So I got a price quote on Netapp's Flash drives that you stick into a Flash Pool and having my eyebrows rise off my forehead. Of course Netapp's prices are/were no worse than EMC's prices for single SSD drives, etc. Basically crazy expensive in both cases.
Now I'm entertaining the silly idea of just using a mix of SAS and SATA drives in a flash pool instead. Get *some* of the advantages, but lots cheaper pricing. Esp using those big fat slow 4Tb drives in the dual drive sleds. Front them with a bunch of SAS disks and it should do quite nicely.
God knows there shouldn't be any technical reason this can't work, it's just a matter of moving blocks from one raidgroup in an aggregate to another. But the Netapp technical sales guy was surprised by the suggestion.
I'm loving the transition of SSDs into the enterprise space, because it's forcing all kinds of changes on the vendors that are long overdue. Just putting a pair of mirrored SSDs into a server is a big boost. Using it to cache is good too.
What do others think?
John