While it’s widely accepted that solid-state drives (SSDs) provide significant performance advantages over hard disk drives (HDDs), there are three main related factors to consider when deploying SSDs: form factor, performance, and location in the storage tier or in the server. To help customers understand the trade-offs between the form factor, performance, and location of various types of SSDs, Virident just published a white paper, “The Advantages of Server-Side Flash Storage.”

In my last post I wrote that while flash was introduced at the right time to help manage multi-core CPUs, big data, and server sprawl, there are various grades of flash storage that one must know about when considering its use. In this second post I’ll address the realities of various categories of flash storage, their performance variability, and the real-world deployment motivations that separate consumer-grade from enterprise-grade flash solutions.

Welcome to my four-part series of blogs on maintaining high, sustained performance with PCIe SSDs. In this initial post I’ll introduce the value of flash storage, the various categories currently available, and their typical performance and use cases.

Five seconds spent waiting for answers to customer queries among the 48 million billing records that Vail Systems processes each day adds up to a lot of time; just ask Virident customer David Fruin, vice president of engineering at Vail Systems. Vail Systems’ clients base their customer care on Vail’s hosting solutions, but existing hard disk drives were unable to support the desired response time to customer queries regarding billing records.

I recently visited the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY where I watched a presentation that compared incremental vs. radical innovation. Incremental innovation is classified as improvement to an existing product, whereas radical innovation is much more disruptive and involves a completely new approach to solving a problem. Disruptive innovation has the potential to turn a market on its head and threaten many existing technologies and revenue streams.   There are some good examples of radical innovation in the storage market from the past, and there are examples of both radical and incremental innovations in the flash storage space today.

Virident produced a one minute video at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference to demonstrate how Virident’s flash storage solution compares to other vendors in the industry. This MySQL simulation shows that Virident’s FlashMAX solution trumps the competition in terms of performance and scalability; allowing users to consolidate four MySQL servers into a single server while offering unconditional performance for growing database applications over time.

The partnerships between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and their magical results, are too numerous to list, but Lucasfilm, Pixar, Silicon Graphics and Apple Computer are examples of Silicon Valley technology meeting Hollywood-style creativity in the film industry. While talent and creativity reign supreme as the sine qua non for any film, behind all the imagination and ultimately displaying the results are the digital cinema finishing systems that transform dreams and visions into displayable realities....

Our customers know that, in order to achieve the performance standards that they require for enterprise applications, they often need to develop custom-configured server solutions. Our customers also know that Virident FlashMAX is an important component of servers providing high performance and low latency...