SSD at Sun

There were two interesting articles about the strategy of Sun regarding Flash and SSD in the last few days. At first Jonathan himself made some comments about this in his blog:

ZFS will allow Flash to join DRAM and commodity disks to form a hybrid pool automatically used by ZFS to achieve the best price, performance and energy efficiency conceivable. Simply put, our storage and server systems will get enormously faster - without any upgrade to the microprocessor. Adding Flash will be like adding DRAM - once it's in, there's no new administration, just new capability.

Adam Leventhal posts in his blog some more technical excerpts of an upcoming ACM publication of this topic in Flash, Hybrid Pools, and Future Storage:

By combining the use of flash as an intent-log to reduce write latency with flash as a cache to reduce read latency, we can create a system that performs far better and consumes less power than other system of similar cost. It's now possible to construct systems with a precise mix of write-optimized flash, flash for caching, DRAM, and cheap disks designed specifically to achieve the right balance of cost and performance for any given workload with data automatically handled by the appropriate level of the hierarchy