Comments on: Flash-talking with Fusion-io

By: Dave Vellante

Dave Vellante — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:00:12 +0000

Hey Robin…nice video– congratulations on putting this together. It’s a welcome balance to digesting text all day. The graphics were helpful too. My vote…do more!

Interesting perspective. It’s all about balance in the system isn’t it and I suspect that’s part of the integration problems the early drive replacement guys are seeing.

Good to see the storage pyramid back in full swing. Fred Moore’s good work lives on…

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:10:39 +0000

Robin, are you aware that StorageMojo is infested with an ad that covers the page until the poor user clicks “close”? That’s bad mojo.

By: Brainy

Brainy — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:30:25 +0000

Interesting times ahead. Tomorrow will be the launch of Sun’s Open Storage Portfolio with SSD/ZFS etc.

And Fusion I/O should work soon with ZFS too http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=285158񅧦

The downside of Fusion I/O is, PCI Adapters are only hot-swappable on high-end systems, compared to disks…

Another interesting point is, how applications behave with SSD DIsks… Do Oracle installations suddenly need less CPU power/licenses? Tough times ahead for Oracle if so….

By: Robert Pearson

Robert Pearson — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 05:33:35 +0000

Finally, some light to guide us to the end of the tunnel…
I never thought flash was a “disk” replacement.
Only the Storage vendors hoping for incremental change and continued market control thought that.

We are at the crossroads again. We have been at this particular crossroad many times.
This crossroad is “Do the smarts go in the box (Unit of Technology) or outside?”

In the article “Five Reasons IBM Is Scared Of Losing Exec To Apple”:

3. Apple Gets Cloud Computing Intellectual Capital That Could Come Back To Bite IBM In The Backside

the statement is made that, “To do cloud computing right you need hardware smarts”.

The first step is to define the feature/function set of the new Information stack (IS). Flash is the first big Unit of Technology for implementing the new IS.
What would you like to see in that feature/function set?
There are many rivers to cross…

By: Simon

Simon — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 15:27:04 +0000

I think one reason we recreate old technology with new products can be summed up by asking a question.

Does fusion-io have a Solaris driver? a Freebsd driver? HP-UX?

I agree it is the correct direction, but lots of great technologies die and lots of bad technologies get adopted all based on how fast and easy they are picked up by vendors / operating systems. In my opinion Fusion-io should pioneer a new interface standard (and or protocol) to fit in between the disk and DRAM.

By: MS

MS — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 07:25:45 +0000

Hello all,

[directly responding to Nathan's comment:]
working on software which is taking the road Robin mentions (SSD extending the whole buffering chain), I can tell you: it all depends on the algorithms you use. You can get HA while still having a fusion IO card, SSD, etc. accelerate your computing tasks.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:23:39 +0000

Interesting.

What I don’t see in that white “paper” is their HA play. Close to the CPU is great until you need to start clustering. What are the failure modes and can they be duplicated? If it appears as a RAID controller to the OS, can they be RAIDed themselves? How about an interconnect for mirroring?

Some sort of high-speed interconnect coming out of the back of this card that plugs into another Fusion.io card in another chassis on the rack would make this a pretty interesting product indeed.

I wonder if we’ll start to see server boards with five or ten PCI-e slots and the ability to chain them all together?

Exciting times.