EMC, to their credit, were the first storage vendor to put an SSD into their array.
One point of view, was that the emergence of SSD was the end of the high performance disk drive. After all SSD’s offer vastly improved performance over 15K RPM drives, and on IOPS/$ basis are cheaper along every meaningful dimension.
Except, I have this nagging doubt.
SSDs are a great technology. They are fast, they are cheap and they look like disk drives. The problem with an SSD is that data at rest is vastly more expensive if it’s on an SSD and not on spinning rust.
So?
As I have said earlier, the reason disk drives have been so successful in the market place is that application IOPS data density maps very well to IOPS density of disk drives.
Most of the data an application has is cold data. So paying for high performance for cold data is a very expensive proposition. If the array can provide high performance to hot data even if the data is stored on slow storage, then the value of Flash as a medium for storing the data is lessened.
In other words, yes 15K RPM drives don’t provide uniformly excellent performance, but they may provide good enough performance for enough of the data to make SSD’s a niche.
Now, I’m not arguing that SSD’s are not the future, nor am I arguing that 15K RPM drives are the past, I am just observing that the future is murky.
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