Hu's Blog

Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates and Jim Handy of Objective Analysis, two market and technology analysts who blog for Forbes.com, have initiated a survey of storage end users.  The object is to determine the Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) for several popular enterprise applications.  This survey is on-going and the results are expected this fall.

In their current blog post they said that most of the IOPS requirements, (79%) so far, were in the 10K to 100K range. However, they were surprised to see that 10.6% of the respondents claimed requirements of over 1 million IOPS.

This will certainly change with the recent flurry of announcements of 1 million IOPS from Nexenta, Nimbus, RAID Inc., Raidundant, Texas memory, Violin and other SSD storage vendors including Hitachi VSP with its new Flash Acceleration feature announced last week. Also adding incentive to the movement to 1 million IOPS are the recent announcements from Microsoft and VMware exceeding the 1 million IOPS mark with their virtual machines.  1 million IOPS will quickly become the new threshold for storage systems as well as for hypervisors.

The significance of the VSP Flash announcement is that this is accomplished with a proven enterprise storage system with all the enterprise functions of dynamic tiering, thin provisioning, snapshots, distance replication, petabyte scalability, virtualization, and API support for interfaces like VAAI. With dynamic tiering, only a small amount of SSDs are needed to deliver SSD performance to hot pages while the rest of the data volumes or files can reside on lower cost HDDs. With this type of system many more users will be able to realize the benefits of SSD performance without the cost and limitations of purpose build SSD appliances.

It will be interesting to see the results of the Forbes survey later this fall and to see what percent of users will require more than 1 million IOPS.

For more information on the VSP Flash announcement see my previous blog or contact your HDS account team.