From the Compellent press release
Delivering Performance of SSD for Virtual Data Centers
For enterprises requiring the fastest storage performance for data management, migration and processing, Compellent’s integrated suite of virtualized storage applications will also support solid state drives (SSDs). The Compellent SAN will reserve frequently accessed, active blocks of data for “tier 0” storage for applications like transactional databases that can take advantage of the significant performance gains of SSDs, and dynamically move inactive data blocks to lower storage tiers. Because the Compellent SAN is expected to be the first to automate tiered storage for SSD, customers will be able to accurately plan SSD purchases along with other drive technologies to significantly reduce total costs while maintaining optimal storage utilization and performance.
This was an obvious next step for Compellent and an exceedingly attractive one for the enterprise buyer. The biggest problem that all storage vendors have is that while they offer so called “tiered storage”, you have practically no useful control over the use of the different tiers.
You’re stuck with granularity at the LUN or file level, neither of which makes the SSD investment particularly attractive, especially if you’re using VMware with the VMFS where your smallest file object is a VMDK file.
Introducing SSD at the dedicated LUN level is staggeringly expensive, and horribly wasteful except for very well targeted applications. But when you combine SSD as your new “Tier 0” storage linked with the integrated ILM or Automatic tiered storage functionality of Compellent’s bays, a reasonable investment is SSD storage can be shared by multiple servers and applications transparently, but only for the subset of their data blocks that actually require this kind of performance.
Less active data block will be migrated automatically down to your “slow” 15K FC disks and eventually down to SATA.
I think that this is a really big deal that further justifies the value of the Compellent solutions. Now the other question that begs asking is power consumption on SSDs. There was quite the kerfuffle about that a little while ago for SSDs targetted for portable use, but I suspect that an SSD will consume a lot less power than a 15K FC disk that’s spinning a full speed all of the time.