Servers Need Storage Endurance
We’ve been talking about deploying solid-state drives (SSDs) in the data center for years now, but it’s never been a more exciting time to talk data center storage.
Modern enterprise tools, including cloud, big data, the Internet of Things, and software-defined infrastructures are opening up new opportunities and amazing new ways of doing business that we’ve never imagined before.
Seems too good to be true, right? Well, yes and no. These new tools demand serious storage performance, and they’re putting the squeeze on existing spinning disk storage methods. The hard drive has become a huge bottleneck in terms of being able to leverage these great new technologies, but there is a solution at hand and, as we mentioned above, we’ve been talking about it for years. The timing is just right for SSDs to make their heyday in the data center.
But not any SSD will do. There’s a saying we like to use, “not all SSDs are created equal.” Flash is indeed fast, but client SSDs were designed for client use cases. Most desktop and laptop users aren’t running their computer 24/7, constantly shuffling data across the I/O pipeline the way a server does. Installing a client SSD in a server will deliver the IOPS, but not for long. That’s why data centers need a drive that’s designed and built specifically for data center workloads.
We hear it time and time again – cost is the major hurdle to deployment. There certainly is merit to the argument, but that just makes it all the more important to deploy the right drive, so that the customer gets the most out of their investment. SSDs can be cost effective when done right, and we have to look beyond a blind focus on performance. The key is performance and endurance. Data center SSDs need to be able to run a non-stop marathon of I/O without waving the proverbial white flag.
Recently we’ve made strides in identifying the levels of storage performance and endurance that enterprises need, and we’ve designed a whole family of data center-ready SSDs to meet these needs. Each series of drive is tailored for specific use cases: read-intensive workloads, write-intensive workloads, and mixed read/write workloads. Our goal was to create an SSD that gives you only the levels of performance and endurance you need, so that you’re not spending budget on superfluous IOPS.
The Intel® SSD DC S3500 Series is a prime example of this balanced approach. Optimized for read-intensive workloads, this drive delivers read/write performance of up to 500/450 MB/s sequential and up to 75,000/11,500 IOPS.1 As for endurance, the drive can support up to 950TB written over its lifetime.2 And it comes with all the bells and whistles you’d expect from an Intel® SSD: end-to-end protection, 256-bit encryption, and power loss data protection.3
It’s the “everything you need, nothing you don’t” approach to SSDs in the data center. This particular SSD was designed for embedded systems, such as factory control systems, and B2B sales databases, or for static web content delivery. There are other SSDs in the data center family lineup with more kick for more write-intensive use cases, but we wanted to emphasize this one because it’s the ideal value-add candidate.
It really is an incredible time to be in the data center. We’re standing at the confluence of amazing new tools and techniques, and the hardware that makes it all possible. SSDs are writing a pivotal new chapter in the data center story, and the moral of the story is that it’s not just about performance. It’s about lasting performance.

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