Some Shortcomings in SSD Appliances for Transaction-Intensive Environments

Solid state storage appliances offer some valuable application performance improvements, but a comparison of available solutions reveals some shortcomings that could be of concern to IT managers in demanding, complex and transaction-intensive environments, says Dataram Corporation.

Solid state storage appliances can optimize performance, leverage existing IT investments, and measurably reduce the total cost of ownership associated with storage hardware in a typical OLTP or OLAP environment consisting of network, database, host, and storage. They boast excellent reliability and availability, typically featuring hot-swappable redundant power supplies and drives, and all but the most entry-level systems offer built-in backup and automatic restore. Monitoring and remote management are offered via flexible, Web-based browsers and system status alerts.

While current appliances share these important features, there are critical differences that impact functionality, performance and ease of integration into the existing storage network. IOPS and speed vary greatly, so IT managers must take care to match their read and write performance needs to the correct product to prevent deteriorating application service levels, reduced productivity, and user dissatisfaction.

Other current shortcomings include:

• Lack of data optimization: all available solid state appliances require the administrator to manually identify and assign files, rather than dynamically identifying and storing high I/O block-level data to optimize performance.
• Lack of Transparency: current systems require changes to the host, application software, storage system, or all three.
• Expense: when compared on cost per IOPS, solid state appliances today can be difficult to cost-justify in mid-range environments.

“As we prepare to launch a data storage acceleration product, we have studied the current state of solid state storage appliances very carefully to understand the strengths and weaknesses of available solutions,” said Jason Caulkins, Dataram’s Chief Technologist. “The features, benefits and hidden compromises the customer must accept with today’s generation of solid state storage appliances are not always obvious. We hope to help our customers understand all their options and provide them with a much better solution.”

Early customer evaluations are currently being conducted before the forthcoming Dataram products are shown publicly for the first time at SNW in October.