Rip and Replace vs Predictability: Why SSDs with Predictable Latency Matters

Опубликовано 21 декабря 2022, 21:42

In the past, many of the world’s most successful applications started as internal products that ran on small, private servers. Today, more products and services begin by prototyping on internal servers built with off-the-shelf client components such as consumer-oriented SSDs. This practice reduces costs as commodities are pushed from prototype to production. It is a viable practice for applications intended for intermittent use, but what happens when an app gets really popular?
Unless you’re already built on a dedicated tier-1 data center, your original design specs will need to change. This is especially true for tools and services managing security, compliance, or privacy information that you want kept inside the network. Ripping and replacing internal resources can become routine as drives age, fail, or don’t perform for the growing demands.
Larger application and service providers still use client drives at scale, ripping and replacing where necessary: sometimes hundreds at a time. The number of data centers practicing this is shrinking as enterprise SSDs become more affordable and attractive to both price-sensitive operations and those desiring predictable, stable performance from their servers.

Predictability is Key
For high-end data centers, reliable performance is key. Many data centers know the value of buying enterprise-grade SSDs. For example, cloud hosting and SaaS companies need to know their enterprise SSDs will deliver consistent performance with minimal latency. An e-commerce site where customers experience lag when processing orders and payments will be dissatisfying and suboptimal. This user experience can have a real-world business impact over time. If customers complain about the consistent latency, they are likely to look for another host, CDN, or application platform.
SSDs should also be considered on their endurance rating as well as latency. Data center SSDs are universally higher-rated for endurance than client SSDs. This makes them both more reliable and relatively safer, as they already meet the performance requirements the data center sets. Client drives today use exotic write and caching methods to save on cost, and will likely never be completely filled during the lifetime of the system, so no change in user experience is never noticed. But put that same drive in a data center application with a 24/7 read/write operation, and slower performance will start to show up.

Predictable Uptime is More Than IOPs
Another consideration should be figuring out what happens in the event of repeated errors. If a technical issue occurs with a client SSD installed in a server, you are unlikely to get good support or a fix from the manufacturer, as you are using the drive outside of its intended purpose. Operations requiring a very high standard of reliability in service uptime should not risk using consumer-grade products. Enterprise SSDs offer levels of support and service not to be found with consumer products.

Enterprise-grade SSDs aren’t simply off-the-shelf products. They’re highly-tuned for read-intensive and mixed-use applications. Many instances feature custom nuances built in for a particular use case, such as supporting those use cases to ensure uptime. If a cache of enterprise SSDs fails, your support team is just a call away to replace or re-engineer a product based on operational requirements. When starting a server operation, the best option is to buy SSDs intended for server workloads from a reputable company. A server with a client SSD installed will have an untested hardware configuration that connects to RAID controllers which behave differently to client machines.
Any enterprise-grade product should begin with enterprise-grade hardware. Thanks to today’s pricing and performance, you can enjoy performance, long-term scalability, and flexibility to ramp up.
In short, enterprise-grade SSDs have the stability and reliability to make your product or service a success.

Basically, if you’re creating an enterprise-grade product, start with enterprise-grade hardware. With today’s pricing and performance, you’ll still maintain the flexibility to ramp up without sacrificing performance or long-term scalability.
In-short, use enterprise grade SSDs for the stability and reliability to make your product or service a success. Humble beginnings needn’t hamstring your operations.