The university is one of the largest schools in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) system, which is the largest provider of higher education in Minnesota. A regional comprehensive university, St. Cloud State has more than 15,400 students and nearly 110,000 alumni.
The most basic difference between the two technologies is that Flash Cache is a PCI-e card (or cards) that sits in the NetApp controller, whereas Flash Pool are SSD drives that sits in NetApp shelves. This gives way to some important points.
Flash cache is the temporary storage of data on NAND flash memory chips to enable requests for data to be fulfilled with greater speed. In a common scenario, the system stores a temporary copy of the most active data in the flash cache and a permanent copy of the data on a hard disk drive (HDD). The goal of flash caching is to store previously-requested data as it travels through the network so it can be retrieved quickly when it is needed again. Placing previously requested information in temporary storage, or cache, reduces demand on an enterprise's bandwidth in addition to speeding up access to data.