A very frequent problem is that the overall solution is satisfactory in principle but for some parts of the data or in some time windows performance would need to be increased.
Our specialists have many years of experience in optimising disk systems and entire SANs. When it is no longer possible to improve the situation by changing the system settings or the layout of stored data, it is possible to increase the performance of most existing and, of course, all new solutions by using FLASH technologies. We have extensive experience with deploying accelerator cards to servers or disk array controllers. Such a solution using suitable software for applications is transparent and fast to apply, and its effect is immediate. Another advantage is the ability to share this fast cache with different applications and data at different times with minimal setup requirements.
If acceleration for write operations is also required, the most common way to increase the performance of disk systems using SSDs is so – called tiering, where data is first written to a fast area composed of SSDs and then migrated to slower disks. This solution is already much more sensitive to correct sizing of the ratio between dataset size and fast vs. slow part of the array, which can also fundamentally change with time. The performance overhead associated with moving data between tiers is also not negligible. But years of experience allow our specialists to properly design such a solution and achieve the highest possible performance while minimising the cost of the SSD tier.
