Solid State Storage is often thought of as being used in one of
two extremes. Either in the high end enterprise to acceleration
databases or in the consumer netbook, smartphone market. The truth
is that solid state storage can be used in a wide variety of
applications in businesses of all sizes. The small data center with
two to three servers should not exclude SSD from its
consideration.
This market may be an ideal match for disk form factor SSDs.
This is because the small sized data center already has existing
servers and may not need a SAN or certainly a large SAN with SSD
just yet.Their servers often have available drive slots that the
SSD can be inserted into. Finally most of these small business
class servers also make adding a drive easy, while getting to the
internals of the system to add an SSD card may be more
challenging.
When should a small data center use SSD? Even if you only have a
sever or two adding SSD to them can greatly improve performance. In
most cases this does not mean switching over entirely to SSD either
but leveraging the technology as a cache or storage area for highly
active but temporal data like transaction log files.
Installing an SSD as a second drive and then moving those types
of files to that drive can greatly improve performance of a system
that is being pushed to its limits, preventing a server upgrade
without dramatically changing day to day work flows. Which not only
saves the cost of buying new hardware but the time and expertise
required to move an application from the old server to the new.
For example several of the operating system vendors are
partnering with server hardware vendors to offer preconfigured
small business bundles with a few core applications like email,
databases and web services already installed on the server
hardware.
Since many of these servers are supplied with simple SATA hard
disks, as the needs of the business grow, these starter servers may
exhibit performance problems that quite often can be related to
storage performance. Instead of upgrading the server or even
installing a faster hard drive it may make more sense to add a
secondary SSD to these servers and set the applications to store
those very active files on the SSD.
Even if the smaller data center is considering its first SAN to
take advantage of server virtualization, a local SSD in the server
can help. Most entry level SANs are iSCSI or NFS based utilizing
1GbE connections to keep costs down. The problem is that even a
small data center can at times see performance issues with 1GbE
connections. Leveraging an SSD to keep temporal high I/O type of
traffic off of the 1GbE connection may keep those peaks from
causing a performance problem.