Background

The recent wide availability of Solid State Disk drives (SSDs) provides mass secondary storage media at new levels of performance, capacity and cost. Although not a new concept, current generations SSDs have substantially higher capacity and comparatively lower cost than preceding generations. This trend, coupled with their high performance, enables interesting new usage models that were not technically possible or economically feasible before in most computing categories, ranging from low power mobile platforms to high end server platforms.

Storage in data center and cluster computing environments is extremely cost sensitive due to large installed capacity. Although the capacity of conventional magnetic storage has increased 100 fold over the last 10 years [1], access latencies have improved only 10 fold [1]. Current generation SSDs offer 100 times higher performance [2] than conventional magnetic storage (i.e. 100x lower access latencies) but they do have a comparatively higher $$/Gigabyte cost. Based on continuing advances such as Vertical Recording Techniques for example, the capacity of conventional HDDs appear poised to continue scaling HDD cost per bit.

Given these trends, there appears to be a good chance for the foreseeable future that the performance benefits of SSDs can be coupled with the cost per bit advantages of conventional HDDs to create tiered storage architectures that provide cost effective, high performance storage solutions [3]. Such hybrid storage architectures, when incorporated into SAN and NAS solutions could deliver large performance gains to IO intensive datacenter and cluster computing applications.

Important Dates:
    - Submission deadline: Sep 30, 2007
    - Acceptance notification: Nov 10, 2007
    - Camera-ready version due: Nov 21, 2007