October 13th, 2009 
Kiwi Si 
Thanks to Rob (Twitter: @robupham) for pointing this video out to me. With Solid State Drives (SSD) increasing in popularity at both a home PC and Enterprise level (server and SAN) have you ever wondered what sort of data through-put you could achieve via a bunch of SSDs (24 drives, 6TB) connected to a high specification dual socket quad core PC?
Of course you have…. 
I think you’ll agree that the performance of over 2000 MB/s on both sequential reads and writes achieved are quite impressive and shows the performance potential that SSD’s bring.
At an Enterprise level the majority of main server and storage manufacturers (EMC, HP, NetApp) are already offering SSD as an option but for many businesses the current high cost is prohibitive to adoption though it is a matter of time before SSD prices drop and their capacities increase.
These are exciting times we live in…
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My name is Simon Seagrave and I am a London (UK) based Senior Technology Consultant and vSpecialist working for EMC. 
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Entertaining video. Something I’d expect to see at an overclocker’s website or perhaps Tom’s hardware. So what’s the verdict? Are they faster than SAS?
[Reply]
Kiwi Si Reply:
October 14th, 2009 at 6:25 am
Hi Jason,
Thanks for the comment. True, more of an overclockers type video but what I thought, and in hindsight didn’t convey clearly in the post
was the application these sort of speeds will have for Enterprise computing once SSD hits mass mainstream.
Both EMC and HP have SSD offerings at the moment though, at least to my knowledge with HP, there is some limitation on numbers eg: you can only have up to 8 SSD drives in an EVA installation. It’d be interesting to get some benchmarks off of a medium/large VM farm running on SSD’s – I’m not sure if there are any implications or gotchas in doing so apart from the possible limited NAND re-writes (about 100K writes off the top of my head).
Throughput speeds compared to SAS (and jump in anyone if I have got this wrong) would be the same or similar on the controller but would offer significant low latency in IO’s particularly random IO’s making it preferable for performance servers/VMs.
I’m just waiting for the price of SSDs to drop and will then buy one to test in my home lab. Just can’t justify the expense at the moment.
All the best,
Simon
[Reply]
James Pearce Reply:
October 14th, 2009 at 9:40 am
Since there’s no physical head movement, random IO should be equal to sequential IO – the video missed a bit of a trick there, although it’s still awesome
EqualLogic PS6000 arrays are available with 16x SSDs, if you can stomach the cost! Interestingly run their fans in maximum speed mode all the time when using SSDs (?).
So using a pair of PS6000s, one with SSDs and the other with SATA drives, we’d get the capacity of the SATA disks AND the speed of SSDs which will automatically be used for hot-blocks (supposedly).
[Reply]
Jason Boche Reply:
October 14th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
To be clear, I meant nothing negative about the overclockers comment. I wanted to be sure you aren’t interpreting it that way.
[Reply]
Kiwi Si Reply:
October 14th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Hi Jason,
No definitely not – I didn’t read it that way for a second. I really appreciate you comments,as I’m sure do others – keep them coming mate!
[Reply]
I’d love to see some benchmarks. I’m sure they’ll be available mainstream soon. I did see that EMC had them available on their brochures but wasn’t aware HP had them in their EVA line. Without the moving parts in a SSD, I’d think another benefit would be much lower failure rate (assuming we can keep these things cool enough). Less service calls for replacing failed drives (hopefullY). Also, their smaller size – I’m assuming we can fit more of these SSDs in a drive tray then what we can today with non-SSD drives.
Thanks again for the post Simon!
Jas
[Reply]
I just saw a Tekzilla (http://revision3.com/tekzilla/visback) episode on Solid State drives and they concurred with what you’ve said. It’s kind of like loading apps in memory…
Good info. Keep it coming.
[Reply]