When flooding devastated areas of Thailand in late 2011, hard disk drive (HDD) suppliers were one of the many to be adversely affected. From small companies to large corporations like Seagate, factories were completely destroyed. Almost immediately the industry faced an HDD shortage. As we enter 2012 it’s become clear the HDD scarcity won’t be alleviated anytime soon and will have lasting effects.

The low supply is causing both consumer and enterprise HDD prices to rise. One major storage vendor recently gave caution to their sales force, telling them to expect a potential drive price increase of 10-20% for Q1 and Q2 but hopefully returning to previous price levels by Q3.

In the meantime, more people are learning about solid-state drives (SSD). Many are exploring it as a viable storage solution, which shifts the storage conversation. Enterprises are evaluating the cost-per-io instead of focusing on the irrelevant cost-per-gig for intense applications.  Cost-per-io, though not as often discussed around storage architect water-coolers, is quickly becoming the focus of application owners.  Expect these kind of macro-events to further push the pace of investigations into higher performing alternatives to traditional HDD.

Regardless of the potentially positive effects this may have on the SSD industry, the flooding was a tragic event. Please consider donating to the victims of the Thailand floods.

Read Part I of the interview, The SSD Garbage Collection Problem Explained.
Read Part II of the interview, SSD Optimization Techniques that Minimize MLC Flash Deficiencies.

Read Part I of the interview, The SSD Garbage Collection Problem Explained.

For those who have heard similar statements, there is an option that will change the scope of your entire storage environment. It will be more cost effective, higher performing, higher density, take less power/cooling . . . Basically, it will change how you look at storage.

Recently, a few of our team members met with a major financial services client who was complaining of analytics application performance issues. After some discussion pertaining to the environment as a whole, they figured they had 40% of their disk dedicated to performance vs. capacity. That is at least three racks of a large storage vendor’s disk with little capacity on it at all. That is over 700 disks! There was a time when this conversation wouldn’t surprise storage architects. That was before SSD.

What if you could get that disk back for your environment? Think about the capacity you wouldn’t have to buy in 2012. What if you could just remove that from your environment? How green would your data center be? What if you could consolidate that capacity to the cloud? Consider how flexible/cost effective your environment would be.

Enough “what ifs.” SSD is changing the game for customers in ways they haven’t even thought of yet. In the case mentioned above, this client will be able to remove three racks of disks and replace it in 6U of rack space by implementing an SSD solution. The world of storage is changing for the better, and it will never be the same thanks to SSD. Imagine the possibilities.

-Scott Hansen
Enterprise Sales Manager
WhipTail