Enterprise SSD has its place, and undoubtedly one place is caching. LSI seems to think so given their recent announcement around FastPath and CacheCade software enhancements to their MegaRAID line of 6Gb SATA/SAS controllers.
LSI’s says the new offerings “help to optimize application performance in direct-attached storage environments configured with solid-state drives“… and “enables SSDs to be configured as a secondary tier of cache to maximize transactional I/O performance to deliver up to a 50X performance improvement in read-intensive applications.”
What read intensive applications:
- On-line transaction processing (OLTP) perhaps eCommerce applications
- File servers used for compute intensive database applications seen in finance and banking.
- Web servers perhaps with the exponential growth of on-demand online video.
What does LSI’s software really do? “The solution is designed to accelerate the I/O performance of HDD-based arrays while minimizing required investments in SSD technology.”
Okay…so it gives your traditional hard drive based storage more power while making your initial investment in SSD more cost effective. Sounds political… no need to make dramatic changes to policy, just economically sensible tweaks to please the masses (the independents).
Long live the hybrid model… it always seems to work out best.
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