Using SSD as a Foundation for New Generations of Flash Databases - Nati Shalom

“You just can't have it all” is a phrase that most of us are accustomed to hearing and that many still believe to be true when discussing the speed, scale and cost of processing data. To reach high speed data processing, it is necessary to utilize more memory resources which increases cost. This occurs because price increases as memory, on average, tends to be more expensive than commodity disk drive. The idea of data systems being unable to reliably provide you with both memory and fast access—not to mention at the right cost—has long been debated, though the idea of such limitations was cemented by computer scientist, Eric Brewer, who introduced us to the CAP theorem.

The CAP Theorem and Limitations for Distributed Computer Systems

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Shutterfly Saw a Speedup of 500% With Flashcache

In the "should I or shouldn't I" debate around deploying SSD, it always helps to have real-world data. Fiesta! with a live-blog summary of a presentation by Kenny Gorman on Shutterfly on MongoDB Performance Tuning.

What if you still need more performance after doing all of this tuning? One option is to use SSDs. Shutterfly uses Facebook’s flashcache: kernel module to cache data on SSD. Designed for MySQL/InnoDB. SSD in front of a disk, but exposed as a single mount point. This only makes sense when you have lots of physical I/O. Shutterfly saw a speedup of 500% w/ flashcache. A benefit is that you can delay sharding: less complexity.

The whole series of posts has a lot of great information and is worth a longer look, especially if you are considering using MongoDB. 

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