SSD (Solid State Drives) and Information Server 8.5

sparq · Post by **sparq** » Tue Dec 06, 2011 10:03 pm

Hi,

We are looking at speeding up our DataStage jobs with the use of SSD technology (enterprise SSD).

Our main bottleneck is the Disk I/O, so the idea is to try and decrease this bottleneck. We would mainly use the SSD for Scratch/Temp/Sorting.

Has anyone implemented SSD's with Information Server ?
Did you face any challenges ?
Did the SSD make much difference ?

Thanks in advance.

Krisztian

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Wed Dec 07, 2011 6:36 am

I haven't seen or heard of anyone making the leap to Enterprise SSDs yet for DataStage but I imagine the only challenge would be to cut through all of the vendor hype and find out how well the various models actually perform. From what I've seen (looking for and implementing a personal SSD boot drive on my PC) it's like the wild west out there and vendors can make up pretty much any benchmark they like.

Found this article online with some interesting thoughts along those lines on standards. Also some notes there about performance over time and reads v. writes v. the 'moving the data around' management that they do. I'm sure there are other articles out there with similar information.

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Wed Dec 07, 2011 2:46 pm

I am aware of a colleague who used a 16GB thumb drive for extra scratch disk when no other disk was available, but have no information about performance other than that it was successful.

sparq · Post by **sparq** » Wed Dec 07, 2011 7:09 pm

I am aware of larger companies (AMAZON for example) that have made the move of replacing their HDD with SSD.

For our purpose it would be mainly for temporally storage due to the high throughput and extremely low access times.

For example the OCZ Z-Drive R4 models use the PCIE bus (x8) and reach 2800MB/sec (Read/Write). These can also be fitted in 1U blades.
The new generation PCIE drives remove the bottleneck from the SATA interface.

Here is an article comparing a few different SSD for Oracle performance
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4879/ocz- ... d-review/7

Krisztian

aartlett · Post by **aartlett** » Thu Dec 08, 2011 6:35 pm

A little off topic but I helped a collegue use a 5 bay NAS fitted with 2.5"bays to hold 5 x 256GB SSD's in a raid 5 configuration for about 1TB fast access.

After the datamarts are created and cubes generated they are copied to the NAS for user access. 2 x 1GB ethernet links, paired into it to improve network performance to the unit and ... dayamn ... that thing is fast. Only one write a day for the data dump.

The solution was to fix bad performance on the cubes for reports. User requirements made the cubes just plain ugly so this $8K solution was a good stop gap to the $100K to "fix" the reports.

users happy, geeks happy ... management screaming over the $8K cost ... I don't get the screaming, but I'm techo geek anyway.

qt_ky · Post by **qt_ky** » Tue May 20, 2014 8:19 pm

I just ran across this older SSD topic and was wondering, has anyone experimented any further in recent years with SSD's and DataStage?

This article describes a few SSD concerns to watch out for: The write endurance and lifecycle limitations, and the write cliff, where performance can apparently become bad.