Architecting with Flash for Web-Scale Enterprise Storage

The cost of flash has dropped dramatically in the past couple years and many organizations are excited at how this high performance storage medium can be leveraged in their environments. In this session, University of British Columbia CS Professor and Founder of Coho Data, Andrew Warfield, will provide a primer on the challenges of architecting with flash in today's storage architectures and concepts that can be borrowed from web-scale IT. He will present test results from research his team has done on how performance can vary significantly depending on where flash is placed in a storage architecture and the amount of CPU and network bandwidth that is available, as well as explain what the key considerations IT organizations must keep in mind as they think about implementing different solutions available on the market or building their own solution from commodity hardware.

Learning Objectives

Review of current flash price and configuration options
Architectural considerations for getting the best performance from PCI-e flash
Overview of web-scale storage architectures leveraging flash