Fusion io does the hard part
Fast, high-capacity flash drive
Fusion-io’s impressive demo at DEMOfall07 piqued my interest (see Fusion io - great demo. Now comes the hard part.) and skepticism. They’ve announced some pricing and refined the specs.
The ioDrive
The ioDrive is a PCIe x4 card with 80, 160 or 320 GB of NAND flash. With a claimed performance of a sustained 87,500 8k IOPS - down from the DEMOfall claim of 150,000 IOPS - the ioDrive offers fast relief from disk latency.
While not as fast as RAM with a device latency of 25us - I’d guess driver latency would be more - the non-volatility, higher capacity and competitive price make it a reasonable substitute for more server RAM. Retail pricing starts at $2400, which is the $30/GB they promised. I’d assume the larger versions would have lower $/GB pricing.
The card is supported on Red Hat AS 4.0 and SUSE ES 10.
The StorageMojo take
Flash drive performance on single-user systems has not lived up to the hype. But servers are another story.
The ioDrive gives low-end servers high-end RAID I/O performance at a much lower cost and footprint. Price competitive with RAM the ioDrive offers power-limited data centers another way to increase I/O performance without adding power-hungry arrays.
Kudos to Fusion-io for figuring out how to harness the promise of NAND flash in the real world.
Comments welcome, of course.
on January 2nd, 2008 at 4:08 pm
This could be useful for transaction logs for databases or file systems (e.g., you can specify which device(s) to put ZFS’ intent log on). Things could then be shuffled off to spinning rust at a more “leisurely” manner.
on January 4th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Depending on “request to data” latency…. useful for database indexes, near ram caches (not as fast as ram), good for high performance OS implementations i.e. read only memory mapped files like dlls and .so (first shut off auto-updates), web server - less in ram file caching. DNS, LDAP, Active directory databases. It could work well.
on January 4th, 2008 at 2:22 am
I went benchmarks!
We’re thinking of using these mtron drives:
http://feedblog.org/2007/12/13/ssd-vs-memory-the-end-is-nigh/
in Spinn3r (http://spinn3r.com)
which have 80MBps write throughput.
is the 87k here write IOPS or just read?
Their numbers would yield > 700MB/s.
Does anyone have any standardizes IO benchmarks on these drives?