Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Product Documentation > Management and Migration > Storage Tiering with Dell PowerScale SmartPools > Leveraging SSDs for metadata and data performance
Adding SSDs within a node pool can boost performance significantly for many workloads. In the OneFS architecture, SSDs can be used to accelerate performance across the entire cluster using SSD strategies for data or metadata acceleration.
SmartPools offers several SSD strategies to choose from, including:
To configure a different SSD strategy on any node pools that are not specified as a storage target in the default policy, create a user-defined policy for each pool.
Note: SSD strategies and GNA work in concert. For example, if a cluster’s entire data is set to Avoid SSDs strategy, enabling GNA has no effect, and the SSDs will not be used. If the files are all set to Metadata read with GNA disabled, only the files on node pools with SSDs will get read acceleration. If GNA is enabled, all files will get read acceleration.
A common setting for mixed clusters, where not all nodes contain SSDs, is often the Metadata read SSD strategy for all files and GNA enabled. A SmartPools license is required to be able to direct different files to different tiers of storage. The SSD strategy is globally set because it is set to the same value on all files even though the storage pools for different file pools are set differently.
Note: Ensure that all F-Series node pools are configured with the SSD strategy of Meta +Data. If they are configured for another SSD strategy, OneFS will not automatically use them.