Atos Origin pilot proves that Intel®Solid State Drives are more than a flash in the pan Atos Origin is a leading international information technology (IT) services company, providing hi-tech transactional services, consulting, systems integration and managed operations to deliver business outcomes globally. The company’s annual revenues are EUR 5.5 billion and it employs 50,000 people. Key to its continued success is the testing and adoption of new technologies that will benefit the company’s clients. Consequently, it teamed up with Intel to test Intel® Solid State Drives (Intel® SSD) for laptop users, one of the first enterprise studies of this technology in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. CASE STUDY Intel®Solid State Drives Enterprise Client/Mobility A Drive for Future Success CHALLENGES • Value of Solid State Drives. Atos Origin wanted to assess whether SSDs were more than a nice-to-have technology. • Quantifiable data. The company wanted to establish both total cost of ownership and return on investment for SSDs. • Comparative assessment. Atos Origin aimed to measure SSDs against traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). SOLUTIONS • Three-month pilot. The company launched a three-month pilot with laptops using Intel X25–M 80GB High-Performance Solid-State Drive. • Evaluated against traditional HDDs. The pilot measured the performance of Intel SSDs against existing Atos Origin laptops that used HDDs. • User groups. Eight Intel SSD laptops were used, four for general office users and four for technical users. IMPACT • Re-image savings. Tests showed Atos Origin could save up to 540 unproductive user and engineering hours each year that were currently spent re-imaging computers. • Fewer disk crashes. The number of disk crashes each year could be reduced by a factor of three. • Huge savings. The company could save at least 2,000 unproductive hours from fewer disk crashes and related economic benefits. “Typically, when a computer comes to the end its life, in approximately three years, we dispose of it. But with Intel® SSDs, we discovered that potentially we can actually extend the life of the computer.” James McMahon, Product Manager, Adaptive Workplace, Atos Origin Testing technology SSDs are rapidly emerging as a new technol- ogy with the potential to change both client and data centre storage in the coming years. Because SSDs contain no moving parts, they are often cited as more reliable than tradi- tional magnetic media drives, for example, spinning hard disk drives (HDDs). SSD pro- ponents claim the risk of mechanical failure is near zero. They enable cost reductions and productivity increases while improving overall system responsiveness. They also consume much less power than a traditional HDD, translating into a cooler, quieter platform. Atos Origin wanted to evaluate whether SSDs were more than a nice-to-have technology and whether they really did offer cost and productivity benefits, especially in an economic climate characterised by budgetary constraints. While it’s not widely known, Intel® is a leader in developing SDD drives, producing them for servers, storage, workstations, laptops and desktop PCs. In fact, the development of memory products has been an a little known aspect of Intel’s history and it has a valued pedigree in developing memory technologies. For example, a year after the company was founded in 1968, it launched its first suc- cessful product, the 3101 Schottky bipolar random access memory (RAM).
Transcript
Atos Origin pilot proves that Intel®Solid State Drives are more than a flash in the pan Atos Origin is a leading international information technology (IT) services company, providing hi-tech transactional services, consulting, systemsintegration and managed operations to deliver business outcomes globally. The company’s annual revenues are EUR 5.5 billion and it employs50,000 people. Key to its continued success is the testing and adoption of new technologies that will benefit the company’s clients. Consequently,it teamed up with Intel to test Intel® Solid State Drives (Intel® SSD) for laptop users, one of the first enterprise studies of this technologyin Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
CASE STUDY
Intel®Solid State Drives
Enterprise Client/Mobility
A Drive for Future Success
CHALLENGES
• Value of Solid State Drives. Atos Origin wanted to assess whether SSDs were morethan a nice-to-have technology.
• Quantifiable data. The company wanted to establish both total cost of ownership andreturn on investment for SSDs.
• Comparative assessment. Atos Origin aimed to measure SSDs against traditional harddisk drives (HDDs).
