The Benefits of Optimizing OLTP Databases Using IBM eXFlash Solid-State Drives

Ensuring that business-critical data is available when needed is an ever-growing need in IT. Your systems must store massive amounts of data quickly and retrieve it efficiently. Simultaneously, you must use new technologies that can improve efficiency and take advantage of these technologies within limited budgets.

One measure of growing efficiency in recent years is CPU processing power, which far exceeds growth in disk input/output (I/O). For this reason, disk I/O is often the reason for bottlenecks in high-performance applications. One technology that addresses this issue by increasing I/O is solid-state drives (SSDs).

In this IBM® Redpaper™ publication, we describe tests that the IBM Software Group Competitive Project Office performed to determine the costs and benefits of using IBM eXFlash SSDs compared to using hard disk drives (HDDs). For this testing, we compared the 200 GB eXFlash SSD with the 15k RPM serial-attached SCSI (SAS) HDD.

Results of these tests indicate that eXFlash SSDs offer a dramatic increase in I/O throughput. The eXFlash SSD can provide more than 50 times the throughput of an HDD so that you can eliminate I/O bottlenecks in a database system at a much lower cost while maintaining performance levels.

This publication is directed at IT professionals and IT decision-makers, such as CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, practitioners, information architects, and current and prospective IBM clients and Business Partners.

Executive Summary
Balanced systems design 101
Testing
Test results
Summary

Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

• 4-Socket Rack Servers
• Drives
• Mission Critical Servers