There is a great topic on integrating SSD appliances started on Information Week’s Blog by George Crump . I like his suggestion for adding data services to an SSD appliance. Indeed, SSD appliances have come a long way over the last 20 years and have made great strides in simplifying integration and improving performance while reducing cost. Flash memory SSD appliances are not the only solution available and DRAM based appliances (coupled with high availability) will surpass flash SSD in many aspects.

It should also be noted that one should consider such an appliance only if the application will benefit from storage that consistently delivers sub-second latency. SSD appliances should be considered when I/O wait time is high. In every enterprise there is typically one application that requires this level of performance from the storage system. Before a new storage purchase is made, application performance issues need to be evaluated and those related to I/O wait identified.

Tags: application performance, Disk latency, DRAM Storage, DRAM-based SSD Appliances, Flash SSD, IOPS, SSD appliances, Storage appliances, Storage Performance