How to build a cost-effective data center?

With the release of the sixth generation Xeon data center processor, it brings a new round of application upgrades to AI, data analytics, networking, security, storage and HPC. As a data center grade processor designed for sustainability, improving performance and cost performance is the key to meeting today's exploding demand for data and applications. Storage, as one of the key roles in the data center, has also assumed the responsibility of promoting efficiency and cost performance, so in the environment of a new round of data center hardware upgrade, the effective use of reasonable resources to build cost-effective data centers has become particularly important.

Distributed storage opens the mind

Among the options to control costs, a distributed storage system is a scalable system structure that uses multiple storage servers to work together to achieve load sharing and improve system reliability, availability, scalability and storage efficiency. The new storage structure change means that there are new demands for solid-state drives that bear high-speed storage, such as stronger performance in horizontal expansion capabilities and performance.

For example, the Kaixia CD8P series achieves a good balance between performance and energy efficiency, supporting the latest PCIe® 5.0, with sequential read performance of up to 12,000MB/s* and 4K random read capability of 2000K IOPS, CD8P ensures efficient operation in large-scale data center environments through energy efficient design. This balance of performance and power efficiency makes it ideal for applications in areas such as AI, large models, cloud computing and edge computing.

At the same time, the enterprise solid state drive thanks to the use of its self-developed flash memory and controller, providing high reliability and data protection functions, combined with power failure protection (PLP), can support a wide range of application needs. Light weight and low power consumption make the system more efficient and energy efficient.

Software-defined storage

After addressing performance and cost, better implementation of application scaling has naturally become an important issue in data center deployment, of which software-defined storage is one of the current recognized trends. Software-defined storage, that is, through the stripping of the relationship between hardware and software, through the service management interface to define virtualized storage, engineers can focus more on storage functionality, rather than cumbersome hardware configuration, thus providing a better choice of portability and flexibility to meet the elastic increase and decrease of data centers and rapid deployment.

In essence, software-defined storage still needs to consider the coupling between software and hardware. Only the storage medium has better versatility and standardized interfaces can meet the rapid deployment of software-defined storage. Therefore, EDSFF or 2.5-inch specifications will be given priority in the selection of specifications. To ensure flexibility in deployment, management, monitoring, tuning, high availability, and more.

For the deployment environment of EDSFF specification, Kaixia CM7 and CD8P series have launched corresponding versions. Take Kaixia CM7 series as an example, as a high-performance enterprise-class dual-port SSD, it is one of the first enterprise-class SSDS on the market to provide PCIe 5.0 and NVMe™ 2.0 support, which can fully release the data throughput performance of GPU during inference operations and meet the needs of multi-GPU loading.

Lay the foundation for efficiency

With more and more cloud applications, enterprise and Internet data growing at a rate of more than 50 percent every year, solving complex and variable storage needs has become an urgent problem. The rapidly changing market environment requires data centers to respond and demonstrate excellent capabilities in terms of cost, scalability, and high concurrency performance, which is very demanding.

The premise of meeting this demanding requirement is that the data center needs a set of cost-effective storage solutions as support. Such a solid state drive should have general technical specifications, stable storage consistency, and forward-looking, can help the data center stand out in a new round of application expansion, for high-quality data center level solid state drive is also destined to give the data center high-speed expansion, save energy consumption, reduce costs through efficient operation, and lay a solid hardware foundation for the next round of application scenarios.