January 14, 2008
Flash-based data warehousing is getting ever closer
EMC is rolling out solid-state drives later this quarter. The press release mentions the word “terabyte”, so this is for non-trivial systems. And by the way, 100,000 write/erase cycles before something wears out is several per hour, so that’s a non-problem for data warehousing.
ParAccel and SAP already offer RAM-based appliances. I suspect we’ll see appliances based on solid-state drives before long. I also wouldn’t be shocked if a non-appliance vendor such as Oracle suddenly jumped into this area, trying to use it as a way to leapfrog the appliance vendors.
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As I understand it, the problem of the 100K write burnout has been
addressed by various Flash file systems. The OLPC has one of
these; see JFFS2 in the Wikipedia. There’s another called LogFS
and another called YAFFS. My impression is that the burnout is not
a serious technical obstacle, even though it sounds like one at
first.