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.
A flash cache is often used in tandem with slower hard disk drives (HDDs) to improve data access times. The form factor of the NAND flash is typically a solid-state drive (SSD), a PCI Express (PCIe) card or a DIMM-based flash device installed in a server's memory sockets.