John Furrier55
Question 2: 2) What hybrid storage array architecture delivers the best performance?
Dave Vellante
Speaking for @dfloyer I'd say those that were specifically designed to be hybrids and not bolt ons and I would add - those that persist to the flash directly
Jean-Luc Chatelain
Again I don't think it is an architecture per se (although important) but it is the SW intelligence driving the hybrid
Dave Vellante
The storage bottleneck in many workloads is very often de-staging the cache to the backend disk - a "Flash First" architecture (RAM first then flash) signals the write is complete when the flash has it then asynchronously trickles to disk
John Furrier
I ask this question on @theCUBE all the time and the responses are consistent .. "there will never be a tool that serves 100% of the market"
Jean-Luc Chatelain
If workload is 100% IOPS and small capacity then little value to hybrid and same if 100% streaming lots of large files but these are edge cases
Dave Vellante
Remember the original EMC Symmetrix? - the beauty of the architecture was it had a HUGE cache and mega backend disk bandwidth to de-stage the cache. Blew away the performance of everything out there. That was circa 1989 - pre-flash
Bert Latamore
while speed is important it is only one advantage of flash. There is also service level consistency and handling noisy neighbors for instance.
Jean-Luc Chatelain
A well designed hybrid should serve the bell of the curve well and differentiation between vendors should be flexible affinity to different host filesystems and applications
Kevin
de-staging is a huge issue when there is a backing-store cliff like #Exadata which is limited to 32,000 HDD IOPS. Datasheet: http://www.oracle.co...
Jean-Luc Chatelain
@dvellante Yes and the big delta between '89 and today is the economics
Kerstin Woods
@InformationCTO I think it's a combination - you need the right hardware (DRAM/flash size) to be useful AND you need intelligent caching algorithms to use it most effectively.
cmosoares
@InformationCTO Yep, cache was very expensive (in fact so were spinning disks) and of course no flash technology
cmosoares
@KerstinWoods In fact with ZS3 70-90% of I/O is server from extremely fast DRAM