SOLUTIONS
• Three-month pilot. The company launched a three-month pilot with laptops using IntelX25–M 80GB High-Performance Solid-State Drive.
• Evaluated against traditional HDDs. The pilot measured the performance of Intel SSDsagainst existing Atos Origin laptops that used HDDs.
• User groups. Eight Intel SSD laptops were used, four for general office users and fourfor technical users.
IMPACT
• Re-image savings. Tests showed Atos Origin could save up to 540 unproductive userand engineering hours each year that were currently spent re-imaging computers.
• Fewer disk crashes. The number of disk crashes each year could be reduced by a factorof three.
• Huge savings. The company could save at least 2,000 unproductive hours from fewerdisk crashes and related economic benefits. “Typically, when a computer comes
to the end its life, in approximately
three years, we dispose of it. But
with Intel® SSDs, we discovered
that potentially we can actually
extend the life of the computer.”
James McMahon, Product Manager, Adaptive Workplace,
Atos Origin
Testing technology
SSDs are rapidly emerging as a new technol-ogy with the potential to change both clientand data centre storage in the coming years.Because SSDs contain no moving parts, theyare often cited as more reliable than tradi-tional magnetic media drives, for example,spinning hard disk drives (HDDs). SSD pro-ponents claim the risk of mechanical failureis near zero. They enable cost reductionsand productivity increases while improvingoverall system responsiveness. They alsoconsume much less power than a traditionalHDD, translating into a cooler, quieter platform.
Atos Origin wanted to evaluate whether SSDswere more than a nice-to-have technologyand whether they really did offer cost andproductivity benefits, especially in an economicclimate characterised by budgetary constraints.
While it’s not widely known, Intel® is a leaderin developing SDD drives, producing them forservers, storage, workstations, laptops anddesktop PCs. In fact, the development ofmemory products has been an a little knownaspect of Intel’s history and it has a valuedpedigree in developing memory technologies.For example, a year after the company wasfounded in 1968, it launched its first suc-cessful product, the 3101 Schottky bipolarrandom access memory (RAM).
Partnering with Intel
Atos Origin teamed up with Intel to run apilot that would establish the efficacy ofSSDs. Eight laptops were fitted with Intel®X25–M 80GB High-Performance Solid-StateDrives (Intel® X-25-M SSD). Four laptops weregiven to technical users within Atos Originand four to people who mainly used officeapplications. There were two main usagescenarios: would SSDs help deliver a betterend-user experience in terms of batterylife and performance? Could an SSD extendthe use of a two-to-three-year-old laptop?
The laptops with Intel X-25-M SSDs weremeasured against Dell D620* laptops thatwere approximately two years old, poweredby Intel® Centrino® Core™2 Duo processorT7200 with 100GB 7200 RPM HDDs and 2GBof memory. Both sets of laptops were runningthe Microsoft Windows* 7 operating system.
Three-month pilot
The pilot ran for three months and Atos Origin,to meet its two overarching objectives, alsowanted to determine total cost of ownership(TCO) and return on investment (ROI) for Intel®X-25-M SSDs by measuring cost savings andproductivity gains. This included establish-ing success and reliability rates, the percent-age of on-site calls for HDD failures, whetherit’s greener to swap out an HDD for an IntelX-25-M SSD instead of replacing a PC, andwhether the risk mitigation of data loss wasenough of a driver to adopt Intel X-25-M SSDs.
The company believed it could establishpossible cost reductions by reducing diskfailures as the age of an HDD increases whichin turn could lead to fewer disk-related issuesand helpdesk calls. The company chalked outareas of potential productivity gains such asthe time saved from reimaging a PC, reduced
start-up and shutdown times, increasedbattery life for mobile users, and improve-ments in searching for data stored on disk.It also wanted to consider whether there wouldbe improvements from scanning disks andwhether there would be fewer disk crashesand how this would translate into the costof a disk crash when data is backed up andwhen data is lost.
