Conclusion
Fusion-io did an amazing job with this product, which is the first flash SSD storage device to deliver truly revolutionary performance. Forget everything you know: this device is faster. Although we did not match the benchmark numbers we found in Fusionio’s data sheet, the 500 MB/s throughput and up to over 40,000 I/O operations per second are many times what hard drives, RAID arrays, and even existing flash SSD solutions are capable of delivering.
It’s Not A Drive, But It’s Amazing Storage
The ioDrive isn’t a classic drive as we know it, as it connects via x4 PCI Express. Thanks to this rather direct link, the ioDrive provides several times the bandwidth of Serial Attached SCSI or SATA. This, by the way, is still a reason why flash SSDs haven’t been completely embraced by the enterprise segment: there are only SATA drives available, and reliability is a rather large unknown that only time can make clear.
Reliability? Go Redundant
Maybe it helps that IBM decided to deploy the ioDrive into its enterprise server products. This validation may be the first of its kind. Hard drive makers are still very conservative about introducing flash SSD drives for the high end, as they and their customers don’t always trust the reliability of flash memory. We cannot make any conclusions about this item either, but Fusion-io provides its ioDrives at acceptable price levels (several thousand dollars maximum), making them a really attractive option considering the solid design and the possibility to even run them in RAID mode to be on the safe side.
Flexibility And Conclusion
You cannot yet exchange a PCI Express ioDrive on the fly, and you still cannot boot from it. Also, performance varies a bit depending on the capacity point you select. That said, the bang for buck here is so much better than what we’ve seen with other flash SSDs. It may even be possible to shut down entire racks within storage arrays after replacing them by an ioDrive. We haven’t even included hard drives in the benchmark charts, because they would hardly be visible on the I/O benchmark charts.
It’s obvious that both the performance increases and power savings are significant enough to justify looking into this solution. We’re looking forward to seeing modified ioDrives that may also be capable of booting an operating system. Bottom line: if you need high performance storage for mission critical servers, this product is a must have on your options list.
Latest Storage Solutions News
Latest Storage Solutions reviews
- 04/04 – OCZ Vertex 4 Review: A Flagship SSD Powered By...Indilinx?
- 09/03 – Open-E's DSS V6: Storage Software Set Up, Managed, And...
- 27/01 – What Does One Petabyte Of Storage (And $500K) Look Like?
- 20/10 – Does The USB 3.0 Controller On Your Motherboard Matter?
- 21/10 – Storage Specialist Starline Interviewed on Business HDDs
/ I've been watching too much zero punctuation I read that very very fast using Yahtzee's voice in my head.
SO in the same style -
This might be a great product it might not but until you came come back to me with with some hard numbers on how fast I can boot up and get some HD porn on screen then you may as well have posted an article tell me how many I/O operation fit into a nuns wide tea cup - - however that being said I can see the benefits of this for my next porn server – just how much is the petabyte version.
/ I need sleep - sorry for all the above - including the article
agreed- with waxdart
how much is it?
shoulda been tested against gigabytes I-RAM tbh.
If you cant boot for it then its of no use to me other than just another bell to add to my whistles I already have.
We need to do away with the mechanical aspect of hard drives altogether and this is the way to go but for some reason, manufacturers are reluctant to take this on board.
Financial reasons dictate we stay in the dark ages I recon.
Hmmm: 48years = 17520 days @ 5TB, therefore the maximum writes the FusionIO can perform without failure would be ~8.76x10^7MB, if the max write perf is 500MB/s you could break it within 48 hours (8.76x10^7/500/60/60) writing to it continually.
If your going to buy one of these and use it to its full potential (and I hope so considering the price!) then you better not use it for any write intensive application, otherwise its going to become an expensive hobby. Even if you're assuming your going to be writing to the disk ~10% of the time (e.g. transactional database), not many people can afford to fork out a couple of grand every few weeks or so
Come on, do you actually think the product would wear out that fast? It wouldn't even make it off the production line QA, let alone a million dollar server rack mount. There's some kind of confusion with the specs.
48 years = 17520 days x 5TB = 8.7 x 10^7 GB, not MB. Even writing 500 MB/s (or 43.2TB day) flat out it should still last over 5 years.
Waxdart made me laugh very hard. That being said, why don't they just sell it with a SATA lead sticking out of it to plug into your SATA socket. It could then boot via SATA and as soon as the driver loads, accept instructions from both interfaces.