Latency: The Heartbeat of a Solid State Disk

This SNW tutorial session is about the number one reason an IT manager would move away from HDDs and towards solid state disks (SSD)...latency. More importantly low latency. Latency becomes less of just a number and more an important metric when considering implementing any serious performance storage related solution. Today low latency can only effectively be addressed by one particular type of storage architecture and that's an enterprise SSD design. Latency in a technical environment is synonymous with delay. More succinctly latency in terms of a SSD is how long it will take for a request to complete its round trip cycle from the time the request enters the device to the time that it leaves the device with the 'payload' in tow. In a storage world where metrics such as $/GB are entrenched as a de-facto standard of measurement, and $/IOPS has arisen to become a relevant metric, we continue to miss a critical discussion point. And that is that low latency is the most important thing that can be delivered to a performance sensitive application or a workhorse database environment. In this session we will discuss the merits of low latency solutions and what they mean when coupled with a high IOPS and a large bandwidth design. From a business perspective, low latency will be discussed in terms of how it saves money, makes money or ideally does both for an enterprise organization.

Learning Objectives

Latency, what is it?
Why does latency matter, no one seems to be really talking about it?
How coupling low latency to high IOPS and generous bandwidth creates performance solutions.