Q: What are the sources of vibration in Data Centers?

A: HDD’s, fans, air conditioning, power supplies as well as the adjacent racks are the primary sources of vibration in Data Centers.  The “Vibration Penalty” impacts every Data Center but the largest and highest density Data Centers suffer the most, because vibration is cumulative

Q: Why has the “Vibration Penalty” in Data Centers been ignored until now?

A: Vibration has not been entirely ignored.  The IT industry has traditionally viewed episodic vibration like construction or seismic events as a system failure mode.  Ongoing levels of vibration which is not as well understood by the industry, degrades Data Center performance and efficiency.

Q:  Why does vibration in my Data Center matter?

A: Vibration is a significant factor that affects the performance and efficiency of storage.   Vibration increases disk latency which reduces disk drive performance,  application performance and increases costs. Managing vibration is an important factor in allowing business to do more with less.

Q:  How do I know the cost of vibration to my business?

A: Since all Data Centers  vibrate constantly, there is a good chance you have a vibration problem affecting your disked storage system.  When vibration reduces your storage performance and efficiency it also increases your costs by forcing you to invest in additional storage hardware to achieve your needed performance level  or Service Level Agreement  (SLA). Over-provisioned storage takes more space, and uses more energy.   Our VMS-1000 Vibration Management Solution will help you determine the amount of lost performance and efficiency due to vibration and will estimate the cost saving and performance increase that can result from managing vibration.

Q:  What does it take to try this solution?

A: We recommend installing our diagnostic/monitoring system VMA-1000 which includes a set of vibration sensors to measure the existing levels of vibration in your working environment and establish its impact on exiting storage performance.  The monitoring should be used at least for 30 days, so that the vibration modulation tied to a monthly workload cycle is recorded, analyzed and correlated with storage performance. With positive data, analysis, and expected savings in hand, the vibration remediation technology can then be applied to new storage as it is installed.

Q:  Do I need to run your storage performance tool?

A: No. We correlate vibration level with storage performance parameters (IOPS and throughput) in your current performance tool.  This can be done thru open API in your tool.

Q:  How much improvement can I expect from a VMS solution?

A: It all depends on the vibration level in your storage as well the type of storage/HDD you have and the application you run. We believe you will see improvements in performance of at least 15% which are more than enough to justify the cost of our service.   Our testing in both labs and customer situations suggests that much greater improvements (in excess of 50%) are possible.  The best way to determine how VMS will impact your Data Center is to try it for yourself.

Q:  How can you help my business?

A: Information has strategic value for business; faster access to information is both revenue and a savings opportunity.   Better decisions drive business for example to: parse claims data for insights, find bottlenecks in the supply chain, look for patterns in patient data, simulate a new product, improve price bids for oil leases, and analyze web content.

Q:  Will SSD’s eliminate the need for vibration management solutions?

A: SSD’s have a role in improving disk storage performance, and the technology works best with structured data in small sizes.   Performances of applications running large unstructured data (Big Data) are generally gated by native disk drive speed which is most susceptible to vibration.

Q:  By managing vibration, will disk drive reliability improve?

A: Application availability will improve as requested data will be provided at a consistent speed, avoiding failures caused by excessive or unexpected delays in processing the data.  These delays cause failures often referred to as a ‘soft error’ within the storage.  

Q:  Big Data is a new term, what is it?

A: Big Data is unstructured data and the size of the file to be processed can be measured in Gigabytes, Terabytes, and even Petabytes.  It is the fastest growing type of data, and has been estimated to account for 80% of all business data. Big Data includes Video, Images, Scientific Logging Data, Web Content, and email, as well as other types of data that are not cache friendly because they do not fit conveniently into databases.