By guest blogger, Jur Faber, CEO Consolidate IT- The Netherlands

Over the years the storage concepts have changed drastically.

Application performance was a matter of memory, drives and CPU power. As I sit here looking at a server, I’m confronted with idle (napping?) CPU’s and overheating drives (nothing like the summer odor of cooking plastic.)

The quality performance of everyday applications that the users need is limited nowadays by the storage. It’s that simple. I need no intelligent tiering device to help me determine that we need a tangible paradigm shift and re-align our focus onto what matters most: a cost-effective and scalable way to limit (REMOVE!) the ongoing IO bottlenecks.

With virtual desktops around every corner and server virtualization already cemented in the data center (cloud!) another visceral area is application consolidation: adding more and more applications to a database server (and it’s corresponding transactions) is causing further delays. Some of our customers have a painful experience each time they need to update their transactional or informational website. It’s basic math – too many data requests and not enough IO’s to accommodate. Ouch.

Even with Exchange 2010 (a smoother, more optimized version to be sure) it needs a high amount of IO’s if you prefer to not field help-desk calls from frustrated users (and executives). Nobody likes seeing the little Microsoft rectangle pop-up bubble saying it’s experiencing delays. That is disk contention at it’s best (worst).

Interestingly, the path to solve this problem is easy, it is simply a matter of design. Move away from 200 IO devices to 50,000-250,000 IO devices, or in other words move from Hard-drives (mechanical) to Solid State Drives (Electronic).

Move away from the expensive and volatile DRAM. Minimize the amount of allotted memory for caching to secure the valuable IOs.

Deploy storage that is designed for handling 50,000+ IO drives, with no latency in between.

WHIPTAIL manufactures an SSD storage array that is designed to provide the performance and endurance to resolve this current IO challenge: filling in the gap between CPU and drive performance, electronic vs mechanical.

Customers that are deploying VDI, or ESX or Exchange will benefit from SSD’s – specifically the WHIPTAIL solution, 250,000 write IOs per second at an affordable price.

Changes in technology are always logical and defendable once they are implemented and the value is made clear.

Why as humans are we sometimes resistant to innovation? Once we have experienced the benefit it seems so natural.

Times are changing. It’s time to change the storage technology we use for transactions. It seems logical to move on and finally embrace SSDs in the appropriate platform for performance. Individual drives are too expensive and are consuming too much energy, which here in Europe is an important factor.

We have seen the adoption of this technology in Europe for several customers like The Pension Trusts, Bridgend College, KPN benefitting from the WHIPTAIL SSD storage for their transactions and VDI deployments.