Solid State Storage Poised to Throw a Monkey Wrench in Current Customer Storage Refresh Cycles
This last week I was doing a fair amount of research and writing on solid state storage when I was struck by how much it is poised to change the storage industry. However the change it is going to make is not in the usual context of how much faster or power efficient solid state storage is over traditional hard disk drives (HDDs.) Rather it struck me that the current 3-5 year depreciation period typically used for today's storage systems may need some updating.
Everyone (including myself) always talks about all of the obvious benefits of solid state storage systems including how they offer 2-3x write performance of HDDs, or read performance that is 2 - 20x faster or how certain solid state storage systems are up to 95% more power efficient that HDDs. That is all well and good and worthy of highlighting.
But as those of us in the tech industry are apt to forget, it is those individuals with the checkbooks who tend to have the final say-so on what technologies get bought and which ones go wanting. This is sometimes what makes buying a new technology so difficult to do - it is easy to see the technical benefits but much more difficult to make the business case for it and justify the expenditure.
In large part, this is part of the reason that solid state storage has not experienced a faster adoption rate than it has. Yes, there are still some concerns about its solid state storage's stability but primarily most organizations cite its cost as the major reason as to why they do not buy solid state storage. However the lens through which organizations are looking at acquiring solid state storage may be flawed.
I say that for this reason. In my research this past week, I ran across some typically overlooked factoids about solid state storage such as:
Now will it be good for forty years? Probably not. But is it conceivable that it might be good for five, seven or even ten years? I cannot say authoritatively yes or no at this point but it merits consideration.
Solid state storage is so much faster than any existing HDD that it will hold that edge for the foreseeable future - probably forever. Further, future solid state storage drives may be faster than today's solid state storage offerings but really, how much faster can they get and still result in measurable improvements?
After all, as organizations go from HDDs with millisecond seek and write times to solid state storage solutions that have seek and write times measured in nanoseconds, even if the next generation of solid state storage is twice is fast as today, who cares?
There might be a few high performance apps that would benefit from an extra 200 nanoseconds of performance in next gen products but for the vast majority of businesses, the performance of today's solid state storage solutions is bound to meet their performance needs for the next decade - maybe longer.
So this is why organizations should re-examine how they depreciate solid state storage's cost. If it has no moving parts, makes no noise, is good for 10+ years and its performance is sufficient for that period of time, why subject it to the same 3 or 5 year depreciation period to which today's HDD storage systems are typically subjected to? Why not subject solid state storage systems to a 7 or even a 10 year depreciation schedule?
Granted, a longer depreciation cycle has nothing to do with lowering the upfront cost of solid state storage. However the upfront cost is not always what enterprises look at when making a buying decisions but rather how it hits their budget in the months and years to come. By extending the depreciation on solid state storage over a longer time frame simply on the basis that it is suitable for their production environment for that period of time that disk, solid state storage becomes more affordable since it has a longer useful life.
So should you run out and buy solid state storage and then depreciate it out over 7 or 10 years solely on the basis of reading this blog entry? I hope not because to the best of my knowledge this concept has not yet been thoroughly vetted.
However, solid state storage is already being measured against a different set of standards than HDDs. As such, the depreciation standards that many organizations apply to HDD-based storage arrays may need to be re-examined in light of solid state's durability and its long term performance characteristics. But if this does hold up under scrutiny, watch out! It could throw a monkey wrench in how storage vendors plan for and anticipate storage technology refreshes in their customer accounts in the years to come while accelerating the adoption of solid state storage in the near term.
Everyone (including myself) always talks about all of the obvious benefits of solid state storage systems including how they offer 2-3x write performance of HDDs, or read performance that is 2 - 20x faster or how certain solid state storage systems are up to 95% more power efficient that HDDs. That is all well and good and worthy of highlighting.
But as those of us in the tech industry are apt to forget, it is those individuals with the checkbooks who tend to have the final say-so on what technologies get bought and which ones go wanting. This is sometimes what makes buying a new technology so difficult to do - it is easy to see the technical benefits but much more difficult to make the business case for it and justify the expenditure.
In large part, this is part of the reason that solid state storage has not experienced a faster adoption rate than it has. Yes, there are still some concerns about its solid state storage's stability but primarily most organizations cite its cost as the major reason as to why they do not buy solid state storage. However the lens through which organizations are looking at acquiring solid state storage may be flawed.
I say that for this reason. In my research this past week, I ran across some typically overlooked factoids about solid state storage such as:
- It has no moving parts
- It makes no noise
- It can last up to 40 years
Now will it be good for forty years? Probably not. But is it conceivable that it might be good for five, seven or even ten years? I cannot say authoritatively yes or no at this point but it merits consideration.
Solid state storage is so much faster than any existing HDD that it will hold that edge for the foreseeable future - probably forever. Further, future solid state storage drives may be faster than today's solid state storage offerings but really, how much faster can they get and still result in measurable improvements?
After all, as organizations go from HDDs with millisecond seek and write times to solid state storage solutions that have seek and write times measured in nanoseconds, even if the next generation of solid state storage is twice is fast as today, who cares?
There might be a few high performance apps that would benefit from an extra 200 nanoseconds of performance in next gen products but for the vast majority of businesses, the performance of today's solid state storage solutions is bound to meet their performance needs for the next decade - maybe longer.
So this is why organizations should re-examine how they depreciate solid state storage's cost. If it has no moving parts, makes no noise, is good for 10+ years and its performance is sufficient for that period of time, why subject it to the same 3 or 5 year depreciation period to which today's HDD storage systems are typically subjected to? Why not subject solid state storage systems to a 7 or even a 10 year depreciation schedule?
Granted, a longer depreciation cycle has nothing to do with lowering the upfront cost of solid state storage. However the upfront cost is not always what enterprises look at when making a buying decisions but rather how it hits their budget in the months and years to come. By extending the depreciation on solid state storage over a longer time frame simply on the basis that it is suitable for their production environment for that period of time that disk, solid state storage becomes more affordable since it has a longer useful life.
So should you run out and buy solid state storage and then depreciate it out over 7 or 10 years solely on the basis of reading this blog entry? I hope not because to the best of my knowledge this concept has not yet been thoroughly vetted.
However, solid state storage is already being measured against a different set of standards than HDDs. As such, the depreciation standards that many organizations apply to HDD-based storage arrays may need to be re-examined in light of solid state's durability and its long term performance characteristics. But if this does hold up under scrutiny, watch out! It could throw a monkey wrench in how storage vendors plan for and anticipate storage technology refreshes in their customer accounts in the years to come while accelerating the adoption of solid state storage in the near term.
Buyers Guides
Newsletter Signup
Leave a comment