Google testing Intel SSDs
Google gets flashy
INTERNET GIANT GOOGLE could be toying with the idea of moving over to Solid State Disk (SSD) technology, according to Digitimes which says the company has just bought a load of them from Intel.
Digitimes claims that Google’s newly-purchased technology is a combined Intel/Marvell offering, with the SSDs based on Chipzilla’s technology and the server controller chips being provided by Marvell. The report reckons that the drives are destined to be used at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, and will ship by the end of the second quarter at the very latest.
SSDs, which use flash memory instead of the heavier and more energy-consuming rotating magnetic plates used in HDDs, have been becoming more and more popular of late. Although their capacity levels still aren’t up to much, it’s easy to see how the significant performance boosts and low energy requirements that SSDs provide would be attractive to an Internet behemoth like Google, which is obviously keen on testing them out.
Google has literally thousands of servers, and the company also has somewhat of a reputation for coming up with most of its own hardware and software products. This could mean that Google plans to build on the SSD technology in order to come up with new "Google-ised" SSDs ideally suited to the firm’s specific needs.
Due to its potential for eventual wide scale deployment by the search engine giant, however, Digitimes speculates that the move could result in a profound shortage of 16Gb and 32Gb NAND flash chips. µ
L'Inq
Digitimes
Comments
Not just about capacity
The main reason for choosing to go with SSD instead of convention hard drives is because of their I/O performance. When it comes to data transfer SSD aren’t much faster than high end desktop hard disks, in the server market they are slower. Also comparing SSD with 2.5” server disks there isn’t a huge amount of power consumption difference, the main reason for switching would be I/O performance, which SSD blows mechanical hard drives out the water with.In a scenario where a company requires a lot of I/O bandwidth for their disks and only 400GiB of Data, and each disk is 100GiB. The company wouldn’t just buy four disks, this would leave a massive bottle neck because the disks can’t perform enough I/O operations. So you buy more disks so you have enough I/O operations, so the company instead buys 12 disks, to provide the require bandwidth. The net result is that company is only using 1/3rd of space of the hard disk.
With the above scenario again, but instead of using mechanical hard drives, they use 128GiB SSD, which’s I/O bandwidth far exceeds that of a mechanical drive. In this case you only need four to provide all the bandwidth and capacity needed. While a SSD vs. a mechanical hard drive in terms of power consumption is fairly close when you look at the above scenario its easy to see that 4 SSD hard disks are going to consume a lot less power than 12 mechanical hard disks.
For someone like good who require a lot of bandwidth for searching etc, its seems like a good idea, as capacity isn’t as much of an issue as I/O.
Seek time
SSD much better on random access applications (no seek time). And this have a good implications for data management, as data placement optimizations are simply not needed anymore. And from public descriptions of their technological approaches, their data is not so volatile, so biggest disadvantage of SSD won't bite them.I guess that other search engines will follow the suit very soon. Except for MS, that will have problems due to its excessive reliance on the disk access in the OS (registry, logs, etc).
Prices Going DOWN 70% for XMAS
Its' True, with improvement in smooth operation & quality, SSD is diverting from mainsteam Manufacturers & starting Fast introduction that will ramp thru Summer'8, with Prices Dropping into affordable range near New Year, Over 70% decrease on smaller 32 gb SSD is expected.Heres another note today from ATI: about Microsoft vista capable:
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/library/vistaexhibitsone.pdf
Its more fascinating than SSD Conjectures.
drashek