Enterprises see endurance and cost as obstacles to SSD penetration

SMART Storage Systems announced the results of a survey among enterprises about solid state disk (SSD) adoption. The report reveals 77 percent of respondents see NAND flash endurance as the key to SSD adoption in the enterprise market, and that 55 percent identified cost as the primary barrier to transition to an all-flash storage environment. Of the respondents, 59 percent believed that MLC flash memory is enterprise ready. Full details below.

SMART Storage Systems, an innovative enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) technology provider, today announced the results of an international industry survey revealing that 77 per cent of respondents believe NAND Flash endurance is the key to widespread SSD adoption in the enterprise. Further underscoring the need for improved endurance of more cost-effective multi-level cell (MLC) NAND Flash, 55 per cent of respondents identified cost as the primary barrier to transitioning to an all-Flash enterprise storage environment.

The SMART Storage Systems survey was conducted at the company’s exposition booth during the 2012 Flash Memory Summit, VMworld 2012, SNW Fall (U.S.) 2012, and SNW Europe 2012 conferences, collecting 722 responses. Survey participants included IT management and infrastructure professionals, storage architects, and engineering and product managers from the United States and Europe.

Viewed by many as the answer to server and storage bottlenecks, the survey found that 52 per cent of organisations currently leverage SSDs in their environment, either in all-Flash architectures or SSDs combined with traditional hard-disk drives (HDDs). Seeking a balance between cost, performance, and endurance, many data centre managers look to consumer-grade MLC Flash-based SSDs. However, due to its inherently low endurance, MLC-based SSDs quickly wear out in write-intensive enterprise workloads, requiring organisations to replace their SSDs multiple times during the warranty period thereby increasing the total cost of ownership (TCO). While 59 per cent of the survey’s respondents believe that MLC Flash is enterprise-ready, 72 per cent rated the endurance of their current SSDs as a seven or below on a 10-point scale, resulting in slower penetration of SSDs in enterprise environments due to the need to replace drives within the stated warranty period.

In addition to highlighting the need for endurance-enhanced MLC NAND Flash, the survey also spotlighted key factors that data centre purchasers consider when evaluating solutions, including:

41 per cent of respondents say performance is the most important characteristic when evaluating SSDs, with reliability and endurance rounding out the top three.

40 per cent of respondents would choose MLC if they were the storage purchase decision maker for their data centre, compared to 30 per cent for single-level cell (SLC).

Only seven per cent of respondents would select triple-level cell (TLC) NAND Flash for their enterprise environment, if it were available.

“Since SSDs became a viable option for the enterprise, performance, cost, and reliability have been critical points of evaluation. However, as IT purchasers begin to better understand the technology’s strengths and weaknesses, we are seeing more importance placed on the balance between endurance and cost,” said John Scaramuzzo, President of SMART Storage Systems. “We have always believed that endurance is the key to making SSDs truly viable in the enterprise. Our Guardian Technology Platform enables consumer-grade MLC Flash to reach up to 50 drive writes per day, enabling SSDs to strike the balance between performance, reliability, cost, and endurance, and meet the requirements of nearly any enterprise application.”