Enterprise perspective
From an enterprise perspective, it's not the the IOPs or throughput that is appealing with flash, it's the latency (or lack of).
Pushing <nnnnn>IOPs or <x>GBps from SAS drives is'nt a problem, just add spindles. But you will never get below 4-7ms for a random read IO, no matter how sophisticated the caching algorithms in <insert your array here> are.
With flash, and good, optimized array code, you can get the random read IOs down to 600-1200mS. That is a huge improvment for lets say a OLTP database doing 3000 read IOPs. VM farms is another example where the latency dramaticly improves the overall responsiveness of the VMs.
Any application doing a lot of small reads will benefit from flash, and that's where we try to implement it. Any other storage engineers here who have different opinions/experience ?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
