Advances in flash memory SSD technology for enterprise database applications

The past few decades have witnessed a chronic and widening imbalance among processor bandwidth, disk capacity, and access speed of disk. According to Amdhal's law, the performance enhancement possible with a given improvement is limited by the amount that the improved feature is used. This implies that the performance enhancement of an OLTP system would be seriously limited without a considerable improvement in I/O throughput. Since the market debut of flash memory SSD a few years ago, we have made a continued effort to overcome its poor random write performance and to provide stable and sufficient I/O bandwidth. In this paper, we present three different flash memory SSD models prototyped recently by Samsung Electronics. We then show how the flash memory SSD technology has advanced to reverse the widening trend of performance gap between processors and storage devices. We also demonstrate that even a single flash memory drive can outperform a level-0 RAID with eight enterprise class 15k-RPM disk drives with respect to transaction throughput, cost effectiveness and energy consumption.