Permalink Submitted by Cory Snavely (not verified) on June 4, 2010
Straight IOps-to-IOps, I couldn't agree more; there is no comparison...and, as far as the geek factor, I'd love to play with SSDs...but our solutions need to be fiscally responsible.
First and foremost, we need a storage configuration sophisticated enough to be shared across multiple nodes so we can offload indexing and handle failover. Simple DAS will not easily work for a 24x7x365 production environment with a large and dynamic index. The TMS product, or the incremental cost of your SAN fabric, are examples of how the cost increases beyond the simple $/GB in order to make storage manageable.
Which brings me to the point I make with people on a weekly basis: cost comparisons of managed storage environments and raw media (disks) are apples and oranges. Production environments at any scale cannot efficiently use raw, unmanaged storage.
So, how do you figure SSDs will wipe the floor cost-wise as compared to Isilon? I do not find the oft-quoted statistic of $/IOps compelling, for example, when there are other ready alternatives on my data center floor that provide performance within acceptable tolerances. We have 504 (soon to be 672) stripes in our Isilon cluster that see relatively little I/O; I would be a fool to not take advantage of that.
ssd costs