Solid-State Disks: Pushing the Envelope in Blade Server Design
Rugged Capabilities
Most blade server vendors are searching for more efficient means of cooling densely packed blades. Hewlett Packard's "dynamic smart cooling" initiative seeks to control heat by focusing cooling on areas identified as "hot spots." For its part, IBM is working on liquid-cooled heat sinks for server processors and water-cooled cabinets. However, these ideas are still under development and are not available now.
Unlike an HDD, a flash SSD generates minimal heat since it has no moving parts, and users can expect the same degree of high-level performance in a wider operating temperature range. These rugged features make flash SSD the most suitable storage platform for Level 3 NEBS-compliant servers. NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) refer to a set of standards established by Bellcore (now known as Telcordia) to determine electromagnetic compatibility, thermal robustness, fire resistance, earthquake and office vibration resistance, and transportation/handling durability of telecom equipment. Telecom carriers deploy equipment to remote locations with unpredictable operating conditions, and NEBS allows them to identify equipment that can provide a high degree of reliability and safety to their network.
The E-Disk Advantage
BiTMICRO Networks, a leading player in the flash SSD arena, successfully penetrated the military/industrial markets with its ruggedized E-Disk flash SSDs. These models are guaranteed to operate in extreme temperatures, from -60°C to +95°C. Other environmental specs are likewise impressive, up to 150Gs of operating vibration and up to 1,000Gs of operating shock, making enterprise and carrier class applications a breeze.
One variant is the E-Disk PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC)-based plug-in flash SSD module. Suitable for blade servers (with PMC slot) that require a reliable, direct attached storage device, it features horizontal connectors that allow parallel fit onto a blade, giving plug-and-play advantages to system administrators. The E-Disk(r) PMC can also be used as a boot and/or storage device for carrier boards such as CompactPCI, VME and MultiBus, and almost any other type of single board computer.
In the enterprise arena, the rising deployment of business intelligence, OLTP (online transaction processing), decision support systems and other transaction-intensive applications place a premium on rapid information transfer, access and retrieval. Fibre Channel and Ultra Wide SCSI E-Disk solid-state drives' impressive performance up to 70 MB/s sustained reads, 48 MB/s sustained writes and 12,500 IOPS make them ideal for applications that exhibit grueling, rapid-fire data access brought forth in transactional and high storage bandwidth environments.
Conclusion
At present, blade servers utilize DAS mainly for system boot and application storage, with a Fibre Channel interface designed into the server to allow for a separate SAN connection. Flash SSDs can help improve, not impede, system performance with faster access times, high I/O rates and solid-state durability. Consider other factors such as hot swappability and ease of deployment, flash SSD is certainly an ideal DAS solution for blade servers.
Jun Alejo is a Marcom Specialist at BiTMICRO Networks (Fremont, CA). You can reach him at jalejo@bitmicro.com.
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