-class storage upgrade from traditional hard disc drives, OCZ Vertex EX SSDs have a compact form factor and no moving parts resulting in a quiet storage solution with significantly higher performance. For crowded server environments, the OCZ Vertex EX SSDs offer space and cost-savings with a compact form factor that use significantly less power thanks to the benefits of high-quality flash-based storage.
OCZ continues to expand its reach to all areas of computing interests and system preferences by going beyond the enthusiast PC to professional server and workstations. Building on the advantages of SLC flash-based storage, the OCZ Vertex Series EX is the result of the latest breakthroughs in SSD technology, delivering incredible performance that translates to professional-class data storage enthusiasts have come to expect from OCZ's premium Solid State Drive offerings. These next-generation drives feature speeds up to a 260 MB/s read and 210 MB/s, while delivering lowered power consumption, increased responsiveness and data access, and superior durability compared to conventional hard drives. Initially available in capacities of 60 GB and 120 GB, Vertex EX offers ample room to create the ideal storage array for all your data.
For more information on the OCZ Vertex EX SSD, please click here.
16 Comments on OCZ Technology Announces Vertex EX 2.5-inch SLC-based Solid-State Drives
Access speed be damned, if you wanted to store 2TB, it would waste an incredible amount of space over just buying a normal 2TB drive, and be ~ 10X as expensive.
And if you raid normal drives nicely they are also pretty dang fast.
I know there are a few places where these things would be nice, as in a laptop , that :
A.) Traditionally have terrible drive access rates, and this would help a LOT there, and
B.) May only have ONE drive bay depending on the model.
But it just seems more and more that they are trying to convince every day users that these things are a good idea for their home pc.
Between the relatively poor storage capacity (it IS slowly getting better) and the as of yet ridiculous prices (Yes, also slowly improving, but still just plain ffing silly) , you'd have to be "pants-on-head" retarded to fall for that...
RAID'ed normal drives come nowhere near the speeds of SLC drives.
You're "pants on the head silly" using these for a storage drive, but you're shitting rainbows if you use one as a boot/games/encoding drive.
Remember, SSD is NOT for filestorage or media archive, it is for OS, swap, and small and medium sized database "transaction" based processing. If you are running, eg. an ERP solution, LDAP, webserver, etc. this is ideal.
What do you save? (on an example of ONE SSD server replaces 11 HDD servers)
1./ 10x physical server cost, could be $3000 per server = approx $30000
2./ 10x copies of Windows Server, application software, antivirus, etc. cost say $1500 = approx = $15000
3./ 10x annual electricity cost, say $300 = approx = $3000
4./ 10x installation time and maintenance time, incl. updating etc. say $500 per commission = approx = $5000
5./ 10x space utilisation for the server rack. If you have a big service centre this adds up to a lot of sq. foot and therefore less rent. Calc=0 for just one rack, but if you do this across a datacentre, the numbers may be big.
So I can see that (again depending on application/situtation) installing ONE SSD server could save you approx $50000 compared to HDD servers with the same transaction capability.
And the cost of doing this? $500 for the SSD, = 1%.
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Another way to look at this, is, again depending on load, you could decommission 10 servers and replace the HDDs in one of them with a SSD. You pay for the SSD within a year of saved electric bills, plus you have freed up a lot of space, to be repurposed. For an IT company, it means you increase your service capacity without having to lease new buildings.
Though, to be honest, my brother has one of OCZ's MLC Vertex drives, and it's so fast it's silly. They apparently don't have the stuttering problems of other MLC drives -- I really don't see why you'd even want to bother on full SLC, if you ask me!
While at Storage Networking World a couple weeks ago, I sat in on as many SSD sessions that I could and that's pretty much what everyone was talking about.
SAN's with 96 SSD's outdoing monster 700+ HDD setups. Talking about getting more performance out of 8U vs racks of mechanical hard drives - all enterprise level 10K's and 15K's short-stroked!
Intel was also there showing off their servers with their own SLC SSD's and NICs - amazing. It looked like they were just transferring data back and forth continuously during the entire conference :D
I know this is outside the scope of many here, even the enthusiasts, but the point is that the enterprise has started to embrace it, so it's not long until SSD's are common in most markets.
If you want to complain that a price drop from over $1000 for 64GB last year to $140 this year is not enough, just remember that I've been waiting --10 years for this-- since 1999 (when 8GB = $8K) for solid state storage to be realistic for the SMB's, SOHO's, and the enthusiasts. By Christmas of this year, even Joe Average Specs may want to jump on a cheap 128GB-256GB SSD.
Lets face it for every one company that has more than 2~3 servers at a single site, there are probably 10 000 with only 1 per site.
These companies Have their accounting package, their stock control, and their email on that server and that it - If it even averages 10Mbit / MINUTE it's a heck of a lot.
It's already running standard 3.5" drives and already doing everything twice as fast as any user needs it done - that's what all of the fully buffered ram is for.
The only real bottleneck any of them suffer is their back haul link to their central servers wherever head office may be.
Yes I'm doing a fair share of generalization here, but that's because its generally true.
