Question Flash-IO SAN and Progress

[Cringer]

Has anyone come across Fusion-IO SANs? Our IT Manager has just asked me to delve a little into the possibility of using them to hold our databases - essentially they'd end up on flash storage. Should be nice and quick, you'd think, but are there any pitfalls to look out for?
They're going to send us a single drive we can stick in a rack so we can benchmark test, which is useful. All the same, it would be useful to know of anyone's experiences.

 

[TomBascom]

FusionIO is a fairly well known vendor of flash storage. They have a reputation for being very fast and very expensive. I've had customers consider their gear but ultimately they have all opted for less expensive alternatives. If disk IO is indeed your bottleneck and you've got the budget for it -- go for it!

Of course the usual caveats apply -- test, test, test! And once you remove one bottleneck a new one will appear -- it may be a long ways down the road or it might be very nearby.

 

[Cringer]

Thanks Tom. Appreciate your comments.

 

[cj_brandt]

we used Fusion IO cards for a trial basis on HP servers. The performance was really good, each card was around 600gb of storage. Not sure how different those are from the setup you are talking about. We ended up going with a solid state disk system with around 25TB from a different vendor.

 

[Cringer]

They're sending us a card to trial for a month so we can benchmark performance. I believe the SANs have 2 flash cards, and then loads of disk. You tell the SAN what to put on Disk 1, and it uses Disk 2 for writes etc. That's then written down to disk as necessary. So in our case we'll be able to load the dbs onto the flash disk. Which is nice!

 

[Chris Hughes]

I came across Fusion IO a while back when researching, agree with Tom their benchmarks are amazing and so was the cost.

In my scenario it worked out better to by more RAM @ 10 GBP per GB so that is what we did.

I have a vague recollection the big different between cheap and expensive SSD is whether they use single layer or multi layer cores - single layer being the enterprise option - multilayer being what you stick in your laptop