Login
At the DEMO Enterprise Disruption event yesterday, Fusion-io had a big announcement — it's broken the one billion IOPS mark, having reached one million less than two years ago. IOPS are Input / Output Operations per second, a measure of computer storage access speeds based on the number of read / write operations that can be completed per second.
This massive performance boost comes courtesy of a new way of using NAND flash as a non-volatile memory solution, known as Auto Commit Memory. ACM is a software layer which allows developers to send and receive data stored on Fusion-io's ioDrive cards directly to and from the CPU, rather than relying upon the operating system. Because of this, massive applications and databases can run with much lower latency — crucial for the cloud-based world we're heading towards.
To prove the achievement, Fusion-io co-founders Steve Wozniak, David Flynn, and Rick White took to the stage alongside a rack of eight HP servers, each toting eight ioDrive2 Duos. To prove their point, the team showed a meter constantly maxing at one billion IOPS when transferring 64-byte packets of data, with White saying "I just wish [the needle] was bobbing more." In contrast, the fastest consumer-grade SSDs achieve IOPS scores below 100,000 (random read), with many drives scoring far lower. ACM is still in the tech preview stage, but Fusion-io says it is working alongside software developers to make best use of the speed improvements.
Comments
Cool stuff. Can’t wait for this stuff to make its way into consumer devices like future smartphones/tablets
nexus - January 6, 2012
Super cheese
dingoeater - January 6, 2012
It’s sad this sort of thing doesn’t get more attention since it will make a much larger impact than a new processor arch. or a faster video card. I can’t wait until more mainstream ssd’s can incorporate some of these features. Think computers that cold boot in a few seconds.
schemedbynick - January 6, 2012
A few seconds? Try subseconds. ;)
asdfgh746 - January 6, 2012
Assume we can get this into a consumer grade SSD.
10^9 is a billion. 10^5 is a hundred thousand. 10^4 is a thousand.
10^9 / 10^5 = 10^4.
Assume a current consumer SSD can boot a computer in 30 seconds.
30 / 10^4 = 0.003
With this technology, if it is practical to get into consumer hardware and software, a computer could boot in 0.003 seconds. Wow.
Now, I may have gotten carried away in my nerd-lust, but I can dream that it will someday be possible, right?
asdfgh746 - January 6, 2012
If this holds true, then the power button on computer cases may as well be replaced with something like a light switch.
shakil314 - January 6, 2012
Sadly, the only way to get a gigaop is to have multiple computers doing the I/Os. The typical SATA controller embedded in the southbridge of an Intel chipset will do maybe 150K iops on a good day. The good news is that this is a huge improvement over the 20 – 50K they used to max out at. (after all if the disk can only do 100 why ship a chip that can do more? At least that was the reasoning as it was related to me).
To achieve this kind of speed up you need to get rid of the ‘SATA’ part of the interface and make it an IO protocol on the IO bus, PCIe. Since a PCIe-16x slot can deliver 2 gigabytes/second to a video card you could use that sort of bandwidth to boot your computer quickly. A PCIe card that had 250 – 500GB of high speed flash (its coming eventually) would allow you to do instant on sorts of stuff in a full up desktop type machine.
ChuckMcM - January 6, 2012
The cards used here are ioDrive2 Duos — PCIe-mounted flash drives, with capacities up to 2.4 terabytes. They’re well out of the reach of most consumers, but they’re not a figment of the imagination.
Fusion-io claims IOPS in the hundreds of thousands — up to 937,000 on a single unit. I’ve not had the chance to put them to the test, though.
http://www.fusionio.com/platforms/iodrive2-duo/
Jamie Keene - January 6, 2012
I agree. This is really exciting stuff that would be amazing to see implemented everywhere. Who doesn’t want instant everything?
heyash - January 6, 2012
Why is a teenager recording this video????
jdog25 - January 6, 2012
Woz makes anything better!
AngryRussian - January 6, 2012
Hint: the only video you could try to shoot with the camera vertical like this is when it’s one single talking head. Turn in your press pass.
rbanffy - January 6, 2012
I had no idea Woz had anything to do with Fusion-IO. That rules.
slashclee - January 6, 2012
Great way to kill a presentation that was supposed to be funny by screaming it’s funny and constantly using term “IOPS per second”
nyris - January 8, 2012 via mobile
Booting ? Sata ? Mobile ? You have no idea about what you’re talking about, isn’t it ? :)
Thoses cards are PCI-Express, not SATA, and you can’t boot on it.
Thoses shiny things are for servers (mostly database), not too boot in less than 1s (btw, you will be CPU-Bound during the boot process). winning a second or two in the booting process of a server is meaningless.
Ho… and they cost more than $10.000 :)
ker2x - January 11, 2012
You must log in with your Verge account to post a comment.
If you do not yet have a Verge account, please sign up for one!