Can The Flash-Based ioDrive Redefine Storage Performance?
Table of contents
- 1. Can Fusion-io Trigger A Meltdown For Hard Drive Makers?
- 2. Fusion-io ioDrive Details
- 3. Thoughts, Reliability, First Results
- 4. Test Setup, Access Time
“Breaking all performance barriers” is what you read when you check out the Fusion-io Web site at www.fusionio.com. We’ve read such statements many times in the past, of course, and they turned out to be true in only a few cases. The device's spec sheet will give you even more enticement: 700 MB/s read throughput, more than 100,000 I/O operations per second—these are numbers that are actually getting close to DRAM performance. Can it be true? We looked at the ioDrive in great detail to find out.
Flash Memory on PCI Express
The concept sounds rather simple: Fusion-io takes a PCI Express add-on card and puts Flash memory and a powerful controller on it. The result is the ioDrive, which in fact should not necessarily be called a drive, as it has little to do with hard drives as we know them. Fusion-io calls its product a NAND flash cluster, and it was designed to provide DRAM-like performance. In fact the ioDrive cannot be used as a drive: it connects via PCI Express and hence it is not possible to boot an operating system from it--at least not yet--Fusion-io says it is working on that...
Application scenarios for this product are few in the desktop space; the product was designed for high performance servers. That said, it is definitely possible to install it into any desktop PC that has a x4 or wider PCI Express slot, if you think you have an application for it. When we first received the sample we were still limited to Linux, but Windows 64-bit drivers have been around for several weeks now. There are no 32-bit drivers available at this point.
The Perfect Flash Drive?
Let me lead by saying that both the specified figures and our measured performance numbers are more than impressive. That comment does not apply to the many hundred megabytes per second of throughput, as this can be handled by a few fast hard drives. But the large number of I/O operations per second is crucial for mission critical applications that depend on maximum I/O performance. Think of banking transactions, weather forecasting, seismic analysis, particle accelerators, warehouse solutions… anything that requires accessing or storing tremendous amounts of data in compact chunks will benefit a lot from better I/O performance.
We don’t know of any flash SSD that would be validated for these sorts of applications; FusionIO might have a significant advantage, as the ioDrive was the first to achieve IBM’s “ServerProven” designation. In other words: IBM wants to use this drive in scenarios that may be business critical, or that could even contribute to making big steps in the areas of science or business.
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/ 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.