SSD at Sun

We don´t talk here about consumer electronics. Your considerations are based on consumer class SSD. But i´ve heard this several times in the past since some PC hardware outlets benchmarked consumer-class SSD.

Enterprise SSD for server systems and Notebook SSD (especially for el-cheapo netbooks) doesn´t use the same technology (for example SLC in enterprise vs. MLC in consumer, different controller chips, size of DRAM caching area).

Of course battery backed NVRAM is faster, but it´s also vastly more expensive. It isn´t out of reach to create a 1 TB SSD storage for the L2ARC (just 4 256GB SSD), whereas a 1TB DRAM based storage is extremly expensive. At a given cost budget a SSD based variant give you more power, as you get more L2ARC based on FLASH-SSD than you would get by using DRAM-SSD. Thus on a given budget a DRAM-SSD would send you much earlier to the rotating rust obliterating the performance advantage of DRAM-SSD ...

There are write-biased and read-biased SDDs on the market. We will announce products for this task soon.

My opinion: SSD are already up to this task. At 3000 IOPS write with 4k blocks even for a plain-vanilla enterprise SSD drive, you have a huge advantage against a high RPM rotating rust drive spec´d at 320 IOPS max.I assume, you can vastly reduce your SPAM spindles, especially when you don´t cheat and keep the best practice to queue the mail without synchronous write semantics.

Yes, your infrastructure will look a lot different from your actual one. But it will not only influence your storage. Your server configuration will look different, too. Today you use as much memory as possible to get your database completly to the memory, as with 320 IOPS per disks even large buches of disks will kill your performance. An SSD will give you a relatively cheap way to build out a L2ARC cache that helps you to reduce the impact when the database has to go to the disks. SSD may influence the infrastructure in a way, that we use less big main memory in the servers in favour of a big L2ARC on enterprise SSD.

Yeap ... dauert nicht mehr lange, bis die auf der Sun Preisliste stehen ...

Both are correct. 320 is the marketing number. I´ve "stealed" some of slides from official marketing slides. But this assumption is on shaky feets. 156 is the worst case(full turn)/technical answer to the IOPS question.

PS: This is the problem of the missing voice track .... i explain this difference in my presentation, but i didn´t thought about that while puting the presention online.