Fusion-IO breaks 1TB/s with SSDs

Author: Gareth Halfacree
Published: 23rd November 2009
Comments (35) Stumble
Fusion-IO breaks 1TB/s with SSDs

Fusion-IO's ioDrive Octal links eight ioDrives together - and a system based on 220 of them can transfer 1TB every second.

If you're disappointed with the speeds currently offered by off-the-shelf solid-state drives, perhaps Fusion-IO's latest toy will interest you.

As reported over on Softpedia, the company has announced the ioDrive Octal - a PCI-Express 2.0 x16 card which holds eight of its ioDrives to produce a RAID-alike single device with greatly improved performance over a single drive.

The device, which is aimed at the high performance computing market, has allowed the company to create a system capable of a 1TB/s sustained data transfer rate - yes, that's one terabyte a second - by connecting 220 of the ioDrive Octal cards together using InfiniBand switched fabric technology and Sun's open-source Lustre parallel file system.

While 220 ioDrive Octal cards - which represents a wallet-melting 1,760 individual ioDrive SSDs - might sound like a lot, Fusion-IO believes that in order to get the same throughput from a traditional storage network you would require 55,440 hard disks with 396 Storage Area Network controllers and 792 input-output servers - a total requirement of 132 full-size racks of equipment. The ioDrive-based system takes up less than a twentieth of this space.

Steve Wozniak - yes, that's Apple co-founder Steve Woznaik - chief scientist at the company, says that "IOPS [Input/Output Operations Per Second] are easy," and that "the real power in our architecture was the ability to also scale bandwidth."

Each individual ioDrive Octal card is capable of providing up to 5TB of storage with 6GB/s of bandwidth, and offers 800,000 IOPS based on a 4K packet size.

While the device remains a bespoke system at present, Wozniak has declared the company's intention to create a commercial version in the future to bring "the power of this solid-state storage technology from the world of HPC to the enterprise." After that, of course, we could hope to see something similar start to trickle down to the consumer level.

Does the idea of a PCI-E 16x card filled with SSDs excite you, or is this a technology which is destined to be nothing more than a plaything for government agencies with more money than sense and a real need for rapid data transfer? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Quote shadysam 23rd November 2009, 12:32
Oh my god , incredible ! 1 TB/s :O
Quote Bede 23rd November 2009, 12:38
Shiny. This is one of those occasions when physical theft becomes appealing to me :D
Quote l3v1ck 23rd November 2009, 12:52
Quote:
Does the idea of a PCI-E 16x card filled with SSDs excite you.....
Anything that removed bottlenecks can only be a good thing. We may finally have a good use for the second PCIe x16 port on some motherboards (let's face it SLi/Crossfire is a waste).
Quote shanky887614 23rd November 2009, 12:53
yes but the question everyone wants to know is how much is this going to cost andwill i need to remorgage my house to buy it
Quote liratheal 23rd November 2009, 12:56
Holy fast, Batman.
Quote HappyThoughts 23rd November 2009, 12:57
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bede
Shiny. This is one of those occasions when physical theft becomes appealing to me :D

I'll be the driver
Quote crazyceo 23rd November 2009, 12:59
Any progress in SSD has to be a good thing (eventually) to us consumers.

No price mentioned even in this bespoke stage.
Quote Rkiver 23rd November 2009, 13:00
The speed.....oh the speed. I see a great OS/Game/Download the entire internet drive coming.
Quote Mister_Tad 23rd November 2009, 13:04
Quote:
Originally Posted by shanky887614
and will i need to remorgage my house to buy it

I hope its a nice house. I'd bet on the 1TB/sec config carrying an 8 figure price tag.
Quote Scootiep 23rd November 2009, 13:22
Well, I don't really want to sell my first born. However, my second born has been ticking me off with his "waking up 4 times every night" crap. I'm sure we could come to some sort of arrangement involving him and indentured servitude for a drive...
Quote B3CK 23rd November 2009, 13:32
I don't have enough A/C in any room of my house to keep enough machines cool that would fit 220 of these cards in order to get the 1Tb/s rate.
Quote fodder 23rd November 2009, 13:35
Just watch Windows bloat to a size that still requires a 1 minute + boot time when this is commercial :-P
Quote p3n 23rd November 2009, 15:09
1/20 of 132 racks is still cheating...
Quote feedayeen 23rd November 2009, 15:28
I don't see any numbers that could be the price. Are you guys using scientific notation in order to save on zeros and commas?
Quote cyrilthefish 23rd November 2009, 15:44
Quote:
Originally Posted by shanky887614
yes but the question everyone wants to know is how much is this going to cost andwill i need to remorgage my house to buy it
I think the answer is:

If you need to ask you can't afford it
Quote Mongoose132 23rd November 2009, 16:15
What would it be used for? o.O
Quote TSR2 23rd November 2009, 16:39
As to the price, at least you won't need any RAM in this thing.
Quote thehippoz 23rd November 2009, 16:48
hehe yeah it doubles as ram
Quote HourBeforeDawn 23rd November 2009, 17:05
one word.... WOW
Quote Star*Dagger 23rd November 2009, 17:32
All my porn transferred in 12 seconds! FAST!
Quote metarinka 23rd November 2009, 17:33
In 10 years we'll laugh and think wow, how slow was Tb/s and look how much it cost!

