Dell and SSD drives

[W Sanders]

We looked hard at the DRAM-based devices made by Texas Memory Systems. IIRC Dell is a VAR. The top end devices can allegedly do 100K iops/sec. They are not cheap, in the $750 per GB ballpark. They appear as regular FC disks, use generic PCI HBAs, and you can put several HBAs in them to spread the IO around. We were assured we would have no trouble getting "wire speed" (the FC would be the bottleneck) even if we did tiny, random writes. (We were working to overcome a vendor's badly configured embedded MySQL DB, that logged all data to a single, huge MyISAM table.)

I looked at 3 1/2 inch form factor SSD's but I was not convinced they would stand up at 2 or 3-thousand IOPs/sec 80% write/20% reads for a very long time.

-W Sanders
http://wsanders.net