Fusion-io demos billion IOPS server config • The Register

Fusion-io has achieved a billion IOPS from eight servers in a demonstration at the DEMO Enterprise event

in San Francisco.

The cracking performance needed just eight HP DL370 G6 servers, running Linux 2.6.35.6-45 on two, 6-core Intel processors, 96GB RAM. Each server was fitted with eight 2.4TB ioDrive2 Duo PCIE flash drives; thats 19.2TB of flash per server and 153.6TB of flash in total.

via Fusion-io demos billion IOPS server config • The Register.

This is in a word, no mean feat. 1 Million IOPS was the target to beat not just 2 years ago for anyone attempting to buy/build their own Flash based storage from the top Enterprise Level manufacturers. So the bar has risen no less than 3 orders of magnitude higher than the top end from 1 year ago. Add to that the magic sauce of bypassing the host OS and using the Flash memory as just an enhanced large memory.

This makes me wonder, how exactly does the Flash memory get used alongside the RAM memory pool?

How do the Applications use the Flash memory, and how does the OS use it?

Those are the details I think that no one else other than Fusion-io can provide as a value-add beyond the PCIe based flash memory modules itself. Instead of hardware being the main differentiator (drive controllers, Single Level Cells, etc.) Fusion-io is using a different path through the OS to the Flash memory. The File I/O system traditionally tied to hard disk storage and more generically ‘storage’ of some kind is being sacrificed. But I understand the logic, design and engineering of bypassing the overhead of the ‘storage’ route and redefining the Flash memory as another form of system memory.

Maybe the old style Von Neumann architecture or Harvard architecture computers are too old school for this new paradigm of a larger tiered memory pool with DRAM and Flash memory modules consisting of the most important parts of the computer. Maybe disk storage could be used as a mere backup of the data held in the Flash memory? Hard to say, and I think Fusion-io is right to hold this info close as they might be able to make this a more general case solution to the I/O problems facing some customers (not just Wall Street type high frequency traders).

Related articles

• Steve Wozniak’s FusionIO: 1 Billion IOPS with software improvement (theverge.com)
• Fusion-io announces groovy new autocommit memory input-output system (venturebeat.com)
• Fusion-io breaks one billion IOPS barrier, pauses to congratulate itself (engadget.com)