Solid-state storage appliances make good business sense

Solid-state storage is increasingly becoming an attractive alternative to the over-provisioning and management headaches of traditional hard disk drive arrays in many IT infrastructures. 

Leveraging the benefits of solid-state storage in a dedicated appliance is a smart move for businesses, enabling companies to improve application performance, leverage existing IT investments and cut costs, according to experts at Dataram Corporation, manufacturer of high-quality computer memory, storage products and software.

Solid-state appliances can optimise performance, leverage existing IT investments and measurably reduce the total cost of ownership associated with storage infrastructure in a typical OLTP or OLAP environment consisting of network, database, host and storage. Boasting excellent reliability and availability, they typically feature hot-swappable redundant power supplies and drives, and all but the most entry-level systems offer built-in backup and automatic restore. Monitoring and remote management are offered via flexible, Web-based browsers and system status alerts.

"In a world of increasing data, higher-volume transactions and tighter budgets, IT departments should definitely evaluate solid-state solutions that maximise performance while minimising cost," said Dataram's Chief Technologist Jason Caulkins. "Solid-state storage appliances offer customers significant benefits due to their ability to seamlessly integrate into existing SANs, dynamically cache I/O-intensive data, dramatically accelerate application performance and provide an immediate return on investment."

Solid-state storage appliances offer a compelling business case for mid-range storage environments by delivering:

. Improved Application and SAN Performance
Typical storage servers are configured for speed, not capacity.  Businesses must over-provision storage capacity to gain improvement in storage performance.  This quickly becomes a wasteful exercise because the amount of spinning disk required to attain the performance required for business-critical computing becomes cost prohibitive.  With a solid-state appliance as part of the total storage infrastructure, servers need far fewer disks to reach desired performance levels and  capacity can be optimized.  Application performance can be improved by as much as 30 times - obtaining high-end performance from mid-range systems.

. Leverage Existing IT Investments
Solid-state storage appliances can be transparently installed into existing SAN architectures with no changes to the operating system or infrastructure. By being interoperable with existing storage subsystems, solid-state appliances deliver immediate results and extend the life of current infrastructure without the need for expensive upgrades.  Solid-state appliances provide a cost-effective alternative solution to purchasing additional storage systems, reducing total cost of ownership by more than 50 percent on average.

. Significant Infrastructure Cost Savings
Because IT managers can leverage their mid-range storage investment and obtain the equivalent performance of high-end storage systems, solid-state storage appliances configured with a mid-range server can save an organization hundreds of thousands of dollars.  And solid-state storage appliances may require no additional software, can provide lower licensing costs, and will cut energy, cooling and floor space expenses dramatically compared to high-end solutions.

Solid-state storage appliances, like Dataram's XcelaSAN, provide application acceleration to businesses that rely on transaction-intensive databases, or perform high volume online transactions and/or analytical processing.  With increased flexibility, scalability that adds capacity and performance, and cost approximately one-sixth that of high-end solutions, solid-state storage appliances make good business sense for organizations looking to optimize their existing storage infrastructure.