SSD in the Enterprise

[DarkOne_BW]

Lately I've been struggling with the idea of using consumer SSDs in Enterprise servers. I've already running a Samsung 840 Pro in an old HP DL380 G5 that I use as a VMware testbed, but after years in the datacenter world I can't bring myself to trust it for anything even close to production.

I'm torn because I've seen a lot of enterprise-grade spinning disks fail and using consumer drives for enterprise applications feels inherently wrong.

That said, for mostly read-intensive applications a consumer SSD seems a reasonable fit, providing there's sufficient data protection policies in place. The performance I get out of a $200 consumer SSD exceeds that of $2000 worth of enterprise spinning disks. It's hard for me to fully cost-justify expensive spinning disks knowing they're mechanical devices that will fail in 5-7 years. My applications that require performatnce don't need much from a sizing standpoint (less than 150GB).

SO what's your opinion? Would you run a production, mostly read-intensive database on a $200 consumer SSD? What about write-intensive? Exchange? An accounting/payroll server (Microsoft Dynamics)? How much faith would you put in RAID-1 sets of those drives?

 

[_Gea]

Yes of course, use SSD if you can afford or accept reduced capacity. They are much faster regarding IO.

You can expect a similar failure rate with desktop disks and desktop SSDs. With heavy writes, you should replace them after a few years. If you need high performance and best reliability look at Intel s3700 for heavy writes and maybee s3500 in future for mainly read use cases. With these new SSDs I would expect a better reliability than with disks.

Use Raid, I use SSDs in ZFS Raid Z2 with Solarish since a few years (ESXi-NFS datastore)

 

[madrebel]

look at sandisk's enterprise SATA line, they're near $1GB and have super caps. sandisk recently bought pliant and more recently a company called smart storage. both of these companies have exceptional SSDs with the smart line having the better sata disks.

typically 'consumer' SSDs are identical to enterprise drives focused at read heavy workloads and typical rating is 3000 P/E cycles.

*edit* kingston also has enterprise SSDs with super caps pretty near $1 a gig and samsung also has a relatively new line based off the 840 drives with suepr caps and more over provisioning too.

 

[mwroobel]

It all depends on your true needs, and your risk/reward appetite/threshold. If you are starved for capital $$$ and can't live in a 5 year acquire/depreciate/replace cadence, then you make accommodations.... How many depend on your needs and position.
From a responsibility standpoint, If everything goes fine, you will be remembered for about a minute for saving a few bucks. If something goes wrong, you will be cursed for hours. If someone wants to use it against you they can and will, for you personally decided to use something that is not generally meant for the use case you chose.
From a "will it really work" standpoint, it depends on your workload and io patterns. It will certainly work for a time, maybe a long time (again depending on io use) but is it worth it to you?
In a true enterprise situation, when you take into account the cost differential between a consumer and enterprise SSD in the grand scheme of things it is less than you think. Especially since you are stating such a small use need (<=150GB) I would stick with something that is both rated for the type of use you need and something that is on the HCL approved list for your particular application.
Over 5 years of costs (both capital and expense) of rackspace, cooling, servers, backup etc.

 

[mwroobel]

It all depends on your true needs, and your risk/reward appetite/threshold. If you are starved for capital $$$ and can't live in a 5 year acquire/depreciate/replace cadence, then you make accommodations.... How many depend on your needs and position.

From a responsibility standpoint, If everything goes fine, you will be remembered for about a minute for saving a few bucks. If something goes wrong, you will be cursed for hours. If someone wants to use it against you they can and will, for you personally decided to use something that is not generally meant for the use case you chose.

From a "will it really work" standpoint, it depends on your workload and io patterns. It will certainly work for a time, maybe a long time (again depending on io use) but is it worth it to you?
In a true enterprise situation, when you take into account the cost differential between a consumer and enterprise SSD in the grand scheme of things it is less than you think. Especially since you are stating such a small use need (<=150GB) I would stick with something that is both rated for the type of use you need and something that is on the HCL approved list for your particular application.

Over 5 years of costs (both capital and expense) of rackspace, cooling, servers, backup etc. you will find the price differential for this particular use (1 or 2 enterprise drives) so small as to not even be worth it in the grand scheme of things.