HP SmartCache technology

Technical white paper | Product, solution, or service
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Comparing storage technology performance
SSDs provide significant performance advantages over traditional HDDs. Figure 2 illustrates the relative performance in
Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and latency for a performance HDD, a mainstream SSD, and an IO Accelerator.
The HP IO Accelerator is an interface card containing an SSD, flash memory, and a custom controller that significantly
improves data throughput with external storage devices.
As shown in Figure 2, for each vertical bar, the top number indicates the IOPS number for 100% random reads and the
bottom number indicates the IOPS number for the 100% random writes. The chart illustrates how the mainstream SSD and
HP IO Accelerator vastly outperform the HDD and are capable of reading and writing data much faster.
Figure 2. IOPS and latency performance of storage hardware.
SSD technology is the foundation for both the HP IO Accelerator and SATA SSD; however, their performance capabilities
differ. The underlying SSD implementation in the HP IO Accelerator provides faster read and write performance:
• The HP IO Accelerator’s read performance is almost double that of the mainstream SATA SSD.
• The HP IO Accelerator’s write performance is roughly five times that of the SSD.
HP IO Accelerators and SSDs obviously address performance requirements but at a cost that may be prohibitive for
applications requiring high capacity and scalable performance.
What about hybrid drives?
Hybrid drives combine a small SSD with traditional HDD technology in an integrated package and are a good option in the
consumer space. However, in the server space where you have many HDDs, hybrid drives lack the flexibility to scale SSD
technology differently based on application needs. If an application is referencing data from just one drive out of dozens in a
hybrid drive configuration, performance will suffer from the small SSD capacity on the single drive and the unused SSD
capacity on the other hybrid disks becomes a stranded resource. With a larger SSD dedicated for caching, performance
scales better as capacity or the amount of hard disk drives is increased.
Benchmark IO Meter 2006
IOPS
(@ 4KB, Q16)
Maximum Latency (ms)
0
120K
100K
80K
60K
40K
20K
100
200
1K
Better
Better
Performance HDD
Mainstream SSD
IO Accelerator
98K
51K
0.380K
12K
33K
0
300
900
400
500
600
700
800
0.360K
20
850
63
100% random reads
100% random writes