SSD and Flash Storage Lifetime

SSD and Flash storage usually has manufacturer-defined lifetime defined by total amount of writes.

To compare this number with expected number of writes for the App Control Server database, the following calculation can be used:

Estimated lifetime disk writes = AEFW´ Agents ´ Years

AEFW: number depends on database layout and can be obtained from table in the previous section.

Agents: total number of agents installed from this App Control server. Note that agents are busiest during initialization, and less during stead-state. Therefore, use total number of agents you plan to install for this number, even if some agents will be uninstalled at later time.

For example, if your environment will have 100K endpoints installed, and you want to make sure that lifetime of the card will exceed 5 years, flash card will accumulate 13 GB ´ 100,000 ´ 5 ≈ 6.5 PB (petabytes) of writes in its lifetime.

Note that modern Flash SSD cards typically have more than 10 PB (petabytes). Therefore, life-time of SSD cards should not be an issue for App Control Server.