Performance in Real-Life Workloads Number 1 Factor When Choosing SSD Solution

Virident Systems, Inc. revealed the results of a survey of 145 enterprise IT professionals regarding their requirements for flash-storage purchases.

55% of respondents identified sustained performance in real-life workloads as the number-one factor when choosing a flash-storage solution, and a majority (65%) indicated they plan to make a flash purchase in the next 12 months.

This survey discovered 60% of respondents find it increasingly important to develop industry-standard, application-level benchmarks to evaluate flash-storage performance.

Key Challenges
Achieving sustained, predictable performance over time and workload remains a key challenge for flash storage, as indicated by the 40% of respondents experiencing mediocre or worse performance in terms of latency, response times and predictability with their current solution. Such widespread disappointment indicates an underlying issue.

The survey uncovered that half of respondents (50%) have difficulty finding benchmarking tools to accurately evaluate flash-storage performance. Of these respondents, 41% find it difficult to recreate close representations of real-world application environments, 39% indicate existing benchmark tools do not accurately represent real-world application workloads, and 20% do not believe benchmark tools exist.

55% of respondents replied “yes” when asked if a simple-to-use and standardized benchmark is needed to evaluate flash storage. Of that 60% almost half, or 45%, cited the need for a simple-to-implement benchmark that can approximate specific workload environments and is normalized to allow easy comparison across vendors.

“While the potential benefits of flash storage are well known, we still see a large number of instances where flash storage is not providing the expected performance,” said Brian Garrett, VP at Enterprise Strategy Group Lab. “The cause is that when evaluating flash storage, it is important to use a benchmark that is simple to use and provides an accurate approximation of your specific workload that is normalized and easy to compare across vendors. Without accurate results provided by a benchmarking tool, it is difficult to determine the ideal flash storage for a particular environment.”

Key Drivers
The survey revealed a steady increase in the use of flash storage, with over three-quarters of respondents (77%) either already using flash storage or planning to use it within the next 12 months.

Respondents indicated the benefits behind this trend:

• 82% indicated performance
• 47% indicated capacity
• 42% indicated scalability

“The findings show that while IT recognizes the advantages of flash storage, issues with sustainable performance can impact ROI,” said Shridar Subramanian, VP of marketing at Virident. “The survey demonstrates that the market requires a flash-storage solution that is capable of delivering sustained performance over time and across workloads. By delivering these features, flash allows customers to integrate it into their existing environments to meet the needs of i/o-intensive applications such as Oracle databases and VDI.“