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Jump straight to an abstract:

• The Benefits of Solid State in Enterprise Storage Systems
• SNIA Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification
• Are SSDs Ready for Enterprise Storage Systems?
• Leveraging Flash Memory in Enterprise Storage
• Apples to Apples, Pears to Pears in SSS Performance Benchmarking

The Abstracts

The Benefits of Solid State in Enterprise Storage Systems
David Dale
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An update to a very popular SNIA tutorial, this presentation gives an overview of flash technologies which are being integrated into enterprise storage system.  It describes the discontinuities in price/performance delivered by flash, and the potential benefits to.  The presentation then goes on to describe where flash fits in enterprise storage architectures today, with particular emphasis on use cases.   Finally, the presentation speculates on future directions for the technology.

SNIA Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification
Easen Ho, Eden Kim
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Tutorial, presentation of Performance Test Specification for Enterprise PTS 1.0 (publication Feb 2011) and Client PTS 1.0 (publication target Apr 2011)

Learning Objectives

• Fundamentals of SSD performance testing.  Methodologies for attaining steady state performance. 
• Application of SNIA PTS specification
• Understanding the meaning of PTS test results

Are SSDs Ready for Enterprise Storage Systems?
Anil Vasudeva
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Computer architects dream of storage devices for their applications/workloads which can provide very high IOPs at minimal cost (IOPS/$/GB) using infinite cheap storage and instant access (low latency)   Enterprise-Ready SSDs ©IMEX have started to fulfill that promise, segmented into SATA and PCIe based Hybrid Storage products. One factor for their quick adoption has been the advent of new controllers and firmware which have allowed them to transparently mitigate early issues related to reliability, endurance, data retention, performance, ease of management and integration using exiting storage interfaces. But the killer software tool for their success in the enterprise has been Automated Storage Tiering activated by monitoring workload I/O access signatures and behavior over time and smart non-disruptive migration of hot data to SSDs, resulting in over 200% improvement in IOPS and 80% improvement in response time at peak loads

Learning Objectives

• The presentation delineates the technology, storage characteristics (performance, cost, reliability and endurance etc.), applications that benefit the most from their usage, system implementation in enterprise storage systems, workloads optimization using automated smart-tiering by vertical industry needs and the economics of SSDs usage using real market data.
• The presentation will illustrate case studies in real life SANs showing how optimally selected hybrid storage of SSDs and HDDs can achieve 65% lower TCO, 475% higher IOPS and 165% lower footprint while achieving a whopping 800% in $/IOPs in SANs and other storage systems in different scenarios

Leveraging Flash Memory in Enterprise Storage
Matt Kixmoeller
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Solid State storage promises to transform the capabilities and economics of the "performance" segment of enterprise storage, and a myriad of different vendor implementations of solid state have arrived on the scene.  Early implementations simply replace some HDDs in enterprise arrays with SSDs, but is one-for-one replacement of disks really the most effective way to utilize SSDs?  New approaches for accelerating array performance with Solid State have arrived, ranging from SSD caching, SSD tiering, and/or creating entire Volumes/LUNs from Solid State.  This tutorial will compare the performance, reliability, endurance, and cost properties of different SSD approaches, illustrate the impact of SSD properties on typical enterprise I/O workloads, and give users a roadmap for how to think about Solid State influencing their future storage architecture.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the similarities and differences between rotating magnetic disks and SSDs 
• Understand the impact of SSD on enterprise workloads with today’s array designs 
• Learn how disk arrays might better exploit the properties of SSDs in the future

Apples to Apples, Pears to Pears in SSS Performance Benchmakring
Esther Spanjer
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This presentation will provide an overview of SSSI Performance Test Suite (PTS), that was proposed by the Technical Working Group of SSSI. It will walk through the various steps of the proposed benchmark test suite to ensure that reliable, comparable and repeatable performance test data is achieved.

Learning Objectives

• Get a good understanding of the various parameters that influence the performance characteristic of a solid state drive. Test results will be shared to illustrate the influence of these parameters; 
• Get a full understanding of the proposed SSSI Performance Test Suite. Topics that will be discussed include preconditioning, queue depth, idle tests, random vs. sequential test suites, etc. 
• Provide a step-by-step guidance on how to set up a test benchmark that creates equal results among the various SSS devices