the Value of Solid-State Unleashing Drives for DB2 Workloads
By Sunil Kamath
A little solid-state
speed can go a
long way—here’s how
to make the most of
low-latency storage
Over the years, database administrators and database appli- cation developers have wrestled with storage layout and isk configuration when implementing mission-critical transactional, data warehouse, or mixed workloads. They spend tremendous amounts of time and money designing and optimizing applications for efficient I/O.
Now, the most commonly used enterprise hard disk drives (HDDs) are limited
by the rate of head movement, the speed of the spinning platter, and seek latency.
Solid-state drives (SSDs, also known as flash drives) address these challenges, providing fast, low-latency data access at reduced energy consumption (IOPS/watt);
Figure 1 shows an approximate comparison of key SSD metrics relative to enterprise
HDDs. Recently, the density of SSDs has tremendously improved; 200 GB and larger
drives already are available, and capacity is expected to double during the next six
months. These dramatic improvements have made SSDs prime candidates for use
in performance-sensitive or mission-critical database applications.
In many cases, organizations will be able to place all of their databases on SSDs.
But although SSD costs are declining every quarter, SSDs are still more expensive
