SSD Data Reduction: The Benefits For Enterprises

Key Highlights

• Data reduction techniques have become increasingly popular in primary storage systems that support mission-critical applications. 
• The superiority of SSDs over HDDs has made it possible to use compression and deduplication technologies even in primary storage systems. 

Vendors have improved their data reduction techniques to minimize the impact on performance and improve efficiency. Data reduction techniques remove redundant data at the bit and block levels. Data reduction was relegated to secondary storage, supporting backups and archives for many years. However, IT teams were reluctant to implement compression and deduplication on primary storage systems due to their potential impact on application performance.

Data reduction operations could consume memory and CPU resources, increase latency, add I/O overhead, and reduce overall performance. Some storage systems took an all-or-nothing approach to data reduction, which presented challenges for organizations that had to comply with data regulations requiring data to be stored in its original format.

Advancements in SSDs 

Advancements in SSDs have resulted in a new generation of devices that can deliver exceptional IOPS, microsecond latency, and performance that can accommodate data reduction overhead. SSDs that conform to PCIe 4.0 is now common, offering faster data rates than were possible a few years ago. Data reduction technologies have also evolved, minimizing their impact on performance and delivering more effective data reduction.

Vendors have made SSD data reduction highly adaptive and improved their algorithms to provide smarter reduction and better performance. Data reduction capabilities in all-flash arrays can increase the capacity of their storage systems, save energy, and decrease the storage footprint.

Benefits of SSD Data Reduction

Data reduction reduces the number of program-erase cycles, extending the drive’s life and reducing the data transmission load. These factors help to decrease overall storage costs and make SSDs more affordable for more workloads. 

Although SSD data reduction operations can still affect performance, their impact is minimal compared to the performance gains offered by enterprise drives. 

Before choosing a storage product, decision-makers should fully understand a system’s data reduction capabilities, its potential effect on application performance, and how much an organization saves in storage costs. By doing so, organizations can leverage data reduction technologies to increase the effective capacity of their storage systems and achieve significant cost savings.