Buffer pool extensions allow you to make use of solid-state drives as extra RAM on your database server. They provide unified integration of a nonvolatile random access memory (solid-state drive) extension to the Database Engine buffer pool, which can significantly improve the I/O throughput. Buffer pool extensions are an Enterprise edition feature, so you have to pay the premium price for SQL Server Enterprise Edition to use this feature.

The main goal of a SQL Server database is to store, retrieve, and manipulate data. Therefore, you should expect higher disk access and disk I/O on many production systems. These disk storage operations can consume many server resources and take a relatively long time to complete; this delay can be the cause of performance issues that are caused solely by the I/O throughout. SQL Server, in order to counteract the delays that I/O operations can cause, has always tried to have an efficient I/O. It does this by making use of the memory...