White Paper: Solid State Disks And Storage Tiering

Standard hard disk drives (HDDs) are spinning disks, and their mechanical actions can create a delay in data retrieval. Solid-state disks (SSDs) are an exciting improvement in disk technology - made of silicon memory chips and with no moving parts, SSDs have no rotational delay and near zero seek time, dramatically reducing response times. SSDs can be extremely valuable to applications that need fast performance.

SSDs offer a high-performance storage tier commonly referred to as Tier 0. If storage administrators know of data that will be in high demand, they can place it on SSD for fast performance, and place other data on HDD tiers. Since the effectiveness of SSD as a disk tier is based solely on how well the administrator can place data, it remains a solution that is useful for IT shops with a known performance problem on specific data sets. Most IT organizations are still unsure of whether SSDs can help them cost effectively.

SSDs offer significant benefits if they fit your workloads. However, if your workloads do not require high performance or are not tier-able, an investment in SSD's may not be cost-efficient. While your system may perform well, it could be over-provisioned and under utilized for what the applications can leverage. As these technologies mature, more information should become available to help administrators know exactly which data sets will benefit from SSDs and automated tiering.