Solid State Disks and IO Performance

I just read a non bulls**t whitepaper from EMC's site about disk performance and solid state disks for the enterprise. They are calling the disks EFD (Enterprise Flash Drives). I have tired of reading storage vendors's whitepapers that dodge real IO bottleneck performance issues. This paper is very informative and discusses IO throughput, which, in my experience, tends to be one of the most limiting factors in hardware performance.

Download from emc.com

Or download my copy from here.

I have always known that solid state disks have faster IO than magnetic disks, but was not sure about their IO throughput. This paper has a performance test (conducted by Microsoft's SQLCAT team) and they found over 1000% throughput improvement by moving to solid state disks. One solid state disk could sustain over 2500 IOs per second! This is great news for any IO bound database server.

The whitepaper also discusses SQL Server's system checkpoint the implication on the log, if you didn't know already.

I suggest the whitepaper is a must read for any DBA interested in system performance.