Comments on: Fusion-IO ioDrive Review

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:50:49 +0000

Well, I’ll give you a hint – sarcasm usually doesn’t work well in marketing. But it is indeed a sure way to bias someone against you and your product. Good luck with it, though – let me know how that approach works out for you.

By: Justin Davidow

Justin Davidow — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:58:52 +0000

“The only way to outperform a Fusion-IO drive is to invest six figures in a SAN and hire a really sharp SAN admin.”

Really? we must be under charging then. We deploy half rack HA SAN nodes with: 11TB of usable ZFS storage, they get 45KIOPS out and 10KIOPS in, and maintain 10Gb links to up to six nodes in a VM cluster, installed with a full year of 9-5/5 support for under 70K.

if only we had known that people like spending so much money!

By: Brent Ozar

Brent Ozar — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:52:14 +0000

Bill – actually, only *each* test I ran lasted 120 seconds, but I ran hundreds of tests in a row, lasting over a day. It just got to the point where I knew exactly which 120-second test would break the card.

By: Bill Williamson

Bill Williamson — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 07:51:15 +0000

We tested the card for longer than 120 seconds. After 48 hours with our stress test under SQL server the write latency was poor. We talked to the support team and still poor write performance over time. Our database doesn’t run for 120 seconds we returned the cards.

By: In-Memory Databases | Kevin E. Kline

In-Memory Databases | Kevin E. Kline — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:17:53 +0000

[...] impact many IT scenarios. My friends, Brent Ozar and Paul Randall, have each written about SSDs here and here, [...]

By: T-SQL Tuesday #4 - IO, IO It's Off To Disk We Go | SQL Server Blog - StraightPath Solutions

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:40:28 +0000

[...] Brent Ozar graced T-SQL Tuesday with his presence through a post about his findings with some Fusion IO drives he got his hands on for testing. Neat stuff but be sure to read about his caveats at the end. The technology is still being ironed out and he discusses some of the risks I have heard from others when it comes to some of the SSD technologies. Still may very well apply to some of your workloads and environments. [...]

By: Brent Allen

Brent Allen — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:20:40 +0000

Writeup was a good read, appreciate your efforts.

I have been following Fusion’s product from quite literally across the hall as I work for a company that use to be in the same office building as Fusion. I’m a big fan of theirs and having looked over the performance numbers I expected they would revolutionize the data market. After reading this it’s clear that their product, while still awesome, has quite a few challenges in front of it. Nevertheless, I would still like to my hands on one of their cards

Given the incredible amount of data throughput these drives manage I wonder if it would be possible to customize a mobo to use an allocation of the drives themselves as system memory? It would be pretty nifty to add additional memory to a box in roughly the same manner used to add virtual memory.

By: Glenn Berry

Glenn Berry — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:42:04 +0000

We have done both synchronous and asynchronous mirroring at NewsGator. We are now using synchronous mirroring for 100% of our production databases. These databases are all in the same data center, with nearly identical I/O capacity on both sides.

We like it because how easy it makes rolling upgrades (with a 5-10 second failover), and because it gives us two copies of the data, above and beyond our backups.

One thing to keep in mind is that SQL Server 2005/2008 Standard Edition only supports synchronous mirroring, so that might mean that more people are using synchronous mirroring than you think.

By: Alen

Alen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:57:30 +0000

Was this tested on Windows 2008 R2 or on Windows 2003? Only reason i’m asking is i’ve read the TRIM command makes SSD a lot faster in Windows 7/2008 R2. Does the Fusion IO support or depend on TRIM?

By: Sumeet Bansal

Sumeet Bansal — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:42:06 +0000

Hi Brent,

You are absolutely correct about the utility of Dooubletake software in this solution. There is also a software product called DataKeeper from Steel Eye Technologies that can also be used for this purpose.

I don’t have any customers to reference for Gridscale but I saw a demo for them at the Boston MTC and it definitely looks promising. The way it works is that the load balancer app executes the same SQL statements on all the nodes. Therefore, there are some cases (specially when there is a high instance of Dynamic Stored Procedures) where Gridscale is not an option. They do have a great analyzer that can scan your database and then tell you if they will be a good fit or not. In terms of reads/writes break-up, Gridscale combined with the Fusion-io technology will result in a system that can accept more or less any kind of workload.

Thanks.

sumeet@fusionio.com