Prioritizing and implementing new business initiatives is imperative to keep up with a fast-paced market and changing technology requirements. These initiatives require planning your IT infrastructure costs for systematic implementation and ongoing maintenance. This is critical to prevent uncontrolled budgetary costs.
However, supply chain issues have disrupted the IT purchase process for these business initiatives. This challenge further signifies the importance of budgetary costs and the efficiency of IT infrastructure.
For example, the total cost of ownership (TCO) should include:
- The acquisition cost of hardware and software
- Opportunity costs of downtime
- Productivity losses
- End-user experience
- Infrastructure support
I’m intrigued by the business and financial benefits of implementing technology solutions at micro and macro levels.
This blog aims to unlock the infrastructure TCO benefits of deploying Pliops Extreme Data Processor (XDP) in the server, rack environment, or entire data center level.
Impact Areas of TCO and Data Infrastructure Challenges
TCO analysis should include a comprehensive assessment of IT infrastructure and other data center costs over three or five years.
IT decision-makers must assess and approve the costs required for new business initiatives. Design and deployment of large scale distributed systems for on-premises, cloud, or hybrid cloud are expensive.
The areas that impact the TCO are:
- Storage Capacity: Adopting new internal and external data sources for digital transformation initiatives to build data-driven organizations leads to data growth. This results in high storage costs.
- Performance & Scalability: As data storage and application users increase, scaling infrastructure becomes more costly to achieve performance and quality of service.
- Infrastructure Resiliency: The opportunity cost of downtime and customer satisfaction (CSAT) increases the redundant storage and server costs for implementing infrastructure resiliency.
- Storage Durability: The incremental cost of refreshing expensive flash storage (SSDs) due to wear out even before the hardware refresh cycles.
5 Ways Pliops Helps Make Informed TCO Decisions
Here are the top five reasons Pliops is the best solution to deliver the most value to customers in reducing the total cost of ownership for your IT infrastructure.
1. Capacity Expansion TCO
Pliops Extreme Data Processor (XDP) enables organizations to grow their data footprint efficiently. For example, XDP provides line-rate data compression, allowing close to 100% SSD capacity utilization. It also offers uncompromised storage capacity while providing data protection.
The combined benefits of these Pliops XDP features provide data storage capacity expansion up to 6x.
The storage capacity expansion helps:
- Reduce the cost ($) per Terabyte metrics at the server level.
- Reduce the cost per Petabyte at the rack or data center level by more than 100%.
The increased storage capacity helps:
- Increase multitenancy for applications.
- Provides more cloud volumes from the storage cluster to reduce the cost per user.
2. Performance & Scalability TCO
Across various customer and partner engagements, XDP consistently demonstrates its ability to accelerate relational databases, NoSQL, and software-defined storage system performance 3x to 10x.
In addition, all these application workloads get the same predictable and steady performance from XDP. Also, the four-nines latency reduction proved beneficial in many NoSQL applications improving QoS by 4x.
Furthermore, the combined benefit of performance scalability (fps/tps/IOPS), latency reduction (Average/4 9’s), and capacity expansion enable organizations to get up to 3x more storage and data processing out of their infrastructure footprint. The result is a decrease of 60% to 70% in hardware and software costs.
3. Resiliency TCO
The cost of application downtime incurs substantial revenue loss and impact to brand reputation. To mitigate the cost of downtime, organizations approach designing a resilient solution in two ways:
- The first method employs redundant storage copies at the server or cluster level to increase resiliency. However, the drawback of this approach is higher storage cost and compromised performance.
- The second method uses erasure coding or replication data protection at the cluster level to increase performance and lower storage costs. However, this leads to a smaller storage density per server. It also increases rebuild duration over the network.
Pliops XDP provides the best of both options. For example, it increases storage resiliency to mitigate SSD failures and server downtime.
For Cluster solutions, XDP complements the erasure coding resiliency using faster data rebuilds at the server level. This eliminates the cluster-level network traffic.
The dual benefit of Pliops XDP also helps reduce redundant storage costs and improve the resiliency of applications at server and cluster levels. In addition, it enhances the application’s recovery time objective (RTO) and customer satisfaction.
4. Durability TCO
SSD storage durability is a measure of usable lifecycle described in Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) for a warranty period of 3 or 5 years.
Organizations that design the storage systems with the wrong SSD endurance type can have higher operational expenses for replacing SSDs before the warranty period. They can also incur higher capital expenses for a higher endurance drive than needed.
Pliops XDP provides an economical approach to ‘meet write-intensive application requirements. This is done by dynamically increasing the DWPD of low-cost SSD drives.
XDP also increases endurance by ensuring the writes at the SSD storage layer are almost identical to application layer writes. This minimizes the write amplification factor introduced in the open systems interconnection (OSI) seven-layer model.
In addition, converting the random writes from the application to sequential ones at the storage layer is another critical feature to further boost the drive’s endurance. This breakthrough approach of Pliops XDP enables applications to utilize low-cost, high-density QLC-type SSDs to reduce storage capital costs dramatically.
5. Data Center TCO
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digitization of everything through cloud adoption and remote/hybrid working. Business wire says data center spending will reach $143 billion by 2027.
Power is the most significant operational expense for data centers, and reducing power costs is often high on the agenda for many executives.
Pliops XDP increases performance/core by orders of magnitude across several flash-enabled database and storage applications regarding performance and capacity expansion.
For example, XDP provides 500 Xeon core equivalent performance per core for RocksDB-based applications. These applications can realize 38K watt-hour of the power-saving equivalent.
In contrast, a cloud block storage application like Gluster storage cloud provider has an incredible 1.7 Megawatts hour.
The broader the use of Pliops XDP in the data center, organizations can realize energy savings increase from 10s of Kilowatts to several Megawatts. They can also see Carbon Emission reduction from Kilos to Megatons of Carbon Dioxide.
Get Insights into TCO Savings
As discussed above, you can gain TCO savings across various flash-based databases and storage applications with a few key design parameters. The chart below shows the impact of Pliops XDP on TCO across a range of applications.
- MongoDB: Reduce TCO by 48% and shrink footprint from 100 nodes to 48 nodes
- MariaDB: Reduce TCO by 54% by going from two racks to a single rack
- MySQL: Reduce TCO by 52% by going from a Full rack to a Half rack
- Cloud Block Storage: Reduce TCO 52% by taking a Gluster pod design from 30 nodes to 12 nodes
- Redis: Reduce TCO by 72% by going from eight racks to a single rack
The Takeaway
As more IT professionals consider deploying or optimizing applications on a large-scale, TCO benefits and environmental impact become increasingly important. It’s essential to pivot an organization’s initiatives that are good for the business and the planet.
Pliops provides a cost-efficient way to deploy storage infrastructure, relational databases, and NoSQL applications to drastically reduce TCO. This advantage will help to meet your business and budgetary goals and enable you to build sustainable data centers for the future.
If you have any questions or feedback on how Pliops XDP can help meet your specific application or data center needs, reach out to me at prasadv@pliops.com.
You can also contact us at info@pliops.com to schedule a TCO savings discussion for your applications and arrive at TCO metrics for decision making.