The pilot revealed a range of benefits fromIntel® X-25-M SSD use in laptops, for bothusers and IT departments. The most promi-nent were:
• An increase in battery life of between 55to 65 minutes compared to an HDD
• Thirty per cent reduction in start-up andshutdown times including hibernation
• A 14x increase in random read/write diskactivity, resulting in a 10 to 20 per centimprovement in overall PC performance.This also led to a 5 to10x increase in activi-ties such as data search in Windows or withina PST* file via Microsoft Windows* 2007
• These improvements were evident on bothWindows* XP SP3 and Windows* 7 RTM
Similarly, Atos Origin noted a range of ben-efits for the IT department:
• A 30 per cent reduction in the time to reimagea PC compared with a HDD drive time ofbetween 65 minutes to 45 minutes, usingnetwork distribution in both cases
• Better reliability resulting in reduced userdowntime, fewer support calls and fewerdrive replacements
• Faster installation of operating systemsand applications, and faster end user datarestoration
• Increased battery life resulting in fewerreplacements
A minimum saving of 2,000 unproductive hours a year
“It’s clear to us that high-perfor-
ming Intel X-25-M SSDs offer a
viable, cost-effective alternative
to traditional spinning HDDs.
They provide better performance,
extended battery life, greater
reliability as well as reducing
technical support costs.”
Mike Smith, Chief Technology Officer,
Managed Operations, Atos Origin UK.
“We also discovered that Intel®
SSDs are actually a lot greener
than HDDs. They consume less
energy, extend battery life and
are generally more efficient.”
James McMahon, Product Manager, Adaptive Workplace,
Atos Origin
Spotlight on Atos Origin
Atos Origin is a leading international in-formation technology (IT) services com-pany. It is also the WorldwideInformation Technology Partner for theOlympic Games and has a client base ofinternational companies across all sec-tors. Atos Origin is quoted on the ParisEurolist Market and trades as Atos Ori-gin, Atos Worldline and Atos Consulting.Its ‘Adaptive Workplace’ is an Atos Ori-gin strategic offering and provides afull range of modular and flexible desk-top and end-user support services.These services allow the end user towork anywhere, anyplace, and at any-time and has already been successfullydeployed at many clients worldwideenabling them to achieve cost reducti-ons up to 40% on workplace manage-ment costs. Atos Origin currentlymanages more than 700,000 desktopsand 20,000 servers“.
www.atosorigin.com/aws
Better all round
In an average year, Atos Origin manages 5,850devices internally, within the UK. The averagedevice is 2.4 years old; the number of PCsreimaged in a year is 1,800; and the numberof HDDs replaced each year is 200.
Using these annual averages, Atos Origincalculated that by using Intel® X-25-M SSDsit could save 540 unproductive hours peryear for both computer user and engineers.
The company also calculated that an HDDcrash cost the user a loss of 15 productivehours depending on circumstances, locationand the data volume that is saved. Over ayear, this equated to the loss of 2,000 to3,000 productive hours each year. As a rider,however, if data is lost or failure happens atcritical time, this figure could be significantlyincreased and difficult to fully quantify. Forexample, a doctor in a surgery could expe-rience enormous difficulties if a computerHDD crashed, with the loss of prescriptioninformation, patient notes and drug direc-tories. And these events do happen.
Economic gains, time savings
Based on mean time between failures (MTBF)values of HDDs, that is the average time anHDD functions before failing, and the age ofa HDD, Atos Origin estimated that by usingIntel® X-25-M SSDs it could reduce the num-ber of disk crashes each year by three times.In real-terms this could result in a minimumsaving of 2,000 unproductive hours per year.
