The Case for I/O Acceleration in Enterprise-Level Systems

The demand for rapid information retrieval is growing at an incredible rate. To prosper in such an environment, companies must maintain a strong competitive position in the area of IT performance. Impressive improvements have occurred in CPU performance and storage capacity, but hard disk drive I/O processing speed has not experienced comparable advances. Mechanical disks cannot access data fast enough to keep up with the speed of contemporary processors. As a consequence, transaction-intensive enterprise applications continue to be plagued by I/O bottlenecks that limit their throughput and productivity.

The I/O Performance Gap

The mismatch between solid-state CPU and mechanical hard disk processing speeds is the root cause of system I/O bottlenecks. This I/O Performance Gap is growing and, unless resolved, it will continue to limit the throughput of transaction-intensive applications.
Common solutions to I/O bottlenecks employed by IT administrators have included: endless application performance tuning, server upgrades, storage upgrades (adding cache and more HDDs), and re-writing the application. Each approach has had specific drawbacks, including slow implementation, increased engineering support, complexity, vendor lock-in, reliability issues, and limited scalability. Furthermore, these approaches generally had little effect when applied in random access environments since they did not directly address the root cause of I/O bottlenecks – the inherent restricted IOPS capability of hard disk drives.

The Solid State Disk Solution

Solid State Disks are peripheral devices, comprised of an array of semiconductor chips. They function as a hard disk emulator without the random access speed limitation of hard disks. Unlike mechanical disks, DRAM based SSDs have no moving parts and process data at RAM speed. They eliminate seek and rotational latency times during read and write requests and are much more robust than hard disks. The key advantage of SSDs is that they access data in microseconds (compared to milliseconds for hard disks), which increases I/O operations per second (IOPS) by an order of magnitude. By closing the I/O Performance Gap, SSDs effectively eliminate I/O bottleneck problems encountered in transaction-intensive enterprise applications.

I/O acceleration is achieved in applications by off-loading I/O-demanding files (“hot files”, typically less than 5% of the content) onto an SSD for processing at RAM speed and using mechanical disks (or RAIDs) to process the remaining “cold files”. This instantly improves the efficiency of the application servers by recovering CPU cycles formerly lost in I/O wait loops. SSD file caching has a 100% hit rate.

Performance Advantages of Solid State Disks

Solid State disks have been recognized for many years as a proven technical solution to IOPS imbalance and I/O bottleneck problems. They also provide a multitude of benefits throughout the system network. As a peripheral device, properly implemented SSDs do not disrupt existing IT infrastructure. They complement RAIDs (File Cache vs. Block Cache) and effect desirable processing load shifts by using CPU more efficiently and reducing the hits on wear-and-tear prone hard disks. SSDs can dramatically increase the life span of legacy systems, extending its return-on-investment period. Additionally, multiple users can be served concurrently with no peak-load slow down.

The Price Barrier of Conventional Solid State Disks

With a random access speed over 1000 times faster than hard disk drives, experience has proven that SSDs can dramatically improve the performance of all enterprise applications that process large numbers of random I/O data transactions.

However, as specially-engineered devices using proprietary components, conventional SSDs have been extraordinarily expensive and slow to evolve into mainstream markets. That explains why SSDs historically have been produced primarily as proprietary standalone units, purchased by big-budget customers (such as the military) for whom the absolute need to meet demanding IOPS requirements justified their high cost.

Efforts to implement SSDs in more mainstream applications have not been successful because the relevant SSD Value Metric of IOPS/dollar has not reflected an acceptable ROI for SSD investment. The high cost of SSDs has remained a barrier to their wide-scale use – until now.

“Universal Solid State Disk” Disruptive Technology

The IOPS Performance Gap has become more critical over time because of the ever-growing size of databases and demand for greater I/O throughput in real-time applications. Being able to deliver the benefits of SSDs to mainstream markets necessitated a fundamental shift in SSD technology that would result in a transparent and convincing rational for adoption of SSD solutions. The Solid Access “Universal Solid State Disk” (USSD) is based on disruptive technology that achieves that objective with its breakthrough IOPS/dollar metric.  

The Solid Access USSD represents a fundamental departure from established SSD technology.
Its novel design is based on a patent pending architecture merging disk drive emulation of SSD with rapid advancement and superior economics of server ecosystem building blocks.

“Universal Solid State Disk” Disruptive Pricing

USSD is powered by general-purpose CPU and fabricated solely from mainstream server components benefiting from their high-volume commodity pricing. Such economy-of-scale pricing translates into a low manufacturing cost, which allows USSD to be sold at a fraction of the price of conventional SSD products.

The USSD innovation translates into disruptive pricing of SSD product with no compromise in performance. Past computer industry disruptive technologies (such as the hard disk product evolution) were characterized by a lower cost accompanied by less performance. By delivering the unprecedented combination of a significantly lower cost with absolutely no decrease in performance, USSD breaks the price barrier of enterprise-level SSDs with no offsetting performance tradeoffs.

USSD Manufacturing and Reliability

USSD provides numerous advantages that further distinguish it from competitive SSD products. The components we use are of proven reliability and are already deployed in the world’s top data centers in unit volumes of ten of thousands. We draw from an extensive cadre of manufacturers to always use best-of-breed components without having to make a single modification to the basic USSD assembly. Should a component become unavailable, or an improved component becomes available, we rapidly implement component replacement. Since Solid Access USSDs are pre-engineered, not constantly re-engineered like conventional SSDs, we offer extremely short time to market for performance upgrades.

An essential element in the Solid Access business model is that we do not stock components. USSD orders are handled on a just-in-time basis. USSDs are assembled by world-class ISO Certified Integration Center. USSDs are backed by a two-year warranty.

Solid Access stands ready to serve you

If I/O throughput in your enterprise application is a problem, we are confident we can deliver I/O acceleration product at a cost, quality and reliability unmatched in the industry. All inquiries receive our prompt attention.

Welcome to the Solid Access New I/O Economy.