(Small image shows, on a logarithmic scale, the access time and cost per gigabyte for DRAM, Flash and a 15K disk. See the ACM article for details.)

Adam address the question "Can flash memory become the foundation for a new tier in the storage hierarchy?" by exploring the capabilities of Flash memory, the challenges of existing disks, Log Devices and Read Caches. Adam says, "it's possible to build a flash-based device that can service write operations very quickly by inserting a DRAM write cache and then treating that write cache as nonvolatile by adding a supercapacitor to provide the necessary power to flush outstanding data in the DRAM to flash in the case of power loss."

Flash is suitable to be a second level adaptive replacement cache (ARC)- L2ARC in ZFS terms. A small server with room for 128Gb of DRAMs can easily accommodate 768GB or more using flash SSDs in its internal drive bays. The L2ARC can help take full advantage of the flash SSDs. [...read more...]

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Other articles in the Storage section of Volume 125, Issue 1: Can Flash Memory Become the Foundation for a New Tier in the Storage Hierarchy? Storage Virtualization as a Route to Data Management Hyper Parallel Access Volume for Sun StorageTek 9985V and 9990V See all archived articles in the Storage section.

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