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Fusion-io breaks one billion IOPS barrier, pauses to congratulate itself

Darren Murph
Updated ·4 min read

Let's get a little perspective, shall we? Corsair's Force Series 3 SSD -- a wholly awesome product in its own right -- is capable of hitting around 85,000 IOPS. On a good day. Fusion-io has been pushing the NAND storage envelope for years now, but even its recently-unveiled ioDrives deliver between 700,000 and 900,000 IOPS. Today, however, the company's pausing to pat itself squarely on the back -- and rightfully so. It managed to achieve one billion input and output operations per second in a technology demonstration conducted at DEMO Enterprise: An Evening of Innovation.

We're told that it was during a preview of the company's latency reducing Auto Commit Memory (ACM) extension, part of the Fusion ioMemory subsystem, and that it's "rethinking how to provide powerful modern CPUs with the data they need through sophisticated software architectures." The demo utilized eight HP ProLiant DL370 servers, each equipped with eight ioDrive2 Duos, to break the one billion IOP barrier when transferring 64 byte data packets. 'Course, that'd probably cost you a few dozen years of work if you were to buy such a setup yourself, but hey -- at least someone's working to eliminate the mechanical drive sooner rather than later, right?

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Fusion-io Breaks One Billion IOPS Barrier

New Breakthroughs in Low Latency Data Performance Achieved with Technology Preview of Upcoming Auto Commit Memory Software at DEMO Enterprise

SAN FRANCISCO – Jan. 5, 2012 – Fusion-io today announced that it achieved one billion input and output operations per second (IOPS) in a technology demonstration conducted at DEMO Enterprise: An Evening of Innovation, in a preview of the company's latency reducing Auto Commit Memory (ACM) extension, part of the Fusion ioMemory subsystem.

"Rethinking how to provide powerful modern CPUs with the data they need through sophisticated software architectures has enabled us to deliver the ultra low latency performance needed to achieve one billion IOPS with existing hardware and Fusion ioMemory solutions," said David Flynn, Fusion-io Chairman and CEO. "This breakthrough is not something that could be achieved with hardware alone. Intelligent software that optimizes 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."

This demonstration used eight HP ProLiant DL370 servers, each equipped with eight ioDrive2 Duos, to break the one billion IOP barrier when transferring 64 byte data packets. This was a preview of an extension to the ioMemory architecture called Auto Commit Memory, which significantly reduces latency and system overhead in transferring data. Auto Commit Memory leverages the unique architecture of ioMemory to reliably deliver data at peak performance levels. Data integrity is assured by the ioMemory architecture's ability to flush all in-flight data, even if the power is abruptly cut, without the need for super capacitors or batteries. The Auto Commit Memory extension will provide developers with new semantics to directly control the datapath to persistent memory, introducing a fundamentally new building block for how modern data systems are designed.

"Breaking the one billion IOPS barrier is certainly a powerful way to demonstrate our ioMemory architecture. As an engineer, what really excites me about extensions to our core technology such as ACM are the possibilities introduced when flash is utilized as a new memory tier," said Steve Wozniak, Fusion-io Chief Scientist. "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."

To learn more about Fusion-io, go to http://www.fusionio.com. Follow Fusion-io on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/fusionio and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/fusionio.

About Fusion-io

Fusion-io has pioneered a next generation storage memory platform for shared data decentralization that significantly improves the processing capabilities within a datacenter by relocating process-critical, or "active", data from centralized storage to the server where it is being processed, a methodology referred to as data decentralization. Fusion's integrated hardware and software solutions leverage non-volatile memory to significantly increase datacenter efficiency and offers enterprise grade performance, reliability, availability and manageability. Fusion's data decentralization platform can transform legacy architectures into next generation datacenters and allows enterprises to consolidate or significantly reduce complex and expensive high performance storage, high performance networking and memory-rich servers. Fusion's platform enables enterprises to increase the utilization, performance and efficiency of their datacenter resources and extract greater value from their information assets.