SA data centres are moving to SSDs

[Bradley Prior]

SA data centres are moving to SSDs

Solid-state drives have become increasingly prevalent due to their reduced form factor, increased speeds, and improved reliability.

Ghassan Azzi, Sales Director of Western Digital, told MyBroadband that solid-state drives (SSDs) could start dominating the global storage industry in the coming years.

 

[mercurial]

Finally.

 

[xera]

Lol about time, they must have been waiting for 2020

 

[r00igev@@r]

The article headline is misconstrued. The data centre has nothing to do with it. It is the cloud or hosting provider that is moving to SSDs. These are co-located within the data centre white space.

 

[Bryn]

No one with hosting worth a damn has been using hard drives for years already.

 

[MirageF1]

SSD's are better for day to day use/boot devices than trad HDD. So long as perf over capacity is a priority.

For long term permanent storage...HDD technology is still better (less risk of data loss/corruption) and cheaper( though slower)

 

[Swa]

No one with hosting worth a damn has been using hard drives for years already.

In which world? There's still plenty of HDDs in use as SSD simply can't offer the space that HDD does.

 

[Bryn]

In which world? There's still plenty of HDDs in use as SSD simply can't offer the space that HDD does.

Sure, for backups and dedicated mail servers. Sort of goes without saying. But everything else should have been on SSD since years ago.

 

[My_King]

In which world? There's still plenty of HDDs in use as SSD simply can't offer the space that HDD does.

I`m just glad MS who does hosting still offer HDD as well as SSD.
No need for our domain controller to be SSD.
Or web server.
Or our development labs.

EDIT : Or Storage server

EDIT 2 : Or terminal server

 

[Swa]

Sure, for backups and dedicated mail servers. Sort of goes without saying. But everything else should have been on SSD since years ago.

And storage?

 

[masehare]

In which world? There's still plenty of HDDs in use as SSD simply can't offer the space that HDD does.

In which world? There's still plenty of HDDs in use as SSD simply can't offer the space that HDD does.

You can buy SAN units from Dell with 16TB SSDs. In fact the new trend is NVME.

 

[Swa]

You can buy SAN units from Dell with 16TB SSDs. In fact the new trend is NVME.

At the same price as a 16TB HDD? This is about hosting and not your at home server. You get either speed or space. You get what you pay for and it's usually not both. The statement that HDDs don't belong in hosting is grossly inaccurate.

 

[Bryn]

And storage?

At the same price as a 16TB HDD? This is about hosting and not your at home server. You get either speed or space. You get what you pay for and it's usually not both. The statement that HDDs don't belong in hosting is grossly inaccurate.

For production environments, I use either NVMe storage with Vultr high-frequency servers or Google Cloud's 'persistent disk' SSD storage.

I've exclusively used Google Cloud for new clients lately. Performance is incredible on the premium network, especially when paired with their Cloud DNS and Cloud CDN. Everything is SSD, because backups and snapshots are sent to Backblaze.

Email storage is all hard drives as I understand. I use dedicated reseller email servers with Mailcheap and the storage capacity is too large to be SSD for what I pay.

 

[Swa]

For production environments, I use either NVMe storage with Vultr high-frequency servers or Google Cloud's 'persistent disk' SSD storage.

I've exclusively used Google Cloud for new clients lately. Performance is incredible on the premium network, especially when paired with their Cloud DNS and Cloud CDN. Everything is SSD, because backups and snapshots are sent to Backblaze.

Email storage is all hard drives as I understand. I use dedicated reseller email servers with Mailcheap and the storage capacity is too large to be SSD for what I pay.

And there's the rub. When it comes to any serious storage SSDs can't pick up the slack. It's not just mail storage.

 

[Ipwn 4]

Lol at the comments here, easy to spot the "self hoster" flexing their CPanel on consumer SSD.

In the enterprise spinning disks and tiered storage will live on.

 

[Johnatan56]

And there's the rub. When it comes to any serious storage SSDs can't pick up the slack. It's not just mail storage.

Most web hosting doesn't need serious storage though, and ssd is usually cheap enough to make it worth the boost.

Lol at the comments here, easy to spot the "self hoster" flexing their CPanel on consumer SSD.

In the enterprise spinning disks and tiered storage will live on.

Consumer ssd for most basic tasks is more than good enough, it's a completely different ball game once you go large enterprise.

For both there will still be use cases for HDD.

 

[Bryn]

Lol at the comments here, easy to spot the "self hoster" flexing their CPanel on consumer SSD.

In the enterprise spinning disks and tiered storage will live on.

You referring to me? If Google Cloud's premium network is too consumer for you, please let me know how you host your sites/applications.

 

[Swa]

Most web hosting doesn't need serious storage though, and ssd is usually cheap enough to make it worth the boost.

Only for 100MB websites where SSD makes sense. Then you get your large site where one file is over 100MB and that can easily outdo thousands of them. This is where the article is inaccurate. You can't take shared hosting with minimal space moving to SSD as a trend. You have to look at the overall picture and how much private hosting is on HDD. I'm sure ito overall space HDD hosting is still multiple times that of SSD.

 

[Johnatan56]

Only for 100MB websites where SSD makes sense. Then you get your large site where one file is over 100MB and that can easily outdo thousands of them. This is where the article is inaccurate. You can't take shared hosting with minimal space moving to SSD as a trend. You have to look at the overall picture and how much private hosting is on HDD. I'm sure ito overall space HDD hosting is still multiple times that of SSD.

How many sites have over 100MB files? I'd consider that very, very rare and even then a few hundred MB isn't a lot of space. On Azure it's something like 32GB HDD vs SSD is $2.58 vs $4.03 for South Africa West (so Cape Town), with standard SSD allowing for smaller disks as well if you don't really need any space, most sites should be <8GB, so $0.50 for 8GB of SSD storage (yes, there's also storage transaction costs, but we're talking like R5 here).

Most sites are tiny, there's rarely a need for large storage amounts, a vast majority of large storage where you'd need to start thinking about splitting it should go to e.g. azure blob storage which is around R1.28 per GB write and then R0.10 per 10k reads in hot storage, easily beating the cost of reserving HDD storage since you shouldn't care if the blob takes a few hundred ms extra to start the download.

 

[Swa]

How many sites have over 100MB files? I'd consider that very, very rare and even then a few hundred MB isn't a lot of space. On Azure it's something like 32GB HDD vs SSD is $2.58 vs $4.03 for South Africa West (so Cape Town), with standard SSD allowing for smaller disks as well if you don't really need any space, most sites should be <8GB, so $0.50 for 8GB of SSD storage (yes, there's also storage transaction costs, but we're talking like R5 here).

Most sites are tiny, there's rarely a need for large storage amounts, a vast majority of large storage where you'd need to start thinking about splitting it should go to e.g. azure blob storage which is around R1.28 per GB write and then R0.10 per 10k reads in hot storage, easily beating the cost of reserving HDD storage since you shouldn't care if the blob takes a few hundred ms extra to start the download.

It isn't about how many there are. It's about one easily having the space requirement of thousands of small ones. HDD is under R0.50/GB now. SSD is easily 4 times that, actually more if you consider prices are near linear and you don't get volume discount. Hosting providers aren't going to pass on the benefits of SSD without also passing the extra cost either in price or less storage space.