Why are 15K HDDs not dead?

[[DHT]Osiris]

Wouldn't you have techs at each geographical location?

Ahahahahahaha... *breathes in* aaahhhahahahaha.

But seriously. Whitebox builds work if you're the only guy ever needing to do it. Know what happens when a whitebox build of anything goes tits up and the guy who built it is no longer around/didn't document it? Someone gets to go to the principal's office. You don't get fired for buying IBM/Cisco/HP/Netapp/EMC (unless you didn't spring for support). It's wrapped into IT costs and accepted.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

15k drives aren't dead because sometimes you really only need 2-3k IOPS.

As long as they're cheaper per-TB.

 

[Viper GTS]

Another issue that has been there historically is predictability. SSDs can have huge variance from IO to IO, most may happen far quicker but the occasional one that takes 10x as long may kill you. For some applications that need space and predictable IO behavior at a reasonable cost SSDs just aren't/weren't there.

Broadcast video specifically is the application I'm referring to. When you get the capacity you need the IOPS are there and they are 100% predictable. Even 7200 RPM is fine in the environment I work in because I have 1,440 of them.

Viper GTS

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Even 7200 RPM is fine in the environment I work in because I have 1,440 of them.

*chuckle*

 

[XavierMace]

Another issue that has been there historically is predictability. SSDs can have huge variance from IO to IO, most may happen far quicker but the occasional one that takes 10x as long may kill you. For some applications that need space and predictable IO behavior at a reasonable cost SSDs just aren't/weren't there.

Broadcast video specifically is the application I'm referring to. When you get the capacity you need the IOPS are there and they are 100% predictable. Even 7200 RPM is fine in the environment I work in because I have 1,440 of them.

Viper GTS

Sadly, that's not always the case. We've got around 800 drives and we are badly IOPS limited.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Sadly, that's not always the case. We've got around 800 drives and we are badly IOPS limited.

Does your application actually use 80k IOPS, or are you in one of those miserable environments where different departments/servers/systems each have their own little 8-10 drive stripe?

Side note: are you striping across a bunch of different-sized disks maybe? That can cause bottleneck in with certain sans.

 

[XavierMace]

No, we're in a miserable environment where the storage isn't tiered at all and tons of stuff just get tossed on a small to medium sized pool (70-80 drives). That's not my department though. I do have one application though that uses about 4,500 IOPS by itself.