April 21, 2009 at 8:55 am
I've been searching around for some good info on this, but hard to find anything in the public space. I have a few private testimonials that like the Fusion drives, but I'd love to get some good testing and experiences written up if any of you are up for it.
It would be good to get a fairly long term test of how it's worked, something > 6 months of use.
April 30, 2009 at 6:29 am
Hi there,
I recently spoke to a guy from SQLCAT here in europe whilst at the European PASS conference (Thomas Kejser). He was one of the people responsible for the world record last year for loading 1TB of data into SQL server in under 30 minutes.
He told me that he is looking at getting a teest-rig using FusionIO to see a real life SQL Server installation running on it. As soon as anything comes out you will either hear it on the grapevine, or I will post details here.
Regards,
WilliamD
April 30, 2009 at 2:42 pm
We're testing some fusion drives at the moment.
Paul White
SQLPerformance.com
SQLkiwi blog
@SQL_Kiwi
May 16, 2009 at 5:34 am
Hi Paul
Any news on the testing front? We are just at the planning stage of a project where speed is critical and any savings would be benefical. Solid state drives would be potentially a performance improvement but my concern is the reliability of the drives as the database in our project needs to be available 24/7
May 16, 2009 at 6:07 am
Hi Hassie,
Actually the drives were only on evaluation and had to go back before we had chance to really give them a proper go.
We've asked for them back again for a longer period, so hopefully either next week or the week after I'll be able to say more.
From the initial tests they seemed fine performance-wise, subjectively close to being as fast as the RamSans - but they're a few years old now.
As far as reliability is concerned - who knows? They're just NAND flash so I guess they'll be about as reliable as any new gear of the same type.
Wish I could say something more helpful!
Paul
Paul White
SQLPerformance.com
SQLkiwi blog
@SQL_Kiwi
May 17, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Thanks for the update Paul. Let me know how you get on with the longer tests as I am very interested to implement this solution on my current project.
May 17, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I saw this 2009-4-6 press release from Fusion-io:
Fusion-io Breaks Storage Performance Barriers, Exceeding 1 Million IOPS and 8 GB/s Throughput Within a Single HP ProLiant Server
http://www.fusionio.com/PressDetails.php?id=81
I think Fusion-io could be valuable for the right requirements, but $110,000 plus for 2.5 TB of storage is fairly expensive. Also, it requires a PCI Express slot for each Fusion-io module, and the test system above was using all 11 PCI-e slots on the server. Another thing to consider is that read performance is greater than write performance, but this lines up well with the typical workload on a SQL Server.
As the price drops for this technology will become more widespread, but it will require rethinking the whole way that servers are built. There is no SAN technology out there that could deliver anything close to the bandwidth of 8 GBytes/second on a typical dual HBA connected server; about 5 to 10% of that seems to be the limit for current technology.
As SSD disk technology get cheaper and the reliability is more proven, you will see a tipping point in the next 2 to 4 years where it will become the technology of choice for data center servers. The very short time for random access because of the elimination of track-to-track seek and rotational delay will bring a huge performance increase for database servers. The much lower power usage will also be a big selling point, as it already is for SSD disk in laptops.
May 17, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Wow, that's pricey considering my WD "green" 1TB drive cost me $142. Granted, it's a touch slower.
May 17, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Heh. We are not buying 2.5TB...
I forget the exact pricing but it was something like seven thousand (NZ) dollars for 160 GB. We would probably look to use it for tempDB and maybe some logs, depending.
Modern NAND flash has write performance very close to its read performance. The 160GB drive quotes 670 write and 750 read MB/s - which seems adequate 😉
Paul
P.S. Compared to what the Ram-Sans cost, Fusion IO seems cheap!!!
Paul White
SQLPerformance.com
SQLkiwi blog
@SQL_Kiwi
May 18, 2009 at 8:12 am
I'm not sure they have worked out how to do RAID with the Fusion-io yet. They are (said to be) more dependable, but losing a drive is still a possibility. Also, it might make it more difficult to manage the space across multiple drives instead of a larger array. At least backups should run fast.
If you are only using it for tempdb, losing the drive would be fairly easy to recover from.
Edit: I just looked at their web site, and it said you can RAID multiple drive together.
May 18, 2009 at 9:39 am
I know some people that have been using these for some time, in RAID. They are very happy with Fusion.
May 18, 2009 at 10:25 am
Paul White (5/17/2009)
Heh. We are not buying 2.5TB...I forget the exact pricing but it was something like seven thousand (NZ) dollars for 160 GB. We would probably look to use it for tempDB and maybe some logs, depending.
Modern NAND flash has write performance very close to its read performance. The 160GB drive quotes 670 write and 750 read MB/s - which seems adequate 😉
Paul
P.S. Compared to what the Ram-Sans cost, Fusion IO seems cheap!!!
Have you seen the specs on their new ioDriveDuo products?
http://www.fusionio.com/PDFs/Pressrelease_Pressrelease_ioDriveDuo.pdf
"The ioDrive Duo can easily sustain 1.5 Gbytes/sec of
read bandwidth and nearly 200,000 read IOPS. Its performance metrics are as follows:
• Sustained read bandwidth: 1500 MB/sec (32k packet size)
• Sustained write bandwidth: 1400 MB/sec (32k packet size)
• Read IOPS: 186,000 (4k packet size)
• Write IOPS: 167,000 (4k packet size)
• Latency < 50 µsec"
May 18, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Michael Valentine Jones (5/18/2009)
Have you seen the specs on their new ioDriveDuo products?
Yeah I've ordered a couple for home use :w00t: 😀
Seriously, yes they are very impressive but there are none available for eval (at least not here) at the moment so we're just waiting to see what the pricing looks like. Dollars to donuts they are more than twice the price of the single units 😉
Paul White
SQLPerformance.com
SQLkiwi blog
@SQL_Kiwi
March 9, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Hi,
I saw a few questions on how Fusion-io drives work and what they can deliver in a SQL Server environment. I would like to attach a case-study that Wine.com did with Fusion-io. They Moved their entire database onto Fusion-io from a SAN and they also Raided the cards (raid-1) within the server to provide disk level redundancy. They used SQL Server Mirroring (in Synchronous mode) to cater for high-availability. The case-study highlights some of the improvement metrics that can be expected in a SQL Server environment.
Thanks.
Sumeet Bansal
Disclosure: I am the Principal Solutions Architect at Fusion-io but my goal here is simply to share some facts with the community.
_____________________________________________________________
Sumeet Bansal
Principal Solutions Architect
Fusion-io, "The fastest Storage device in the world" - Engadget.com
sbansal@fusionio.com
March 9, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Thanks for that article. That might prove useful in a current project.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
_______________________________________________
I have given a name to my pain...MCM SQL Server, MVP
SQL RNNR
Posting Performance Based Questions - Gail Shaw[/url]
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