PAM/SSD in EDA environment

[wally1975]

I was curious to know if anybody here using NetApp storage in an EDA environment has positive/negative experience implementing PAM in their environment. I assume layout and general engineering activities would benefit from PAM, but what about verification and simulation workloads that tend to be write-heavy? What about SSD? Has anybody implemeneted SSD in an EDA environment for their simulation/scratch data? Do folks in similar industries have thoughts or experiences they can share? I know I can run PCS to get an idea of how much PAM can help and plan to do so, however, I also want to get an idea of what my peers are doing to keep their engineers happy-ish. Thanks!

[shaunjurr]

You can easily  do a simulation of the effects of PAM cards.  Do a search on now for PCS (Predictive Cache Statistics).

What tool you use is of course, going to be dependent upon your needs and budgets.  SSD solutions are going to be very expensive.  Some CAD programs do really stupid things like having temp files on networked storage instead of locally or in memory.

[wally1975]

Just as a followup, we ended up purchasing FlashCache and after running our filers for a few months (and a couple tape outs), we do see very high cache utilization and we are happy with the investment.