Are you on Solids yet?
- Date
- 18/11/2011
Before the start of this year I could count on one hand the number of our customers who used solid state drives (SSD) in their SAS® environment. This has started to change and it is changing rapidly.
Usually we store our SAS installation, the operating system, the temporary data created during processing (WORK library), permanent data and other types of SAS files on mechanical disks. Although there are various flavours of interfacing with mechanical disks such as SATA, SAS (not to be confused with the software), generally the faster they spin the faster they serve up data to your computer or servers' CPU and memory for processing.
SAS Software is highly I/O dependent, i.e. it reads-In and writes-Out lots of data. That strategy for processing data is actually very clever (ultimately it allows SAS to process an almost infinite amount of data when other software simply exhausts resources). It just takes a while sometimes. There are a few ways of addressing this, In-Database and In-Memory technologies are hot topics in the SAS industry today, not least is using solid state drives (also known as Flash drives).
In the last decade advances in CPU and memory technology has pretty much kept pace with the growing volumes of data we deal with. Disk technology has not, basically because there is a limit to how fast you can physically spin a disk. Until recently solid state drives were not able to read and write with equal speed, usually reading very quickly but write speeds were relatively slow. The drives themselves were expensive too. However in the last year or so solid state drives have come onto the market with equal read and write performance. This suits SAS and by using such drives, for instance, as WORK libraries we could have a profound benefit on long running SAS jobs.
Amadeus regularly receives requests for help speeding up SAS processing. A few weeks ago, along with one of our customers, we set about putting some new solid state drives through their paces. A large variety of tests were performed on two types of solid state drives along with a traditional mechanical disk as the control. The bottom line? One type of solid state drive saw an average 60% reduction in the time required for SAS jobs on the Windows 2008 R2 x64 operating system.
We work with a range of technologies and appliances for large volume data processing, from SPD Server to in-database technology, but we are amazed at just how quickly and inexpensively we can speed up SAS processing. Better still with costs for high volume, high specification solid state drives plunging, you can expect the return on investment to be months or even weeks.
In December 2011, Andrew Williams, Consultant at Amadeus Software, will publish on our website his findings on SAS processing with solid state technologies. Before you know it, you’ll be weaned onto solids too.
David Shannon, Technical Director Amadeus Software.
