Latency Beyond Throughput | @CloudExpo #DataCenter #Storage #SSD #SCM

Storage is moving to flash, and flash is getting faster, so people keep asking me why I keep talking about latency as if there is a problem. Isn’t faster flash going to just make everything faster? Won’t “the rising tide lift all boats”? Flash media as a storage media is indeed “faster” than the spinning hard-disks we’ve all been using for decades. But when it is used to simulate a hard disk, as is the case with SSD products, there are software layers which prevent it from reaching its full potential. That explanation always gets heads nodding, because it is obvious. But what about when the flash media is not simply packaged into an “SSD” and connected over SATA or SAS, but instead can be addressed via NVMe over PCIe? Doesn’t that make the problem of hard disk drive emulation go away?

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