Re: FUSION-IO io cards

On 04/29/2011 04:54 PM, Ben Chobot wrote:
> We have a bunch of their cards, purchased when we were still on 8.1 and
> were having difficulty with vacuums. (Duh.) They helped out a bunch for
> that. They're fast, no question about it. Each FusionIO device (they
> have cards with multiple devices) can do ~100k iops. So that's nifty.
>
> On the downside, they're also somewhat exotic, in that they need special
> kernel drivers, so they're not as easy as just buying a bunch of drives.
> More negatively, they're $$$. And even more negatively, their drivers
> are inefficient - expect to dedicate a CPU core to doing whatever they
> need done.

I would recommend to have a look a Texas Memory Systems for a
comparison. FusionIO does a lot of work in software, as Ben noted
correctly, while TMS (their stuff is called RAMSAN) is a more
all-in-hardware device.

Haven't used TMS myself, but talked to people who do know and their
experience with both products is that TMS is problem-free and has a more
deterministic performance. And I have in fact benchmarked FusionIO and
observed non-deterministic performance, which means performance goes
down siginificantly on occasion - probably because some software-based
house-keeping needs to be done.

--
Joachim Worringen
Senior Performance Architect

International Algorithmic Trading GmbH