Fusion-io's ioDrive puts power of a SAN on a PCIe card

In a recent demonstration at DEMOFall '07, Fusion-io showed off its newest PCIe device, which reportedly "places the power of a SAN (storage area network) in the palm of your hand." Essentially, this single device boasts up to 640GB of storage capacity, delivers 100,000 IOPS (input / output per second) and can achieve sustained data rates of 800Mb/sec (read) and 600Mb/sec (write)." In marketing terms, the ioDrive can perform "nearly a thousand times faster than any existing disk drive," and it can reportedly be integrated into existing data centers or workstations without any alterations to your infrastructure. Next quarter, the outfit will begin shipping the card in 40GB, 80GB, 160GB and 320GB configurations (with the 640GB flavor to follow suit), but unfortunately, official prices have not yet been divulged. Oh, and be sure to check out a video of the ioDrive's unveiling here.

[Via TGDaily]

[bitcast @ Sep 28th 2007 9:33AM]

the next iRAM anyone ?

[Scott @ Sep 28th 2007 9:34AM]

I think that should be MBytes/s (800 & 600) if what I read in another article is write.

[nunya @ Sep 28th 2007 11:32AM]

I think that that write, should be right.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Sep 29th 2007 9:04PM]

Could you imagine two of these set up in a raid 0 array? Or for that matter, four of them would be enough to flood the bandwidth of most modern DDR RAM/FSB.

[Mehdi Cheddadi @ Sep 28th 2007 9:35AM]

In other news, Bestbuy has started selling ioDrive's latest 1 TB pci-e storagecard. Using advanced Raid and 2nanometer technology, it manages to achieve the maximum bandwidth capacity of 8 GB/s from the now old PCI-E 1.1 express standard. It's a shame that we can't have a pci-e 2.0 version for some sweet 16GB/s action, but for 40 bucks, you can't go wrong.

28 Friday 2011

[JerkyChew @ Sep 28th 2007 1:23PM]

Are you sure about that 1TB figure? I can't find anything about it on bestbuy's site, but I did find this TechRepublic article that said they're shooting for a $30/GB price point.

[Pedro @ Sep 28th 2007 9:48AM]

That looks like flash memory to me. Good luck with your limited number of write cycles.

I'll stick with a RAID, thanks.

[Coniferous @ Sep 28th 2007 10:44AM]

Actully, thats a gross exaggeration. There are some simple techniques that solve that problem.

Here, let wiki explain it to you..

"flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 100,000 write-erase-cycles for block 0, and no guarantees for other blocks). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors; this technique is called wear levelling. Another mechanism is to perform write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure, which is named bad block management (BBM). With these mechanisms in place, some industry analysts[1] have calculated that flash memory can be written to at full speed continuously for 51 years before exceeding its write endurance"

[Bumble Bee Tuna Eater @ Sep 28th 2007 11:23AM]

Oh, darn only 100,000 write/erase cycles.

Damn, because over the next five years I needed to be able to write and erase my data sectors 60 times a day.

I think this flash memory will do fine. Pedro, don't be a sucker (or a player) for HDD manufacturer's FUD campaign.

[Paragraph @ Sep 28th 2007 9:56AM]

:\ not to crazy about this. It's not going to be any cheaper than a storage server, and the only companies that will find this pretty usefull will be the big guys with lots of moolah, or the ones with literally no space and lots of money.

The goal here is $30/GiB, so prices work like this
$1,200 for the low end
$36,000 for the 2008 projection of 1.2TiB
Lets look at other options for a second:
For $1,195 you can get a 1TiB SAN server from Dell
As for storage upgrades, a 1TiB hard drive will run you $330 each

Really, in the end the only people who benifit are those who really have no room for more servers, or really can justify the extra speed.

:\ bieng an IT guy in a small business, i'm not thrilled about this product... the accountant side of me fails to see how this is cost-effective.

[nunya @ Sep 28th 2007 11:36AM]

TiB? Wouldn't it be TeB?

[Mike D @ Sep 28th 2007 10:02PM]

It would work out great group like jefforson labs, a physics lab down the street from my office, that has to do lots of number crunching. Also I think you're a bit confused that card, unless they can make it more dense, would not save any space in terms of storage capacity the space they were talking about saving is in performance so that You don't have to have 1000 hard drives to get the same performance.

[Vagn Henning @ Sep 28th 2007 9:56AM]

So it has "the performance of a thousand hard drives", but it doesn't quite have the capacity... Unless that's a thousand 80MB hard drives, of course...

[Chekote @ Sep 28th 2007 11:52AM]

640GB is plenty of space for many applications. The point of this product is speed, not size.

[GoreTEX @ Sep 28th 2007 9:56AM]

The 32gb SSD on my vaio tz makes Vista purr like a kitten... its the equiv read/write speed of a 10k rpm HDD and then some. I'll probably never own another laptop with an HDD.

[Borik @ Sep 28th 2007 10:08AM]

Seems like one of those over hyped products...
check out companies web site, http://www.fusionio.com/, has nothing there to see...

any one interested in high performance should check out RamDisks, here in interesting solution http://www.hyperdrive4.com/


Borik

[saq @ Sep 28th 2007 10:31AM]

Speed of a SAN? Hardly. A real SAN (HP EVA) can pull 3GB/s total bandwidth with well over 250,000 IOPS.

