Now that solid-state drives have begun to decrease in value, makers tout them jointly thanks to boost overall information center performance. SSD performance will surpass the quickest mechanical exhausting drives, however merely replacement bequest drives with SSDs won't yield any improvement. Is SSD well worth the investment?

As associate degree administrator, you’ll ought to scrutinize the potential advantages of solid state drive (SSD) performance before creating the switch. the most effective thanks to assess associate degree SSD performance gain that associate degree upgrade may yield is by distinguishing I/O-dependent servers that may be sensible candidates for solid state storage. Once they’re known, use the Windows Performance

Monitor to spot the server’s bottleneck.

Every server incorporates a performance bottleneck — the one piece of hardware that's slower than everything else within the system and limits the server’s overall performance. For servers running I/O-intensive applications it's simple to assume the exhausting disks ar the matter. Exhausting drives are mechanical devices and run way slower than different system parts. Often, however, another system part is accountable for the bottleneck, particularly for servers that ar connected to superior storage arrays. In these things associate degree investment in solid state storage may be wasted unless the server’s non-hard-disk bottlenecks also are self-addressed.

While victimisation the Windows performance monitor to look for storage bottlenecks might sound sort of a pushover, the centralized nature of knowledge center storage will complicate the method. As an example, one among the first Performance Monitor counters wont to valuate disk performance has forever been the common disk queue length (ADQL) counter. 

Even if the administrator will have associate degree correct SAN mapping, the ADQL counter are often deceptive. Let’s say the counter price is six. If you simply contemplate. Microsoft’s recommendation to stay the counter below a price of two then this is able to look like a giant drawback. However, if the degree spans 5 drives, then you'd got to divide the disk queue length of six by the entire variety of drives, 5. The ADQL per drive would solely average concerning one.2, well inside Microsoft’s tips.

Because it's typically troublesome to understand what percentage physical drives ar being mapped to a volume, it should be more practical to seem at the avg. disk/sec counter instead. This counter permits you to watch the time taken for scan, write and transfer operations. Response times alone won’t tell you whether or not or not you may take pleasure in associate degree upgrade to solid state disks, however it'll provide you with a touch on the system’s health. If you're seeing response times within the five to ten time unit vary then the server is experiencing good performance. That isn’t to mention that solid state drives won't improve the server’s performance – simply that there aren't any major storage performance issues.
Use tools to investigate storage traffic

If you see high disk response times — larger than ten milliseconds — it’s doable that your existing exhausting disks ar having bother keeping pace together with your server, however it's conjointly doable that you just ar tormented by network latency problems instead.

For example, in Windows operational systems, the Windows Performance Monitor is restricted in its ability to work out whether or not a performance drawback on SAN storage may be resolved by replacement mechanical exhausting disks with solid state disks. This must be done with the superimposed approach that Microsoft uses for storage I/O.

There ar variety of parts that ar utilized in the Windows I/O stack. all-time low level at that it's doable to watch storage performance in Windows is at the port level that manages a particular transport. The port hands I/O operations off to the miniport driver, that could be a vendor-supplied part specific to the underlying hardware. As such, the Windows Performance Monitor is unable to watch the stack at the miniport level.

If you believe your Fibre Channel property may be the supply of the bottleneck then you may got to use a third-party answer like those provided by Fibre Channel Technologies or Network Instruments to investigate your Fibre Channel communications.

Analyzing storage traffic can tell you whether or not or not your Fibre Channel links ar tormented by information measure saturation or latency problems. If you identify the server’s storage property is that the issue, then you'll be able to improve storage performance by putting in further host bus adapters.

There is no denying SSD performance is healthier than what's accessible with mechanical exhausting drives, however the potential gains might stay unsuccessful unless storage property will keep up with the storage array.