Had some fun today with a new feature in OnTap 8.1.1, Flash Pools. You basically create an aggregate with two different disk types, SSD and SAS or SATA. In doing this you create another pool of flash just for that specific aggregate. Very cool feature that will bring NetApp a long way in the proving grounds of being able to do spindle effective VDI solutions and other read intensive operations. One thing that also benefits from Flash Pools is the ability to write data to them. The normal Flash Cache does not allow for writes and only serves up reads. Continue on to see an Iometer screenshot.

The configuration for this achievement was:

  •  NetApp FAS6210
  • 1x Flash Pool with 10x SSD, 11x 600GB SAS
  • One 10G iSCSI connection
  • Cisco UCS C-class server

Here’s a fun picture of the outcome: