An administrator is working with an application group to resolve a performance problem within the environment. They are experiencing slow read speeds and are trying to determine what could be done…

NVRAM functions as a write cache to protect and accelerate write I/O by logging incoming writes before they are destaged to disk - it does not cache or accelerate read operations.

FlashCache, also called the Performance Acceleration Module (PAM), is a PCIe flash card that caches frequently read data blocks so subsequent reads are served from fast flash rather than spinning disks, directly reducing read latency. It is purpose-built for read acceleration and is the correct solution when an environment reports slow read speeds.

Additional system RAM can expand the WAFL buffer cache and improve read caching for a subset of working-set data, but FlashCache provides far greater capacity and is the purpose-built, purpose-sized solution for read performance acceleration.

Adding processors addresses CPU-bound bottlenecks such as deduplication, compression, or encryption workloads, not slow read I/O throughput or latency.