Fusion-io, HP claim extreme solid-state drive speeds

Fusion-io, the company that boasts Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as its chief scientist, says it has achieved extremely high data transfer speeds on servers from Hewlett-Packard.

Fusion-io ioDrive Duo

(Credit: Fusion-io)

Solid-state drives are generally faster than hard-disk drives, particularly at reading data, and have no moving parts, unlike hard disk drives.

Working together in HP's ProLiant engineering labs in Houston, HP and Fusion-io built a system using five 320GB ioDrive Duos (see photo) and six 160GB ioDrives in a single HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server, running with four Quad-Core Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, Fusion-io said.

This configuration allowed the engineers to achieve about 1 million IOPS, or input/output operations per second. By comparison, hard disk drives typically don't excel at IOPS, achieving only a fraction of this level of data transfer speed, which makes solid-state drives appealing to large customers such as CitiBank and Bank of America. These kinds of companies need lots of IOPS for their financial transactions.

HP offers solid-state drive arrays as part of HP's BladeSystem. The HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator is a flash-based storage adapter based on Fusion's ioMemory technology. Each IO Accelerator card achieves more than 100,000 IOPS. A single HP BladeSystem server can accommodate two or three IO Accelerator cards.

"The ioDrive and ioDrive Duo are able to supply the extreme storage performance (for data centers) at a fraction of the power, cooling, and per unit-of-processing-power price compared to traditional solutions," said David Flynn, chief technology officer of Fusion-io, in a statement.

These drives are especially valuable for database and data mining, virtual machine deployments, and financial transactions, according to Flynn.

[slickuser]

how much it? 1GB for $300 or so?

[rapier1]

Maybe, even so, that's a minimal investment for the kind of transactions they are talking about. Faster I/O speed means more financial transactions per second which means more money.

[skrubol]

A quick Google search found the 160GB a bit below $7k, I couldn't find anything on the Duo-320GB, but it is probably close to double the 160GB, as it's basically two of them sitting on one card.

[jake-amd]

Read further commentary of this achievement in this @Work post - http://links.amd.com/MillionReasons.

[jesseas]

This is OK for high speed for servers, etc. etc. What I want to know is why someone hasn't put a PC on the market with a "solid state" hard drive. It would be the equiv. of a few USB flash drives on a circuit board. You would never have to "shut down" and "start up" Windows. At the end of the day, just pull the plug. To restart where you left off, just turn on the switch!
Jesse

[viper396]

Did you even do any research before asking "why"? There are a handful of netbooks, Laptops, and even desktops with Solid State Drives (SSD) already on the market You can even buy SSD's separately and add to your own system.

[skrubol]

If you're running any traditional OS, shutdown and boot up are still necessary. SSD's you speak of do exist, they're still pricey (compared to desktop drives. Very cheap compared to these.) and not a whole lot faster than standard drives. Standard USB flash drives are relatively slow and don't have the write cycles necessary for an OS drive (without some sort of write balancing, which they don't have.)

[holyhope]

What I see is hope for artificial Intelligence. 1,000,000 iops depending on the complexity load of each one of those iops would mean to me to be able to fake it. Not an internal, but an external seeming unit. I think within the next 20 years it may arise spontaneously on the net, much to our chagrin.

[baggyguy1218]

hehehehe..you said Chagrin.