Deploying Hybrid Storage Pools With Flash Techology and the Solaris ZFS File System 
by Roger Bitar
October 2008
The CPU to storage bottleneck is hampering overall system performance — a trend that continues unabated as system performance outpaces disk throughput year over year. The disparity in IOPS between the system and disks, and the I/O bottleneck introduced forces CPU cycles to be lost waiting for I/O to complete, impacting system throughput and application performance.
To compensate, IT managers typically add more external devices and DRAM to help speed throughput. More DRAM lets systems store working sets in memory to avoid disk latency, and adding disk spindles can help reduce seek times and increase IOPS. However, the result is an expensive infrastructure that is difficult to manage. For example, a large-scale online transaction processing (OLTP) system can cost nearly $3M, with over 74 percent of total system cost going toward storage performance.
This article discusses a new approach to enterprise storage management. By combining Flash technology and the Solaris ZFS file system, companies can combine the high performance of enterprise solid state drives (SSDs) with the low cost of high-capacity hard disks to create solutions that help balance system performance and cost.
Contents
- Storage Infrastructure Challenges
- Flash Technology Moves to the Enterprise
- Enterprise Solid State Devices
- The Hybrid Storage Pool — A New Way to Manage Storage and Speed Application Throughput
- How the Hybrid Storage Pool Works
- Sun's Enterprise Solid State Devices
- Solaris ZFS File System
- Reduced Read Latency
- Reduced Write Latency
- Simplified Hard Disk Drive Pool Management
- Applications That Can Benefit
- How Flash Technology and Open Storage Can Help
- About the Author
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Related Resources
- Ordering Sun Documents
- Accessing Sun Documentation Online
Roger Bitar
Roger Bitar is a staff engineer and technical marketing manager at Sun, and is responsible for developing technical product materials that provide compelling and differentiated technical evidence of Sun solutions. Over the last nine years, Roger has worked on improving ISV application performance and scalability on Sun platforms.
The author would like to recognize Adam Leventhal, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, and Denis Villfort for their contributions to this article.
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