Designing Solid State Drives Into ATCA-based Platforms

Due to the growth of video on demand (VoD), IPTV media content, and embedded database applications, AdvancedTCA (ATCA)-based storage capacity requirements continue to increase exponentially. In addition, storage requirements have become more complex and varied for ATCA designs that have expanded beyond the central office to include network data center and general data center applications that need to handle a wide variety of server platforms. The advancements and general availability of new storage solutions, particularly solid state drives (SSDs), enables ATCA platform developers to meet the design metrics of a broader range of markets where distributed data storage and management become increasingly required. The continual evolution of SSD storage technology, with its improved capacity, performance, and cost reductions, provides additional opportunities for integrating storage directly into the ATCA platform, allowing new designs to gain the benefit of high performance and availability provided by ATCA-based systems.

Complex Storage Considerations

The expansion of the storage industry has placed higher expectations on the role and performance of the storage subsystem in ATCA-based applications. In VoD, IPTV, and billing/authorization applications there is a customer expectation of, and therefore a need for, instant access to distributed data over a network. This puts storage performance at a premium. This higher performance requirement is further challenged by the finite power and space limitations in most ATCA-based systems that live in a data center or other restricted environment.

A good solution for this dilemma, in light of the multiple storage technologies available to designers, is to integrate a group of cascading hard disk drives (HDDs) with several SSDs to get the job done. Utilizing both storage mediums to their fullest within the required performance, power, and size design specifications allows faster, multi-user data access to “hot data” with an SSD that excels at read performance while relying on HDDs to handle the mass storage load. Because they have no moving parts, SSDs do not have latency issues, so they perform very well in applications with significant amounts of random data. These applications can also benefit from employing a combination of both HDDs and SSDs to intelligently manage how data is written so as not to wear out the SSD and maximize its endurance. SSDs provide the needed high random read performance and fast access to random unstructured data for multi-user environments that demand the highest reliability and data integrity.

This tiered storage approach provides an ideal symbiotic relationship where SSDs act as performance enhancements to a hard drive-based subsystem allowing the most popular content to be accessed quickly, making for a more applicationcentric distribution of storage. Big storage libraries can strategically use SSDs to enable customers to connect on demand, providing the five-9s (99.999%) availability that must be achieved.