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Ohio State University and HP Labs Study Finds Solid State Drives Risk Massive Data Loss
By Rachel Ramsey TMCnet Web Editor
When it comes to managing a data center, it’s important to make sure you can ensure uptime and backup data in the event of power loss. Power outages in data centers are common – most recently seen from Hurricane Sandy and winter storm Nemo – and you don’t want to realize you’re unprepared during a disaster.
Data loss is just as critical to the medium-sized data center as it is to the large enterprise. The behavior of modern storage technology during power faults is an important yet mostly ignored issue in this dependability-critical area.
“Today’s data explosion creates unique storage challenges for data center professionals,” said Rob Crooke, Intel (News 
- Alert) vice president and general manager for the Intel Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group. “High latencies and slow storage I/O can cripple data centers’ ability to deliver exciting big data or cloud-computing applications with fast, low latency data access.”
Understanding how new storage components behave under power fault is the first step toward designing new robust storage systems.
Flash-based solid state drives (SSD) store data in flash memory, but companies adopting these are risking massive data loss due to power outages, according to a new University of Ohio and HP Labs study. Recovering data from an SSD brings challenges such as vendor-specific SSD designs and the incorporation of built-in encryption technologies.
During the study, thirteen of 15 SSDs from five different vendors suffered bit corruption, metadata corruption and total device failure after being exposed to power loss.
All of them lost some amount of data that researchers had expected to survive the fault. Two units "became massively corrupted, with one no longer registering on the SAS (News - Alert) bus at all," while another saw one-third of its blocks becoming inaccessible after eight fault cycles.
To ensure you are doing everything you can to monitor your data center power, Server Technology (News - Alert) is a producer of rackmount power distribution and monitoring solutions that help manage power capacity, reduce downtime and improve energy efficiency. The company helps you monitor your power sources so you can eliminate the risk of losing data and in an unexpected power outage.
The study proves that it is important to test your equipment before it is too late. Watch the entire presentation of the study here.
Edited by Rich Steeves
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