Albireo Deduplication for Enterprise Flash
Flash technology is a rapidly growing segment of the storage industry. Flash delivers the I/O performance that enables storage to keep pace with the speed of server processors and closes the performance gap between storage and processor performance. A number of storage offerings leverage the I/O performance of flash technology to store and/or cache performance sensitive, mission critical data.
As the cost of flash technology has become more affordable applications of flash solutions have emerged such as:
- Enterprise Flash Arrays – Arrays that house tens of terabytes of flash storage and address the needs of performance intensive applications.
- Enterprise Flash Cache Solutions – Hardware or software based solutions that use flash to provide high performance for active (hot) data and migrate low use (cold) data off to less costly, traditional mechanical storage.
- Solid State Devices (SSD) – Typically one of two form factors to deliver flash I/O performance:
- Traditional Disk Drive - These units provide a traditional drive form factor and support industry standard SAS/SATA interfaces. Performance for these devices is typically limited by interconnect, but they can be easily deployed in existing storage solutions.
- PCIe – This addresses the I/O latency gap between traditional storage SAS/SATA interfaces and flash by delivering PCIe-based solutions.
Flash Optimization
Over the past few years, the cost of high-performance storage has dropped significantly relative to performance density ($/IOPS/TB). When deduplication technologies are applied to flash technology,the effective costs become even more aligned with spinning disk storage and write operations are optimized because less data is being written relative to the amount of data stored. Vendors are just beginning to offer deduplication in these environments today, as deduplication becomes the enabler that closes the cost and data safety gaps that have been inhibitors to more widespread adoption.
Business Benefits
- Lowers both cost per write operation and effective cost per GB stored
- Improves quality of service and increases customer satisfaction
- Reduces maintenance costs because less storage is needed
- Provides competitive differentiation
Technical Benefits
- Increases performance by lowering the cost per write operation, increasing effective DRAM cache size and reducing average read latency
- Increases reliability by reducing the number of writes (translates to increased write cycles)
- Increases efficiency by lowering the effective cost per GB stored