Facebook smacks away hardness, sticks MySQL stash on flash • The Register
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Does Fusion-io have a sustainable competitive advantage or will it get blown away by a hurricane of other PCIe flash card vendors attacking the market, such as EMC, Intel, Micron, OCZ, TMS, and many others?
More updates on the data center uptake of PCI SSD cards in the form of two big wins from Facebook and Apple. Price/Performance for database applications seems to be skewed heavily to Fusion-io versus the big guns in large scale SAN roll-outs. It seems like due to the smaller scale and faster speed PCI SSD outstrips the resources needed to get an equally fast disk based storage array (including power, and square feet taken up by all the racks). Typically a large rack of spinning disks can be aggregated by using RAID drive controllers and caches to look like a very large high speed hard drive. The Fibre Channel connections add yet another layer of aggregation on top of all that so that you can start splitting the underlying massive disk array into virtual logical drives that fit the storage needs of individual servers and OSes along the way. But to get sufficient speed equal to a Fusion-io style PCI SSD, say to speed up JUST your MySQL server the number of equivalent drives, racks, RAID controllers, caches and Fibre Channel host bus adapters is so large and costs so much, it isn’t worth it.
A single PCI SSD won’t quite have the same total storage capacity as say that larger scale SAN. But for a single, say one-off speed up of a MySQL database you don’t need the massive storage so much as the massive speed up in I/O. And that’s where the PCI SSD comes into play. With the newest PCI 3.0 interfaces and utilizing 8x (eight PCI lane) connectors the current generation of cards is able to maintain 2GB/sec through put on a single PCI card. To achieve that using the older SAN technology is not just cost prohibitive but seriously SPACE prohibitive in all but the largest of data centers. The race now is to see how dense and energy efficient a data center can be constructed. So it comes as no surprise that Facebook and Apple (who are attempting to lower costs all around) are the ones leading this charge of higher density and higher power efficiency as well.
Don’t get me wrong when I tout the PCI SSD so heavily. Disk storage will never go away in my lifetime. It’s just to cost effective and it is fast enough. But for the SysOps in charge of deploying production Apps and hitting performance brick walls, the PCI SSD is going to really save the day. And if nothing else will act as a bridge for most until a better solution can be designed and procured in any given situation. That alone I think would make the cost of trying out a PCI SSD well worth it. Longer term, which vendor will win is still a toss-up. I’m not well versed in the scale of sales into Enterprises of the big vendors in the PCI SSD market. But Fusion-io is doing a great job keeping their name in the press and marketing to some big identifiable names.
But also I give OCZ some credit to with their Z-Drive R5 though it’s not quite considered an Enterprise data center player. Design wise, the OCZ R5 is helping push the state of the art by trying out new controllers, new designs attempting to raise the total number of I/Os and bandwidth on single card. I’ve seen one story so far about a test sample at Computex(Anandtech) that a brand new clean R5 hit nearly 800,000 I/Os in benchmark tests. That peak peformance eventually eroded as the flash chips filled up and fell to around 530,000 I/Os but the trend is clear. We may see 1million IOPs on a single PCI SDD before long. And that my readers is going to be an Andy Grove style 10X difference that brings changes we never thought possible.
In this book Grove mentions a 10x change is when things are improving, growing at a rate of one whole order of magnitude, reaching a new equilibrium
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