Technogory

I had a chance to visit Fusion-IO - vendor of high quality medium cost solid state hard drives.  What sets them apart from their competitors?  Shear speed!  I had the cahnce to talk to one of their “sales engineers” and got a quick glimpse of their impressive drive technology.

First and foremost, I am not going to bore you with tech details, you can get that from their site.  But, I do want to mention one very impressive stat - 700MB/s Random Read and 600 MB/s Random Writes!  That is just over 3X the performance of their closest competitor.

Their drives are PCI Express x4. which means there is plenty of highway to move the data.  Their general idea, and I think it’s consistent with their competitors, is that the closer you can get the drive to the memory, the faster performance you can expect.

A real world example of this - gamers!  That’s right, they are planning on attending an upcoming gamers show, and that seemed to be ther “real” target audience.  Although, I am sure their are excellent Enterprise Data Center applications.  I was told Oracle is testing this technology now.  But, back to the gamers.  Can you imagine being a gamer where you have no level load times?  Where you are on the map before you competitors?  That’s the kind of performance you can expect with these drives.

The drives have a type of CRC checking that allows the drive to sense a “bad” DRAM and rebuild on the fly.  No data loss.  It also employs what many might know as “striping.”  The ability to cross drams with information.

You are probably wondering, what about thost 15K drives?  No competition!  First, what the guys at Fusion-IO shared is that in their research of large capacity drive arrays, many companies were using what is called “shorting the drive” - that is, they make sure they only use the inside 1/2 of the physical platter in the drive.  You might be thinking why, but it’s simple.  In a mechanical drive, you have head seeks.  That means, there is a reader that has to move across the diameter of the disk.  Information written on the outer edge actually spins at a slower speed than data written close to the spindle.  So, keeping data close, means faster reads and shorter seeks.  Now, I am not saying I didn’t think this is really crazy, I mean large disk arrays that are 50% or less utilized!  What a waste.  So, it appears to me the Fusion-IO drives take that away.  No moving parts, 100% utilization, and very fast access speeds!

A vendor that decides Linux is the first O/S is unthinkable.  These guys, out of the gate, only support SLES or RedHat!  Cool!