Hot or Not

According to recent data from the US and UK, the prices of solid-state drives (SSD) have more than halved in the past year. Meanwhile, prices of spinning hard drives (HDD) have increased significantly due to the floods in Thailand. In 2005 the price differential per GB between HDDs and SSDs was 33:1, by 2006 it was 19:1 and this year it is around 10:1.

As SSD capacity ramps up prices will continue to fall and it's likely you'll see more use of SSDs in laptops; the latest "Retina Display" MacBook Pro is only available with SSD storage, as is the new version of its MacBook Air whilst Windows 7 has supported SSD since its release.

Teradata use SSDs in their Enterprise-class data warehouse alongside HDDs so it's certainly an area the company has invested in. The 'glue' that binds this together is Teradata Virtual Storage (TVS). This software allows the physical storage to include a mix of devices with different capacities and performance levels and it automatically manages the data that gets distributed across those resources.

TVS automatically and transparently migrates and places data on storage by measuring the temperature of the data. Data placement is automatically and optimized by moving most often accessed data (‘hot data’) to faster storage (SSDs), while moving rarely accessed data (‘cold data’) to larger capacity HDDs.

The use of mixed storage options in Teradata products is an exciting addition to Teradata. I'll be interested to see how this develops over the next couple of years.