A recent article in the Data Center Journal written by Mark Teter outlines how flash is becoming a disruptive technology in the data center and how it will soon replace HDDs in the storage hierarchy. As Teter explains, the drivers behind this trend are lower cost/performance and power savings; flash is over 100x faster for reads than the fastest HDD, and while it is expensive, it can produce dramatic reductions in the cost of performance as measured in Input/Outputs per second (IOPS). What's more, flash consumes 1/5th the power of HDD, so it's faster AND greener. Teter writes, "when appropriately used, flash turns the current economics of IT performance on its head. That's disruptive."

Exadata Smart Flash Cache in the Sun Oracle Database Machine makes intelligent use of flash storage to deliver extreme performance for OLTP and mixed workloads. It intelligently caches data from the Oracle Database replacing slow mechanical I/O operations to disk with very rapid flash memory operations. Exadata Smart Flash Cache is the fundamental technology of the Sun Oracle Database Machine that enables the processing of up to 1 million random I/O operations per second (IOPS), and the scanning of data within Exadata storage at up to 50 GB/second.

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Read more:
"Flash technology can revolutionize your IT infrastructure", The Data Center Journal, March 30, 2010.
Exadata Smart Flash Cache and the Sun Oracle Database Machine white paper