Fusion-io achieves a billion IOPS from eight servers
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Jan. 6, 2012
Storage memory provider Fusion-io said today that it has achieved a billion IOPS from just 8 servers.
The company organized a benchmark testing session at the DEMO Enterprise event in San Francisco yesterday.
The testing required only 8 HP DL-370 G6 servers, running Linux on two, 6-core Intel processors and with 96 GB of RAM.
Each server was equipped with eight 2.4 TB ioDrive2 Duo PCIE flash drives-- that's 19.2 TB of flash memory per server
and 153.6 TB of flash in total.
The demonstration used a custom load-generator that ran at 125 million ops/sec on each server and transferred 64 byte
data packets.
Fusion-io said that the ioDrives used Auto Commit Memory (ACM) software, a function in its ioMemory VSL subsystem. It
allows application and system developers direct control of the data path to persistent (NAND flash) memory and significantly
reduces latency and system overhead in transferring data, according to the company.
What's more, fusion says that data integrity is maintained "by the ioMemory architecture’s ability to flush all
in-flight data, even if the power is abruptly cut, without the need for added storage capacitors in the servers' power
supplies, UPSs or external batteries."
The concept is to remove latency and O/S overhead from the access to data. David Flynn, Fusion's chairman and CEO,
said "This isn't something that could be achieved with hardware alone. Intelligent software that optimises NAND flash
as a low latency, high-capacity, non-volatile memory solution for enterprise servers can transform the way organizations
process the immense amounts of data that powers our lives today, and at speeds that were previously unattainable so far.”
Steve Wozniak, one of the two co-founders of Apple and that has worked with Steve Jobs for over twenty years, and now
Fusion-io's Chief Scientist, said “Instead of treating flash like storage, where data passes through all of the OS kernel
subsystems that were built and optimized for traditional storage, our core ioMemory technology offers a platform with new
programming primitives that can provide system and application developers direct access to non-volatile memory.”
The demo preview system had 64 ioDrive 2 Duos, each with 2.4 TB of storage capacity. Flynn said existing 2.4 TB ioDrive
2 Duos do around a million IOPS. Each one in the demo system delivered 16 million IOPS, a sixteen-fold improvement in
performance.
This comes from avoiding using the host OS' I/O subsystem at all. Instead, the iODRive capacity is seen by enterprise
applications as an area of memory. Flynn said apps simply read or write data from an area of RAM, using CPU Load Store
instructions.
Fusion-io uses an ACM API to do this and so would need writing or rewriting to do so. Flynn said apps could be somehow
fooled into thinking they were still using the host OS's I/O pathways, even tough they are not, which would make the adoption
of ACM by existing software somewhat easier.
It is a data transfer, an I/O in that sense, but doesn't look like it to the host operating system. The OS's block I/O
subsystem simply isn't used, however.
Flynn added that this means application software effectively gets instantaneous I/O, data transferred at near-memory
speed, and the server's CPU doesn't don't get involved with this data transfer at all, further improving the performance
even more.
This means that a virtualised server with VMware or similar software gets a huge amount of CPU resource released
by apps using the cut-through or Fast Path ACM software, so that one host could run even more virtual machines (VMs).
How many more depends upon how bounded by I/O the existing apps are.
However, Flynn was quick to point out that ACM is still in beta, and a production release won't be ready until at
least March or April 2012.
Fusion-io has a track record in such demonstrations, starting with the 1 million IOPS Quicksilver demo with IBM's
SVC in 2009. Two years later, it was a thousand times faster with fewer but more powerful servers.
By producing software such as Auto Commit Memory, Fusion-io is avoiding the commodity PCIe hardware 'flash trap'
which will cause prices to drop.
Overall, ACM should be a real product by DEMO Enterprise in April. It will only be available with Fusion-io's hardware,
however.
With ACM, Fusion-io has significantly raised the bar in enterprise server I/O performance and has separated itself from
the PCIe flash drive croud. It's no longer enough to have fast flash drive hardware. You now need more intelligent software
to really make your PCIe NAND flash operate as fast as it can.
Source: Fusion-IO.
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