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At the November 2009 PASS Summit in Seattle, one of the outstanding keynote presentations was by Dr. Dave DeWitt, Microsoft Fellow, and leader of the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab, in Madison, WI.  I received a copy of his slide deck from PASS Headquarters, which you can see below.

Dr. DeWitt is working on releases 1 and 2 of SQL Server Parallel Database Warehouse.  In his keynote he reviewed the 30 year history of CPU, memory, and disk performance.  Variations in performance gains across these subsystems, with disk performance lagging badly, have major impacts on database system performance.

Disk performance gains have been made in three areas, Capacity, Transfer Rate, and Average Seek Time.  However, the gains over the last 30 years have not been uniform.

Capacity of high performance disk drives has increased by a factor of 10,000.  Transfer rates have increased by a factor of 65.  The average seek time has only increased by a factor of 10.  Dr. DeWitt talked about the impact of these discrepancies on OLTP and Data Warehouse applications. 

One of his conclusions is that some problems can be fixed through smarter software, but that “SSDs provide the only real help.”

Fusion-io

We learned more about SSD’s during the Fusion-io presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group.  The DesignMind team has also been evaluating SSDs to determine situations where we can provide our clients with the most leverage.  Plus here’s a terrific video which shows SSD’s in action. 

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I just had to share this terrific demo of the ioDrive in action.  Here’s Father Robert Ballecer interviewing Fusion-io President and CTO David Flynn.

Father Robert is a Jesuit Priest.  The video was produced by Tech Stop at the Center for Apostolic Technology, headquartered in San Jose, California.  How cool is that?

Sumeet Bansal of Fusion-io will speak to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group on November 11, 2009.   We’ll be at the Microsoft office on Market Street in downtown San Francisco.  Please consider joining us.

You can see more from Father Robert on the Gadget You Tube channel.

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Perhaps you’ve heard this astonishing figure.  At Amazon.com, every 100 ms of latency costs the company 1% in sales. Sumeet Bansal, Principal Solutions Architect at Fusion-io, referenced the Amazon study as he separated myth from reality about Solid State Storage and its role in the modern Database enterprise system.  

Fusion-io is a producer of enterprise-class SSDs.  Their silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory applies flash memory to large-scale enterprise storage products like Storage Area Networks.

Sumeet’s presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group on Tuesday included a variety of reasons why SQL Server  DBAs, as well as other technologists, should be excited about SSD’s.  He stressed that SSD’s are ready for the enterprise today.  His description of the things to look out for when purchasing SSD’s was quite useful – kind of like the Consumer Reports of SSD’s.

This list of differentiators is probably part of why Steve Wozniak joined Fusion-io as Chief Scientist – “the Woz” wouldn’t put his energies into anything but the most promising technologies.  And neither would Sumeet, who came over to Fusion-io from Wine.com, where he was VP of IT at the San Francisco company.

David Leston walked away happy, and probably stayed up very late installing his blazingly fast 320 GB Fusion-io Solid State Drive (SSD).  He won the coveted door prize, which was generously donated by Fusion-io. 

I hadn’t met David before tonight, but he was on the same wavelength as our speaker.  Sumeet’s discussion of SSD’s pointed out that you don’t purchase SSD’s based on cost per GB, but rather by the value of the performance gains and reliability. 

It was particularly interesting to hear comments from the audience about how Microsoft and other vendors will start optimizing performance based on SSD-equipped systems, in addition to conventional drives.  Right now there’s an assumption of significant latency when going to the drive.  As the operating systems see great reductions in latency, additional optimizations will add to the performance gains of this breakthrough technology.

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