Going through all of these single servers replacing perfectly sufficient 3.5" spindle drives with massively higher priced SSD's would not improve anybody's user experience by any measurable amount, and would cost a small fortune.
I'm just flipping the other side of the coin - I KNOW there are applications where SSD's are a small miracle, but any reasonable person looking to spread resource intelligently will realize that these applications are far fewer & far between than all of these SSD press releases would like us to believe.
I ALREADY want one as my boot/windows drive - but at the end of the day - the money is far better spent on the video card / ram / CPU, as games go - the loading only takes a few seconds anyway - halving your load time with an SSD wont help your frame rates for the other 99% of the time that you are busy actually playing the game(Unless you have a really bad video card with insufficient texture ram, that has to keep reading for data - and even then yer STILL far better off getting a better Video Card)...
Maybe in another year when the prices have slipped even further :) ...
EDIT : AT least SSD's FIRMWARE'S don't brick themselves like my ffing SEAGATE's :(!
Those SMB's you mentioned earlier with only a server or two? SSD's could help them stay at one or two servers as they grow. Here at work, they're going to help me consolidate from four servers to two while improving performance.
"On average" you could consolidate 5 servers into 3 using SSD. 1 server is on average a NAS and stays HDD. One server is on average a non-performance related machine, backup or redundancy. 3 machines are transaction related like email servers, webservers, ERP, domain servers, etc. These can be consolidated.
50% of businesses are smaller than average, in which case, there are less than 5 servers and probably dont need to do any server consolidation unless they want to "do more" on less.
50% of business are bigger than average, in which case, there are plenty of consolidation opportunities.
Let say for these 50% of bigger companies they have an average of "10 servers". They can probably consolidate those to 3 (for the above reasons) in situations NOT CONSTRAINED by geographic location.
So let's say half the time you can, half the time you cant.
Therefore: 15 million servers x 50% x 50% x server consolidation ratio approx 70% (7 saved out of every 10) = 3 million servers could be turned off tomorrow just by implementing SSD. (If the administrators could be bothered) (In the US alone)
Intel know this, which is why they are making sure that each modern server is not constrained at the CPU and memory level (think Nehalem-EP and DDR3), and have virtualisation capabilities to assist consolidation efforts.
All'right , I give up :)
Lets go thought the over 100Million registered companies in Central Europe, and visit every single server office amongst them, the large majority of which don't even have more than 1 HDD per office server (because again although that specific business may employ 5 servers - they are distributed over multiple branches in multiple regions where these servers into ONE machine in ONE branch is simply not possible as you would be left with 4 branches WITHOUT A SERVER)
-DEEP BREATH-
.. and replace all of those single drives that probably go through about 20 ~ 30 mb of of data per hour or so capturing the occasional invoice, or emailing an order to a supplier, and replace all of those drives with $500 SSD drives for no reason at all because it wont change anything at all for the ppl working from those servers - as their current access demands in at least half the cases don't even amount to 10% of the drives already existing access capability.
I'm sure now that this is the best thing to do - it will only cost a few billion Euros, and accomplish no beneficial gain whatsoever (apart from a very small potential saving in electricity - which would probably be SERIOUSLY offset by all of the petrol usage, and downtime, and lost productivity, ferrying around the millions and millions of drives to all of the offices , and trying to haul off & scrap all of the old drives.)
I'm totally sold, and I surrender the internet fight.
See ya in the next thread - this one's getting stale :)
The point is SERVER CONSOLIDATION. You take two or more servers and make them just ONE. That's right. Only ONE server now. Whaddayamean "very small savings in electricity"? If before you have 2 servers, now 1, then you HALVED your server electricity bill and HALVED your software licensing costs. If before you had 10 servers, and now 3, you save 70% electricity and 70% licensing costs! And if you have maintenance contracts, lower contracts, or less need for IT contractors/staff.
I refer you back to the start of the thread, with one reminder: these Intel SSDs are called ENTERPRISE SSD, not micro-mum-and-pop-shop email server consumer-SSD.
"all the petrol"... LOL. Any company that has IT techicians are already travelling to do system maintenance, backups, etc. There is NO ADDITIONAL WORK other than about 10 minutes doing a SSD install compared to a system backup.
Lets face it SLC drives are currently only targeted at enterprises and the most extreme of the extreme enthusiasts, and not at end users.
Last year I configured a SQL server that had high random IOPS / TPS (transactions per second) needs, and it required an external storage enclosure with a total of 22 15K RPM drives. Then you have to look at the energy and cooling costs for all those drives, the two RAID controllers, the cost of the external enclosure + 4U server enclosure, etc. Total database size? 80GB. We used the smallest 15K drives available, but still, most of the space will never be used.
This could have been achieved with 2 of these SLC drives in a 1U chasis. Most data centers chargeback the dept or internal entity within a mid to large corp for rack space yearly.
Not as extreme as your example but as real world as they come, and very typical. Sadly HP, IBM and Dell still don't sell SSD drives with many of their servers, and many IT managers won't install non-OEM drives because of the service hassles. This is already changing rapidly, but these server companies are still lagging behind the leading edge a little.