Solid State Disks - The Need For Speed (Jul. 21, 2010) (417832)
Wednesday, July 21, 2010 6:56 PM "SSWUG.ORG" <[email protected] Texas Memory Systems - Solid State Disks (SSD's) Need Speed? Accelerating your SQL Server or Oracle applications couldn't be easier now that super fast solid state disks are more affordable. The PCIe type SSD's, such as the Texas Memory Systems 450GB RamSan-20 (self-service price quote), can sustain 120,000 read IOs per second (IOPS) and 50,000 write IOPS (translate that to just flat out screaming). The 10TB network-based RamSan-630 (self-service price quote) can sustain a massive 500,000 random read/write IOPS. One SSD could replace a data centers full of hard drives. Solid State Disks - The Need For Speed Back in the old days when we needed to tweak a windows NT System to get some speed out of it we did lots of neat little tricks. Older versions of SQL Server allowed you to place tempdb into RAM. Later we bought large amounts of RAM and created a RAM disk for tempdb. SANs were introduced with disk speeds rivaling more expensive mainframe counterparts. Still, we want more...and more...and more. As the Intel platform becomes more powerful and larger systems are hosted we will continue the quest for more speed. As I was preparing the editorial today I was reminded of the continued growth and reliability of Solid State Disks. There are a lot of compelling reasons to consider SSD. My laptop today is completely SSD and has a greatly extended battery life as a result. My database performance on my laptop screams as well because there is no disk contention when data is not in cache or is being written to disk. One thing you need to be careful of is trying to solve bad database design issues by deploying SSD (or any other hardware for that matter). But, if you need a boost in performance, this may be something to consider. You may find that SSD has lower power cost than disk counterparts. Something to look at anyway. Are you using SSD? Share some of the lessons you learned with the rest of the SSWUG community. Drop me an Email at [email protected]. Cheers, Ben [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
