The (Solid) State Of Drive Technology Photo Licensed With Creative Commons From http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandonshigeta/2982031496/

Who Am I? Kendal Van Dyke Senior DBA for Channel Intelligence in Celebration, FL SQL Server DBA 8+ years http://kendalvandyke.blogspot.com Twitter: @SQLDBA

Agenda How SSDs Work & Fundamentals Performance Demo How People Are Using SSDs Today Caveats Are SSDs Right For You? Q & A

Solid State Drive (SSD) How It Works Hard Disk Drive (HDD) Solid State Drive (SSD) HDD Magnetic Media Spinning Platter(s) Mechanical Heads move back and forth to read\write data SSD Electronic Media NAND Flash No moving parts Images Licensed With Creative Commons From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Open_HDD_and_SSD.JPG

SSD Fundamentals Single Level Cell (SLC) Multi Level Cell (MLC) Wear Leveling TRIM Over-Provisioning SLC 2 states per cell (1 bit) Metaphor: Single Home MLC 4 states per cell (2 bits) Metaphor: Duplex SLC vs. MLC - Biggest issue is lifetime - Write Cycles SLC: 100,000 MLC: 3,000 - 10,000 Typical users write ~ 1.4 Gbytes/day Heavy users write ~ 5.2 Gbytes/day TRIM Garbage collection Windows 7 & Windows 2008 R2 Prior OS’s use custom implementations that require free RAM SLC vs. MLC Storage Image Source: http://www2.electronicproducts.com/MLC_and_SLC_NAND_flash_design_tradeoffs-article-FAJH_Toshiba_Sep2008-html.aspx

Performance - Hardware Fusion IO IO Drive 128 GB PCI Express SLC OCZ Z-Drive p84 256 GB PCI Express MLC Dell PowerVault MD1000 12x 146 GB 15,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah SAS RAID 10

Performance - Metrics SQLIO File Sizes IOs/sec MB/sec Avg. Latency Fusion IO: 64 GB OCZ: 64 GB PowerVault: 512 GB

Performance - Reads 8 KB random reads 64 KB offset 64 KB RAID Stripe 64 KB allocation unit IO Depth: 8 Threads: 8

Performance - Writes 8 KB random writes 64 KB offset 64 KB RAID Stripe 64 KB allocation unit IO Depth: 8 Threads: 8

Demo 128 GB OCZ Vertex II 2 year old laptop Windows 7 x64 REBOOT!

How People Are Using SSDs MySpace Fusion IO Banks STEC in EMC SMBs OCZ & Fusion IO

Caveats Software RAID for PCI Express Drives have been known to disappear Fusion IO requires x64 $$$$ vs Traditional HDD STEC Zeus 48 GB SATA SLC - $10,800

Are SSDs Right For You? It Depends! Good For: Not Recommended Redundant systems TempDB Low Writes, High Reads Not Recommended Core systems Five 9‘s systems

Questions? Photo Licensed With Creative Commons From http://www.flickr.com/photos/meer/2658968648/

Additional Resources The Brave New World of SSDs (2 Parts) http://www.lostcircuits.com/mambo//index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=9&id=41 The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1

THANK YOU! Photo Licensed With Creative Commons From http://www.flickr.com/photos/kimberlyfaye/2784535823/