I remember using a 32mb flash mp3 player, and thinking wow that's a lot of music for such a small device!
Quote webdev511 23rd November 2009, 18:52
Quote:
Originally Posted by feedayeen
I don't see any numbers that could be the price. Are you guys using scientific notation in order to save on zeros and commas?

Price for this? I haven't seen it either. They make an 80 GB PCI-e 4x versions for consumers. Single card is $900, dual card is $2k. 320 GB Enterprise version is $8k. They gave a 320 enterprise version away at a Silicon Valley SQL User group meeting in October.

http://www.amazon.com/Fusion-io-80GB-eXtreme-Bundle/dp/B002SDM3W0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1259002216&sr=8-2
Quote thecrownles 23rd November 2009, 19:40
Quote:
Originally Posted by fodder
Just watch Windows bloat to a size that still requires a 1 minute + boot time when this is commercial :-P

But when it finishes booting, it will read your mind and algorithmically assemble the answers to questions you are thinking about before you realize it. And then it will offer to wank you. (followed by BSOD)
Quote TWeaK 23rd November 2009, 20:48
Quote:
Originally Posted by B3CK
I don't have enough A/C in any room of my house to keep enough machines cool that would fit 220 of these cards in order to get the 1Tb/s rate.

Exactly. Plus, you're not going to be able to fit even a handful of these in a consumer motherboard. I think everyone has missed the fact that YOU NEED 220 OF THESE TO GET 1TB/S!

Still, if each of these cards can do 6GB/s then it's better than anything you'll get through SATA. Plus it scales really well if 220 of these give 1TB/s, so if you have enough PCI-E slots for 2 or 3 of these you won't be too far off 12 or 18GB/s. The storage size of each card is pretty impressive too.

However, getting a hold of even a handful of these is going to be 5 figures at least. 220 is just ridiculous and I'd be surprised if anyone bought that many. It's really just a PR stunt at the end of the day.
Quote dark_avenger 23rd November 2009, 22:34
the forum link on the article is broken
Quote Landy_Ed 23rd November 2009, 22:40
It's not a PR stunt, it's the way forward for high-bandwidth high-availability data systems. Fusion IO have been pushing the "lower-end" product that comes in at between 2 & 8 times the equivalent consumer products down 4x PCIe lanes to sql server people, & creating some very positive waves.
Quote woodshop 23rd November 2009, 23:22
http://www.ramsan.com/products/ramsan-20.htm
not as fast.. probably much cheeper..
Quote thehippoz 24th November 2009, 00:18
just wonder how long it would last- especially carrying the amounts of data this thing would be used for
Quote Autti 24th November 2009, 00:29
What actually requires 1TB/s? Plus what is the point when rack systems can have RAM quantity in the TB's and wouldn't RAM still be a lot faster?
Quote AshT 24th November 2009, 07:58
Quote:
Originally Posted by Autti
What actually requires 1TB/s? Plus what is the point when rack systems can have RAM quantity in the TB's and wouldn't RAM still be a lot faster?

SSDs are a replacement for HDDs. So in your rackmount systems you would still have a need for HDDs to store data, the RAM is used for temporary storage. With SSDs the data moves much faster.

The film industry could certainly make use of this stuff and I guess any power house internet based sites like google or Facebook.
Quote Bede 24th November 2009, 08:21
Fb definitely needs these, although it could probably do with a new code base as well :s
Quote jake9891 24th November 2009, 08:25
how much do you think guys it is going to cost??
Quote kenco_uk 24th November 2009, 09:48
Even if one of these were used in a PCIex4 slot, that'd still be over 1GB/s.

Want now!
Quote Journeyer 24th November 2009, 12:37
Yes this is impressive, but the question remains; would this be sufficient for the Mankz to transfer the ladies to redundant backup HDDs quick enough for it to be done within his lifetime?
Quote ZERO <ibis> 24th November 2009, 19:02
I was thinking it would be great to get 30gb for $800+ at this speed but 4TB I can not even think how much $.
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