[TheChaz @ Sep 28th 2007 11:14AM]

Not to start a flame war here or anything, but the EVA is a joke. After supporting SAN solutions architected around them as well as Network Appliance devices; they just don't hold a candle to the Filers. You're not wrong about the 3Gb/s but that's fairly unremarkable speed in enterprise SAN, and no one matches NetApp for ease of administration.

As for the product here, I'm not sure who the target is. Someone else mentioned that it wasn't attractive to small business due to cost, and I'm here to say that it certainly won't be attractive to enterprise for reliability reasons. No legit IT director is going to store mission critical data on flash. It's almost laughable.

[Tracy in Cary @ Sep 28th 2007 10:32AM]

It puts "the POWER of a san" in my computer? I disagree.

To me the "power" of a SAN has nothing to do with I/O. The power is my ability to have multiple computers connected to it for redundancy, along with redundant power to keep it running.

When one of my servers crash, what is my down-time getting this thing extracted and plugged into another computer?

Can I take a snapshot of my data and have my backup server talk directly to this card?

[Paragraph @ Sep 28th 2007 10:37AM]

well, concidering it takes only a few minutes to instlall, un-installation should be just as easy ;)

as for backup, it's probably recognised as a hard-disk, so backup to disk...

should work fine ;) assuming you're running Veritas, naturally

[Tracy in Cary @ Sep 28th 2007 10:54AM]

Still not giving me that warm fuzzy.

A "few minutes" to install assumes the computer is sitting right there with me. Not in a server room in another building half a mile down the street. And then shoehorned into some rack-mount cabinet.

With a properly configured (real) SAN and VMware, I can just move that dead "server" (along with all it's storage) from one piece of hardware to another from anywhere in the country.

As for backups, the idea is for the tape silo to talk directly to the SAN and leave my application servers out of the loop so they don't get bogged down running the backup.

I get the impression this is nothing more than a high performance SSD. Like I said the "power" of a SAN to me has nothing to do with the I/O and all about the redundancy and reliability. I could buy a 12-disk SATA controller, 12 high performance disks, and run RAID ZERO and I bet I would get incredible I/O. But I sure wouldn't say it has the power of a SAN.

[Manny @ Sep 28th 2007 10:37AM]

For the marketing folks...that's hella fast!

[theckel @ Sep 28th 2007 11:02AM]

It seems like the more notable advantage is the speed per watt. If you can get similar speed to a RAID array of 5+ drives in one PCIe powered card that is a huge power saving. Of course you will still need to back up and it doesn't provide redundancy, but that doesn't really seem like the point of the device.

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Sep 28th 2007 11:04AM]

A better quality video can be found here.


http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid980795693/bctid1205096305
http://www.fusionio.com/demo.html

[Zenshai @ Sep 28th 2007 12:08PM]

If its that fast, wouldn't it be good for personal use as well, i.e. gaming, etc.

[EnterpriseFlash @ Sep 28th 2007 12:18PM]

Don't forget the real TCO for a SAN today. $30 GB is ridiculously cheap(over time the price/storage ratio will only improve). A typical enterprise SAN costs $80-240 per GB when you include all of the components. Most corporations over buy storage for their OLTP systems, then buy software to use it properly. Most technology out there is a retrofit solution. Redundancy and capacity will be solved with Fusion's products, not just performance.

This technology is game changing across all sectors of the storage market. This is not a solution for home PC's however. Yes it could be used for gaming, but it is truly suited for enterprises.

[System48 @ Sep 28th 2007 12:49PM]

Some people aren't seeing the real potential. Instead of using just one of these to replace a few servers on a SAN why not use 4 of these cards in each server on the SAN? Use your reg HD's as once a week/once a month backup and have your live apps/OS running on these cards.

[David @ Sep 28th 2007 12:52PM]

The electrical savings are going to be HUGE. Marketing should attach the word GREEN to this puppy!
No moving parts. Yea!
Out with the old in with the new.
I like this product very much. Finally a large step forward for the storage players.

Backing up might be an issue for a bit, but those are small bumps with small headaches.
Having disk arrays and media arrays for backup is a must.
Include massive battery backup for servers and an attached battery backup on each card themselves. Include some solar panels outside and the greenie weenie geeks will wet themselves.

I could literally shove a petabyte of these suckers in a rack, Not a Room.. I likey!!!!

[jharcnc @ Sep 28th 2007 1:15PM]

640gb should be enough for anybody...

[rcastrousa @ Sep 28th 2007 1:47PM]

i want one now! google should buy them now...the demand for this product will be huge! youtube could pay for the upgrade just in power savings alone

[palehorse @ Sep 28th 2007 2:45PM]

Will Windows Vista allow you to boot from it through PCIe?

[kyle90 @ Sep 28th 2007 3:16PM]

"640 gigabytes ought to be enough for anybody"

[E71 @ Sep 28th 2007 5:34PM]

Really? Only a thousand? Not a gazillion?

You gotta love how manufacturers make up numbers or give you theoretical values then you install the stuff and notice it's barely faster than your alternatives.

[Wwhat @ Sep 29th 2007 6:08PM]

It's pretty nice for datacenters and servers, but I bet that sadly it's going to be mostly used AGAINST people, by the NSA and CIA and feds (and various similar orgs around the world) and other such anti-people endeavors.

[IT Monkey @ Oct 1st 2007 7:10PM]

Make it driver less and I am sold.