Realities of Solid State Storage (2012)

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

Explain the fundamental structure of flash memory cells
Explain how that affects how enterprise storage built on flash behaves
Help users understand what kinds of questions to ask of suppliers selling flash based storage for enterprise class applications.