Organizations are looking to deploy virtual servers in the effort to reduce IT costs and increase data center performance. Microsoft SQL Server is a popular database product that is widely used by business applications. As SQL Server is an I/O intensive workload, deploying it in a virtualized environment may limit database performance due to storage I/O bottlenecks.
Many organizations have begun to replace rotational hard drives with solid state drives (SSDs) that have the benefit of increased performance, a small form factor and low power consumption. Even if you replace rotational hard drives with SSDs, the key to increasing application performance is not so simple. Adding SSDs you upgrade the hardware of your organization. Even then, network latency or contention at the array ports impacts performance adversely.
Dell Fluid Cache for SAN is a highly available write-back server-side caching accelerator that utilizes high-speed PCIe-SSDs as a shared, caching solution with an “open” compute cache pool layer. Fluid Cache for SAN runs in a flexible and low-latency Dell Compellent™ SAN environment. The key differentiation of Fluid Cache for SAN from other host side caching solutions are the global cache pool across multiple servers, the read and write-back cache policies, and the easy access media.
This white paper helps you configure the Dell Fluid Cache for SAN solution and demonstrates how the performance of an online transaction processing (OLTP) database can be accelerated using this solution compared to the rotational hard drives-based solution.
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