Solid State Memory and TPC-E benchmarks
Violin Memory have published an interesting TPC-E benchmark which illustrates the kind of cost and performance gains that can be achieved by strategically replacing traditional disk drive arrays with solid state memory systems. Replacing storage with technology that provides an order of magnitude better performance is particularly well suited to the low-latency requirements of TPC-E and by implication the real world scenarios it simulates. It also poses some new challenges for optimizers and memory management software on how to best leverage this technology.
The detailed benchmark results are available here: https://www.tpc.org/tpce/results/tpce_result_detail.asp?id=110062101