HP sticks SSDs on Proliants

THE MAKER of printer ink that costs about as much as Britain's Royal Family and does not work as hard, HP has decided to jack SSDs into its ProLiant G5 and G6 server ranges.

It means that data centre admins will be able to use specific drives for different types of applications if they want them to go faster or not.

HP is offering to replace two to 24 hard disks with the new SSDs. Whether or not you'll want to do this will depend on configurations, business requirements, budget constraints and whether or not you can convice your bean-counters that SSDs are not only cool but will show a good return on the additional investment.

The NAND flash memory in the SSDs will be made by Samsung and comes in either 60GB and 120GB capacities. HP has been offering SSDs as an option in its high-end EVA storage arrays since March 2009. Clearly that has worked well enough for HP to offer it on the more common file storage and web servers.

However using SSDs can be risky. SSDs have read times that are 40 times faster than hard disks but write speeds that are also faster but not so impressive. It is also suspected, although not proven, that they do not store data as well or as long as conventional hard disk drive arrays.

Samsung Flash marketing manager Brian Beard said he worked with HP for months to configure the drives to HP's requirements.

They had to add advanced write algorithms and load balancing that moves the data around the disk to make full use of the solid state memory and help it last longer.

Samsung's SSDs execute random read commands at 25,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and random writes at 6,000 IOPS. They have a sequential read speed of 230MB/s and a sequential write speed of 180MB/s. µ