Jeff Merlet

I really started (maybe a little bit late) to look more closely at SSD Flash drive with the recent news around Fusion-io ioDRIVE; see a review at DVNation. Then, I looked at Sun with the new SSD Flash array storage offering; see also the Sun white paper on SSD-based server performances (PDF). An external look at this offering from Spinn3r's Kevin Burton.

My main concern is mostly around Oracle I/O performances, as generally this is one of the main bottleneck of any Java (or not) server based on Oracle (RAC or not in case of sharding for example) once the code has been tuned, proper usage of the DB being implemented , proper caching, etc. On the Oracle 11g performance page you can find this presentation from Oracle Development offering some insights (PDF) on running an Oracle database on Flash drive. I also found this good presentation from Texas Memory Systems on faster Oracle performance with SSD drives (PDF).

Even if I am focusing now on Oracle, the pros & cons are the same for other databases. Sun has some interesting blog posts on SSD performances and database (even if using DB2) here and here. Big DBA Head is mostly focusing on MySQL for most of their SSD drive performances work that you can find here and here. Kevin Burton has also a good write-up on using SSD drives for Spinn3r MySQL databases; and here is his list of posts on SSD drives with mostly a MySQL angle.

Finally there is a good aggregation of SSD related news and articles at Storage Search, including this Flash Performance (PDF) article from EasyCo CTO.