My last portion of my last sentence in my previous comment should have read, “lower disk utilization and lower overall costs for the disk array.”

Your comment that “many customers are struggling to identify use cases for solid state drives and have no easy way to measure and justify the potential performance improvements – other than to install the drives and see what happens.” This is not true. Granted, I believe customers are struggling with how to quantify and measure the benefits before they purchase and install these drives, but the methods do exist.

As a performance engineer at EMC, we have been taking a scientific approach to helping the customers to understand what volumes are showing up as good candidates from array statistics, correlating those volumes with application/database data to make sure the match will produce an application improvement. We even go so far as to model the performance and showing lower utilization on the spinning disk drives. This does not mean that the process is somewhat involved. It does require some cooperation and effort on the part of the customer. It also requires that customers examine their application/database data to do the correlation part. But the process works and it has been demonstrated at several customer sites to improve performance, lower drive utilization and drive overall disk array solution costs oveall.

I think for Compellent the next piece of evolution is to reduce the re-org interval to less than a day and make things more policy based. Hoping to get my hands on some hardware soon to write a proper review.

Chris