Opinion

posted on 22 July 2008 08:48

Jay Kidd, NetApp;s chief technology officer, blogs: "NetApp is in the process of certifying enterprise-grade SSDs that you can use in our existing storage shelves."

Here is the other side of the curtain that the two accelerator products NetApp announced last month, The Performance Acceleration Module and Storage Acceleration Appliance. The company wil be hoping that customers obtain storage access performance boosts from an SSD tier zero in its arrays and a separate or combined storage performance boost from the PAM (plug-in DRAM cache card) and SAA technologies.

That's neat; it means non-SSD-accelerated NetApp arrays will also get a performance boost. Kidd says a flash-based PAM is coming: "we we will offer a version using flash chips next year." That should be less expensive.
He also makes the point that flash caches will be deduped because NetApp's A-SIS deduplication applies to SSD storage and PAM storage as well as HDD storage.

He says that a storage array controller can easily be saturated with I/Os from quite a small amount of SSD capacity. This implies that if and when SSD prices fall low enough to encourage a broader take up then storage array controllers will need to boost their I/O capacity to handle the added I/O load.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}