In summary, Atos Origin’s pilot established:
• Significant productivity gains that offsetthe higher price of Intel X-25-M SSDs throughreducing memory upgrade, replacementbatteries, and overall power consumption
• Better system performance
• Improved battery life and reduced powerconsumption for laptops
• Potentially better reliability
• Decreased support costs and support time
• Reduced time for installing operating sys-tems and applications
• Faster time to encrypt hard drives withfull disk encryption solutions
• Eliminates the need for disk defragmen-tation software
The overall conclusion was that Intel X-25-M SSDs would bring significant operationaland cost benefits for both Atos Origin andend users. However, a couple of significantissues also emerged during the pilot.
It was noted that some encryption productsare not yet optimised to run on Intel X-25-M SSDs, diluting some of the benefits of thetest. However, James McMahon, productmanager, Adaptive Workplace, Atos Origin,said: “We estimate that as the market catchesup with the benefits of Intel X-25-M SSDs,encryption products will naturally be devel-oped to ensure optimal performance onthis technology.”
Another benefit is the Intel X-25-M SSDs aredesigned for long life. Intel has incorporatedwear-leveling algorithms into the technologywhich essentially means that typical life-spanis measured in hundreds of years. Whileclearly not meant to be used for this lengthof time, this design element does illustratethe robustness of this technology.
“Intel® SSDs provide a significant
decrease in support costs. They
require less time to encrypt and
potentially have a far longer life
than HDDs.”
James McMahon, Product Manager, Adaptive Workplace, Atos Origin
Performance tests and ratings are measured using specific computer systems and/or components and reflect the approximate performance of Intel products as measured bythose tests. Any difference in system hardware or software design or configuration may affect actual performance. Buyers should consult other sources of information to evalu-ate the performance of systems or components they are considering purchasing. For more information on performance tests and on the performance of Intel products, visit IntelPerformance Benchmark Limitations.
This document is for informational purposes only. INTEL MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT.
*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. 1009/JNW/RLC/XX/PDF 322864-001EN
OEM pricing
Another large issue was the cost of Intel® X-25-M SSDs. McMahonadds: “It’s clear that some OEMs have understandably taken quite anaggressive stance with the price of SSDs because it is a new tech-nology. In some cases they are three times as high as standard HDDs.”
Even with SSD’s double the price of HDDs, it’s sometimes cheaper tobuy a standard PC with an HDD and an additional Intel X-25-M SSDseparately. However, that said the cost of data migration from a HDDto an Intel X-25-M SSD needs to be factored in to cost analysis andit’s also likely that the market will naturally correct current pricingdisparities.
But McMahon points out: “The pilot using Intel X-25-M SSDs provedbeyond any doubt that they are not only a valuable technology, butthey also bring significant cost benefits. They potentially have a longerlife and can extend the life of a traditional laptop by at least a year.
They last longer than HDDs, between two and three times. For example,a traditional SATA HDD has a life span of 0.5 million hours¹ yet IntelX-25-M SSD has an average life span of 1.2 million hours. This hasall sorts of positive economic implications and we expect that it’sonly a question of time before Intel X-25-M SSDs are widely adoptedin the industry.”
Find a solution that is right for your organisation. Contact your Intel representative or visit the Reference Room at www.intel.com/references.
Mike Smith, Chief Technology Officer, Managed Operations, AtosOrigin UK, summarises: “It’s clear to us that high-performing IntelX-25-M SSDs offer a viable, cost-effective alternative to traditionalspinning HDDs. They provide better performance, extended batterylife, greater reliability as well as reducing technical support costs.From an end-user point of view, the risk of losing data due to diskfailure is vastly reduced which is very significant in itself. Equallyimportantly, they enable the extension of a computer by at least ayear. In fact, other than the current OEM price range, it’s difficult tofault them, and we actually expect cost to come down as the marketcorrects the prices.”
1 – Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean toyou? Bianca Schroeder and Garth A. Gibson, Computer Science Department, CarnegieMellon University. The paper points out that MTTF specified on datasheets rangesfrom 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 hours suggesting a nominal annual failure rate of atmost 0.88%. However, in the field it discovered that annual disk replacement ratestypically exceed 1% with 2-4% common and up to 13% observed on some systems.
