In 2025, storage and computing infrastructure will undergo a step-level change, and unlocking ROI with Ultra-High-Density drives will be a key initiative for IT planners. Ultra-high-density drives, such as Solidigm’s industry-leading 122TB models, are redefining the cost dynamics of data centers. These drives set a new bar for capacity, enabling organizations to consolidate infrastructure, reduce costs, and achieve significant returns on investment (ROI). However, achieving these benefits depends on selecting the right infrastructure software to tap into their potential fully.
Ultra-High-Density Drives Means Less Drives
Ultra-high-density drives reduce how many drives IT needs to deploy per server to meet capacity requirements, even if the price per TB is slightly higher than lower-capacity drives. Fewer drives can:
- Lower Power Requirements: Consolidating data into fewer drives reduces the energy footprint of storage systems.
- Enabling Converged Infrastructures: High-density drives should extend the suitability of converged infrastructures like Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI), which can now deliver double-digit PBs of capacity in three to four servers or nodes.
- Reducing the number of Servers: These high-capacity drives allow IT to deploy fewer servers to achieve similar or greater storage capacity, resulting in lower overall costs.
Organizations switching to high-density drives can expect a more energy-efficient data center that consumes less physical footprint and lowers maintenance requirements. VergeFS, part of VergeOS, enables this consolidation by delivering high performance with fewer drives, unlike traditional systems that depend on the parallelism of high drive counts to deliver acceptable performance.
Ultra-High-Density Drives Means Fewer Servers
Compute comprises a series of servers acting as nodes within a cluster. Depending on the organization’s computing and storage requirements, they may have one cluster or dozens. Ultra-high-density drives allow organizations to consolidate storage infrastructure by reducing the number of servers required per cluster. In the same way, compute demand can be met by using multi-processor servers with hundreds of cores. The benefits of fewer servers are:
- Lower Power Consumption: Fewer servers use less electricity, which reduces operational and power costs.
- Lower Upfront Capital Costs: Consolidating capacity into fewer servers reduces the need for additional hardware purchases.
- Reduced Networking Infrastructure Investment: Fewer servers require fewer networking cards, switches, and cables.
To maximize these savings, organizations must adopt software that encourages high-performance, high-core-count servers capable of handling the expanded capacity offered by ultra-high-density drives. Legacy pricing models that charge by the number of cores or TBs may lead to software licensing that eliminates the cost savings created by hardware innovation.
From a technology perspective, legacy infrastructure software solutions may falter under this design because they require high levels of parallelism to deliver acceptable performance and data resiliency. Fewer drives and servers mean fewer available resources for parallelism. Parallelism is good, but IT planners can’t design highly dense infrastructure if their software vendors over depend on it. Modern infrastructure software like VergeOS is essential for realizing dense architectures’ technical efficiencies while having a business model that rewards their deployment.
Ultra-High-Density Drives Deliver Scale-In
One of the most pivotal benefits of ultra-high-density drives is their ability to scale capacity within existing servers. Instead of adding servers or storage hardware, organizations can grow capacity by adding or replacing drives in their existing servers.
- Cost-Effective Scaling: Expanding capacity within existing servers eliminates the need for new hardware investments.
- Drive Type Flexibility: Modern infrastructure software, like VergeOS, allows the support of mixing drive types and capacities, allowing seamless upgrades without disrupting operations.
Using a standard 2U, 24-drive bay server as an example, IT can start with four servers, half populated with 60TB drives for a raw capacity of 2.8PBs. Then, in the future, as capacity demands increase, they can add 122TB drives or whatever drive capacity is the state of the art at that time. This flexibility enables IT teams to adopt a phased approach to ultra-high-density drive deployment, gradually increasing capacity while optimizing costs.
The software must support this flexibility. VergeOS’ ioOptimize feature enables customers to add drives to existing servers, add servers of different generations, or even shrink cluster size if fewer servers result from a data center density initiative.
Infrastructure Software: The Critical ROI Enabler
Achieving maximum ROI from ultra-high-density drives requires software that eliminates inefficiencies and unlocks their full potential. Legacy solutions often struggle with extracting the performance potential of these drives and the slow rebuild times required if one fails, leading to underutilization and slower ROI realization.
VergeOS, a modern Ultraconverged Infrastructure (UCI) solution, is designed to optimize high-density storage deployments. With features like:
- Synchronous Deduplicated Mirroring: Ensures faster rebuild times and minimizes downtime.
- ioOptimize: Supports mixing drive types and capacities, enabling phased upgrades and efficient scaling.
VergeOS empowers organizations to fully harness the benefits of ultra-high-density drives and maintain their performance even though there are fewer drives. In the screenshots below we generated over 1 million read IOPS and 470K write IOPS using 64K block sizes.
Additional ROI: Exiting VMware and Eliminating Dedicated AFAs
Transitioning to VergeOS unlocks the benefits of ultra-high-density drives and enables organizations to exit the VMware ecosystem entirely and, over time, replace dedicated all-flash arrays (AFA). By replacing VMware with VergeOS, IT teams eliminate traditional virtualization platforms’ complexity and high costs. This shift simplifies operations, reduces licensing fees, and allows IT to remove “finding a VMware alternative” from their strategic to-do list.
As we will demonstrate in our upcoming webinar, “Storage And Infrastructure Strategies,” VergeFS can deliver millions of IOPS of performance with just a handful of these drives while improving data protection and resiliency. These additional layers of ROI position VergeOS as a comprehensive solution for infrastructure consolidation and virtualization modernization.
The combined ROI of VergeOS can reduce infrastructure costs by 70% or more while simplifying strategic and day-to-day operations. For example, in a recent webinar, now available on-demand, we discussed how IT can execute a complete recovery from a disaster in three clicks and with minimal data loss.
The Long-Term ROI Impact
Ultra-high-density drives don’t just lower initial costs; they provide lasting benefits over time:
- Operational Efficiency: Reduced hardware, energy consumption, and maintenance lead to sustained savings.
- Scalability: The ability to expand within existing servers reduces the need for frequent hardware refresh cycles.
- Sustainability: A smaller data center footprint aligns with environmental goals, improving organizational environmental metrics.
Conclusion
Unlocking ROI with ultra-high-density drives requires the right software to tap into their density, performance, and scalability potential. VergeOS unlocks the these drives’ potential, enabling organizations to consolidate infrastructure, reduce costs, and future-proof their data centers.
