IDF: Will SSD mean the end of 5GB free?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Storage, Intel on
Cloud computing will shine on SSD, but your free storage might go away when it does.
The reason you get free storage on Gmail and SkyDrive and Mozy and flickr and all the other Web 2.0 services isn’t just to keep up with all the other Web 2.0 services. It isn’t just to draw in visitors who can see and click ads. It’s because when you use hard drives, especially cheap, consumer grade hard drives, to run your search engine on, the only way to make that storage fast enough is to leave most of it empty.
The hard drives that Google stacks together are never more than 25% full, because any more than that and the latency to get the information back off is just too slow to make the search effective and slap the ads on it. The other 75% is just sitting there spinning around on the platter and making you happy by putting your files on there for free makes sense.
You don’t need access often enough to slow down Google’s own accesses and Google can queue your request up to retrieve when it’s convenient - your Internet connection isn’t fast enough for you to notice.
SSD is still expensive, but it could save a lot of money for enterprises and Web services because it’s lower power. For a notebook PC you care about 15% longer battery life - if Intel’s figures carry over to real PCs; for a data centre, you care about Watts/IOPS and Intel is claiming SSD can offer six times the read performance using 98% less power and needing only 75% of the space - because you can put cooler drives closer together without space for fans and AC. That means SSD should quickly start to become common. But that could also mean the end of ever-increasing free online storage.
On the one hand, SSD is fast enough that latency is much less of a problem, so you don’t have to leave most of it empty. And on the other, it’s expensive enough that you don’t want to leave any of it empty.
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Loading ...Comment by WebDesignMiami - August 26, 2008 on 11:21 am
Kudos to the Cloud Crowd for Re-Inventing the Wheel!
One thing 30 years in the IT industry has taught me is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Another is that the only memory we seem to access is short-term. Yet another is that techno-marketeers rely on that, so they can put labels like “revolutionary” and “innovative” on platforms, products and services that are mere re-inventions of the wheel … and often poor copies at that.
A good example is all the buzz about “Cloud Computing” in general and “SaaS” (software as a service) in particular:
Both terms are bogus. The only true cloud computing takes place in aircraft. What they’re actually referring to by “the cloud” is a large-scale and often remotely located and managed computing platform. We have had those since the dawn of electronic IT. IBM calls them “mainframes”:
The only innovation offered by today’s cloud crowd is actually more of a speculation, i.e. that server farms can deliver the same solid performance as Big Iron. And even that’s not original. Anyone remember Datapoint’s ARCnet, or DEC’s VAXclusters? Whatever happened to those guys, anyway…?
And as for SaaS, selling the sizzle while keeping the steak is a marketing ploy most rightfully accredited to society’s oldest profession. Its first application in IT was (and for many still is) known as the “service bureau”. And I don’t mean the contemporary service bureau (mis)conception labelled “Service 2.0″ by a Wikipedia contributor whose historical perspective is apparently constrained to four years:
Instead, I mean the computer service bureau industry that spawned ADAPSO (the Association of Data Processing Service Organizations) in 1960, and whose chronology comprises a notable portion of the IEEE’s “Annals of the History of Computing”:
So … for any of you slide rule-toting, pocket-protected keypunch-card cowboys who may be just coming out of a 40-year coma, let me give you a quick IT update:
1. “Mainframe” is now “Cloud” (with concomitant ethereal substance).
2. “Terminal” is now “Web Browser” (with much cooler games, and infinitely more distractions).
3. “Service Bureau” is now “SaaS” (but app upgrades are just as painful, and custom mods equally elusive).
4. Most IT buzzwords boil down to techno-hyped BS (just as they always have).
Bruce Arnold, Web Design Miami Florida
http://www.PervasivePersuasion.com
Comment by Matt - August 29, 2008 on 3:47 pm
It seems unlikely that the page caches would be upgrading to SSD, as although SSD prices are not quite as scary as they used to be, the prices of terabyte hard drives are also sliding into the non-scary region, and when capacity is king, the choice of one SSD of 128 or 256GB, or a rack of terabyte hard drives is no contest.
It seems likely that SSD will be used more for cases where speed is critical but the amount of data is controlled, and terabyte hard disks where the amount of data is indefinite and speed is not so critical.
Comment by Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe - September 10, 2008 on 4:57 pm
Matt - capacity isn’t king for Google; indexes dont take a lot of data - IOPS and performance are king, so they will take SSD quickly. The speed of retrieving the information to put the right ad on the page is critical to Google. hence, they will move to SSD and where will your free space come from then?
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