Read-Intensive Workloads Drive QLC Adoption for Cloud and Enterprise Storage

The Capacity You Need With Performance that is Just Right

Solidigm™ D5-P5430 QLC SSDs provide the right performance, density, and total cost of ownership for today’s mainstream workloads.

Storage workloads have changed

It seems the world today has an endless ability to create and consume increasingly vast amounts of data. This data tsunami has fundamentally reshaped storage needs, with accelerated growth in read-intensive workloads accompanied by a steady decline in SSD endurance levels on average. Two recent large-scale studies illustrate this point:

• 94% of workloads are read-intensive, with a median read-to-write ratio of approximately 78/22 [1]
• 99% of SSDs consume less than 15% of their usable life [2]

Read-intensive workloads are everywhere

Mainstream and read-intensive workloads are ubiquitous in the cloud and in enterprise storage. Mainstream workloads include applications and usages such as email and unified communications and collaboration servers, general-purpose servers, object-based storage, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and more. These workloads tend to cluster around an 80/20 read-to-write mix, and are widely deployed in most enterprises. On the higher range, read-intensive usages and applications such as content delivery networks (CDNs), data lakes, data pipelines, imaging databases, video-on-demand (VOD) services, and more cluster around the 90/10 or higher read-to-write mix.

The best fit for these workloads

In our read-intensive world, triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs might not be right-sized for these applications. While they deliver strong read performance, these drives might not provide the best fit for mainstream and read-intensive workloads for a few reasons:

• Most workloads are composed of low write activity
• An overwhelming majority of SSDs use less than 15% of their rated drive life [2]
• When considering available form factors and maximum capacity points, TLC SSDs only support one-fourth of the capacity in the same space as quad-level cell (QLC) SSDs [3]

QLC SSDs: Right-sized for mainstream and read-intensive workloads

Solidigm QLC SSDs deliver read performance that’s equivalent to TLC SSDs, along with strong write performance and ample endurance for many workloads. The following table, normalized on a TLC SSD, shows how QLC performance, endurance, and maximum-capacity-per-drive compares with a range of TLC SSDs.

Table 1. Comparison of Solidigm D5-P5430 vs competitor SSDs [4,5]

Endurance concerns emerge with bit-per-cell transitions. With Solidigm QLC SSDs delivering 3,000 program/erase (PE) cycles on massive capacities available, lifetime writes (in petabytes written [PBW]) can exceed TLC SSDs.

Even more important than PBW is the reality of endurance needs. A large-scale study showing the read dominance of most workloads also examined how many TLC SSDs in its dataset of approximately 2 million drives could have used QLC SSDs instead. The study found that at 1,000 PE cycles, almost 95% of those drives could have been replaced with QLC SSDs, while at 3,000 PE cycles (coincidentally the rating for the D5-P5430 QLC drive), the opportunity would increase to nearly 99%. [1] This points to a massive opportunity to “right-size” SSDs for mainstream and read-intensive workloads to deliver more value.

QLC benefits

QLC SSDs are suitable for a wide range of workloads. In addition, IT administrators can realize up to 3x smaller rack footprint, 20% lower energy cost, and 31% lower total solution cost versus an all-TLC array for object storage. [6] The Solidigm D5-P5430 shows the density, total cost of ownership, and sustainability opportunities ahead for these workloads.