With the iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) camp, solid-state memory manufacturers began to pay attention, some solid state storage vendors are emerging as solid state memory market leader.Obviously, the biggest winner is STEC, the vendor's ZEUSIOPS FC and SAS SSD (solid state drive) has become IBM, EMC, SUN and HDS array of the selected storage device; and Fusion I / O also won the HP and IBM serversFlash DAS (direct attached storage) orders.
Once the flash memory vendors to the appearance of their products do and disk size as, and with the same interface, and disk, then the SSD into the array is just a matter of time.Now you can buy in the market performance (STEC can be reached: 45K IOPS read / 16K IOPS write) flash drives (EMC, HDS, etc.), or an entire tray of low-performance drivers - but still more than 15KRPM (rpm) disk drive 10 times faster and has lower latency - Intel X25-E, or Samsung drive (Pillar, EqualLogic, etc.).No matter what kind of drive, you can create a RAID (redundant array of independent disks) portfolio and LUN (logical unit number), then you can let the application staff will be "hot" data input to a new LUN in the flash memory.Since these drives in the array can be like a work like disk drives, so you can also use it all the data protection.You only need to migrate data to a new LUN.
For array SSD, flash memory, or PCI-E, the problem is to identify those who need regular access to the "hot" data.This "hot" data may only database of 2% to 5%, meaning that even if the price of flash memory than the 15K RPM disk drive you 20 times, in this case, the flash memory also remains cost-effective.A competent Oracle DBA (database administrator) or the development team to migrate the database only the most frequently accessed data, such as the total capacity of 5TB they can be busy in the database data migration to the new 250GB flash LUN.
On the other hand, Exchange administrators can not be decomposed Exchange of data - the data is always a lot of documents, and many organizations may not only extract 2-3% of the "hot" data.Therefore, in this case, they should consider a whole tray of SSD.Although the performance of this SSD lower, but costs less, and they are still more than the speed of 15K RPM disk drives 10 times faster.
Next we also need is a way to automatically identify the hot data and migrated to layer 0 flash layer mechanism.For Linux and Unix servers, they can choose a solution is Symantec's VerITas File System.Symantec's Storage Foundation VxFS is part of the product.VxFS can be extended to multiple volumes with different performance characteristics.Administrators can I / O temperature to identify its performance characteristics, and automatically migrate files to a flash memory system.VxFS to file-level granularity, so use VMware to host an instance of VxFS can be busy VM (Virtual Machine) migration to a faster storage system, not just move the VM's Windows swap file.
With the development of flash memory, Compellent's automated tiered storage, or similar technology will be the disk array 2015, a standard feature.System administrators or storage administrators do not need manual intervention, automatic storage tiering techniques to automatically confirm the logical data block in a busy, and migrate to the flash memory system to optimize system performance and reduce system costs.Layering technique can automatically store data blocks from the busy 7200 RPM disk drives to migrate to 15K RPM disk drives, but these two performance difference between the storage layer is only 3 or 4 to 1.If the data from the 7200 RPM disk drive migration to the flash memory system, then you can bring to enhance the performance of 30:1, which means that even if only a small part of the disk into the flash memory can also be a huge performance boost.
Then the RAID controller when designers begin to use flash memory to protect the cache? We believe that, rather than using the battery to maintain the large volume DRAM (dynamic random access memory) week of work, might as well use a small battery or supercapacitor to the problem of cache data block copied to the flash memory.