Solid State Drives (SSDs) for Enterprise Storage Networking

SSD as cache can benefit businesses of all sizes, whether you are a small business trying to get better performance out of your Exchange environment or a large one trying to optimize your Oracle environment. This Information Week article details how SSD can deliver improved performance without having to add more or faster drives.

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"The simplest case is to use an internal SSD either as a drive or a PCIe card inside of a server. Several RAID controller manufacturers have added the ability to support an SSD drive to act as a cache in front of the drives attached to the RAID controller. For the cost of a single SSD drive, or two for redundancy, we’ve seen dramatic improvements in performance. The SAN can also benefit from cache and the solution does not necessarily have to come from your storage vendor. Several storage virtualization products have the capability to set aside several SSD drives as caching area for reads and in some cases even writes, to existing storage arrays. There are also a few products that are essentially caching switches, and don’t require a storage virtualization engine. As is the case with the server example, this can greatly improve performance.

"The above two examples cover the block world but NAS systems do not need to be left out. There are several devices that can be placed in front of NAS systems to cache CIFS and NFS traffic as it goes across the network. While many assume that the network is the bottleneck in high performance NAS environments, the thrashing of disk I/O is sometimes the root of the problem; caching should help alleviate that."

Read the Full "The Types Of SSD Cache" Story at Information Week