On 06/21/2011 05:17 PM, Greg Smith wrote:
If they just do the same style of write cache and reliability rework to the enterprise line, but using better flash, I agree that the first really serious yet affordable product for the database market may finally come out of that.
After we started our research in this area and finally settled on FusionIO PCI cards (which survived several controlled and uncontrolled failures completely intact), a consultant tried telling us he could build us a cage of SSDs for much cheaper, and with better performance.
Once I'd stopped laughing, I quickly shooed him away. One of the reasons the PCI cards do so well is that they operate in a directly memory-addressable manner, and always include capacitors. You lose some overhead due to the CPU running the driver, and you can't boot off of them, but they're leagues ahead in terms of safety.
But like you said, they're certainly not what most people would call affordable. 640GB for two orders of magnitude more than an equivalent hard drive would cost? Ouch. Most companies are familiar---and hence comfortable---with RAIDs of various flavors, so they see SSD performance numbers and think to themselves "What if that were in a RAID?" Right now, drives aren't quite there yet, or the ones that are cost more than most want to spend.
It's a shame, really. But I'm willing to wait it out for now. -- Shaun Thomas OptionsHouse | 141 W. Jackson Blvd. | Suite 800 | Chicago IL, 60604 312-676-8870 sthomas@xxxxxxxxx ______________________________________________ See http://www.peak6.com/email_disclaimer.php for terms and conditions related to this email -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
