During a recent server performance review, we identified several areas which would benefit from a change of storage media. Namely: system log files, web service log files, static database files, pda connection logs, old backup files etc. Moving these items to a faster media would provide better performance, and take some of the load off the disks containing the live databases.
The decision was taken to add NVME storage for these areas. NVME is an SSD-type technology i.e. solid-state memory chips, which allows the drives to act more like the fast memory that they are, rather than the hard disks they imitate. NVME reads and writes data literally four times faster than the SATA SSDs found in previous generations. Not only that, but it locates them 10 times as fast. That’s on top of the four- to five-fold improvement in throughput and ten-fold improvement in seek times that was already provided by SATA SSDs when compared to spinning disk hard drives.
These NVME drives were fitted and implemented recently, during a short scheduled downtime in the early hours of the morning. Our testing proves this decision was worth it, as general system performance is a lot better overall, and support calls related to I/O and connection speeds have dropped off to zero.
