In many cases, the performance of applications using SQL Server is limited by storage performance so it is easy to understand the popularity of flash storage. With AlwaysOn Availability Groups, Microsoft® has enabled non-SAN storage to support application failover from a primary to a secondary server. Log shipping with synchronous-commit to a secondary replica emphasises high availability and data protection, but often at the cost of increased transaction latency. Testing by LSI has shown that using a dedicated network with synchronous-commit, the LSI® Nytro™ MegaRAID® Application Acceleration card provided up to an 80X improvement in user response times over just using HDDs under an OLTP workload.
In this session by Mike Horner, LSI Senior Field Applications Engineer, we will discuss how using flash with intelligent caching can allow an economical mix of flash and HDDs to be used because typically only a small portion of storage is accessed frequently, and retaining this data on flash can still provide huge performance gains. Nytro acceleration products support AlwaysOn and Windows Server® Failover Clustering which allows enterprise-class high availability to be supported.
