New Intel SSD for personal computer systems

Oracle Database Tips by Donald BurlesonOctober 18, 2015

This article on the new Intel SSD on RAID0 (striping without mirroring) shows that SSD is making headway into the personal computer market:

"Though there is a pronounced saw-toothed performance pattern here, you can see that a pair of these drives offers, you guessed it, up to double the IO throughput of a single drive.

For any standard SATA RAID 0 array we've tested to date, these are easily the fastest IOMeter numbers we've seen.

Interestingly, our Sandra tests show the drives offer 396MB/s for read performance and 130MB/s write performance, while HD Tune and HD Tach show peaks and valleys from 200MB/s to 300MB/s. Regardless, we hope you enjoyed this quick-take performance test of what Intel's new SSDs can do in a performance-targeted RAID 0 setup"

Oracle databases have been using SSD for years, and SSD is rapidly replacing the antiquated spinning platter devices which were brand-new in the 1960's. See my notes here on hardware device speeds.

Rack-mounted SSD for large databases clobbers disk speed, and Sun Microsystems has announced that all of their 2015 servers will have on-board SSD.

PC SSD speeds

The article notes that this Intel SSD is about half as fast as rack-mounted SSD (1), and up to 25 times faster than disks:

	Rack Mount SSD	Intel SSD
Throughput	400-500 MBps	225 MB/ps

It appears that Intel has recognized that RAM is also legitimate storage, and Intel is now entering the arena of storage vendors. As disks age-out (and become the new "tape"), we will see increasing numbers of solid-state Oracle databases.

(1) SSD Overview

Market Survey of SSD vendors for Oracle:

There are many vendors who offer rack-mount solid-state disk that work with Oracle databases, and the competitive market ensures that product offerings will continuously improve while prices fall. SearchStorage notes that SSD is will soon replace platter disks and that hundreds of SSD vendors may enter the market:

"The number of vendors in this category could rise to several hundred in the next 3 years as enterprise users become more familiar with the benefits of this type of storage."

As of January 2015, many of the major hardware vendors (including Sun and EMC) are replacing slow disks with RAM-based disks, and Sun announced that all of their large servers will offer SSD.

Here are the major SSD vendors for Oracle databases (vendors are listed alphabetically):

2008 rack mount SSD Performance Statistics

SearchStorage has done a comprehensive survey of rack mount SSD vendors, and lists these SSD rack mount vendors, with this showing the fastest rack-mount SSD devices:

manufacturer	model	technology	interface	performance metrics and notes
IBM	RamSan-400	RAM SSD	Fibre Channel InfiniBand	3,000MB/s random sustained external throughput, 400,000 random IOPS
Violin Memory	Violin 1010	RAM SSD	PCIe	1,400MB/s read, 1,00MB/s write with ×4 PCIe, 3 microseconds latency
Solid Access Technologies	USSD 200FC	RAM SSD	Fibre Channel SAS SCSI	391MB/s random sustained read or write per port (full duplex is 719MB/s), with 8 x 4Gbps FC ports aggregated throughput is approx 2,000MB/s, 320,000 IOPS
Curtis	HyperXCLR R1000	RAM SSD	Fibre Channel	197MB/s sustained R/W transfer rate, 35,000 IOPS

Choosing the right SSD for Oracle

When evaluating SSD for Oracle databases you need to consider performance (throughput and response time), reliability (Mean Time Between failures) and TCO (total cost of ownership). Most SSD vendors will provide a test RAM disk array for benchmark testing so that you can choose the vendor who offers the best price/performance ratio.

Burleson Consulting does not partner with any SSD vendors and we provide independent advice in this constantly-changing market. BC was one of the earliest adopters of SSD for Oracle and we have been deploying SSD on Oracle database since 2005 and we have experienced SSD experts to help any Oracle shop evaluate whether SSD is right for your application. BC experts can also help you choose the SSD that is best for your database. Just call 800-766-1884 or e-mail.: for SSD support details.

DRAM SSD vs. Flash SSD

With all the talk about the Oracle “flash cache”, it is important to note that there are two types of SSD, and only DRAM SSD is suitable for Oracle database storage. The flash type SSD suffers from serious shortcomings, namely a degradation of access speed over time. At first, Flash SSD is 5 times faster than a platter disk, but after some usage the average read time becomes far slower than a hard drive. For Oracle, only rack-mounted DRAM SSD is acceptable for good performance:

	Avg. Read speed	Avg. write speed
Platter disk	10.0 ms.	7.0 ms.
DRAM SSD	0.4 ms.	0.4 ms.
Flash SSD	1.7 ms.	94.5 ms.

��