Higher I/O requirements from Tier 1 mission critical applications and the rapid growth of high density virtualized infrastructures place greater I/O demands on storage than ever before. This increase in I/O requests can make it more difficult to meet SLAs with existing storage in datacenters. As a virtual infrastructure’s virtual machine and application densities rise it is more difficult to keep up with growing I/O request demands. This can force a rise in CAPEX and OPEX spending on servers and storage.
There are solid state device-based accelerators that help accelerate Tier 1 applications and virtualized environments. Many application areas like databases, virtualization, data analytics (i.e. Hadoop), cloud computing, high performance computing, and social applications are using host side SSDs and PCIe flash cards to increase performance and efficiency.
A device level response of 5-7 ms is the typical response time for a small data read from a hard disk drive. Using the same measurement, solid state storage can complete the same reads, on average, at 300 μs. This is an order-of-magnitude improvement in response time.