In his recent StorageSearch blog, High Availability Enterprise SSD’s, Zsolt Kerekes discusses why building a do-it-yourself HA solution typical of data center Fibre Channel or IP SAN hard disk array installations is not a viable option for an enterprise SSD array. The reasons, according to Zsolt, boil down to performance, flexibility of use, risk, complexity, and scalability. I would add Murphy’s Law.
Zsolt points out that any home-grown HA solution sitting in front of an SSD storage controller is likely to introduce considerable latency and time to the recovery process. When it comes to the mission critical applications typically running on SSD arrays, such as online transaction processing, time really is money and simply not something you want to sacrifice. “Wrap around” HA, as Zsolt calls it, also introduces architectural complexity and controller configuration issues that can gum up the works.

Folks from EMC and IBM started Kaminario because they felt passionately that any SSD device worth its name must have an architecture designed from the ground up for fast SSD, not a slow legacy disk architecture tweaked for SSD. 


