I’ve been wondering how long it would take Compellant to do something with SSDs and now they’ve announced this. I think that Compellant might well be ahead of the curve on their Automated Tiered Storage in the same way that 3PAR were ahead of the curve on thin provisioning. I’m certainly expecting announcements over the next twelve months from some of the ‘major players’ with regards to automated storage tiering be it in the array or in a virtualised environment.
I do have some concerns about how scalable this is all going to be and the sheer volume of meta-data I can see being generated tracking all these blocks is going to be.
Saw this post – we’re very excited about our SSD implementation strategy. By using SSDs with Compellent’s automated tiering technology, only the most frequently accessed blocks (and not entire volumes) are placed on tier 0 storage. That way, end users only need to purchase the minimum number of SSDs required to store active data for the applications that can take advantage of the performance boost from SSDs. Automated tiered storage will ensure all less-frequently accessed blocks are moved to lower, less costly storage tiers, allowing customers to better utilize and scale SSD purchases and improve performance.
To address your concerns about scalability, we already have customers running our automated tiered storage software with very high drive counts. Our system supports up to 1,000 drives and our dynamic block architecture tracks extensive info about each block within those drives including: type of drive used, RAID, associated volume, time accessed and written. For us, SSDs are treated as any other drive type and do not impact the amount of metadata compared to traditional drives.