Last night (1/5/12) at a DEMO Enterprise event in San Francisco Fusion-io unveiled a one billion IOPS (I/Os per second) storage system. A billion IOPS!
The machine was built using 64 Fusion-io ioDrive2 Duos connected to eight HP ProLiant DL370 servers.
This came sooner than we anticipated. It was only in July 2008 that the million-IOPS barrier was broken by IBM using 41 Fusion-io devices.
Fusion-io points out that such high performance does not simply come from producing faster hardware. Substantial improvements had to be made to system software to move past the legacy code that has been built around the assumption that I/O is slow. Fusion-io devoted a significant share of its press release to the Auto Commit Memory extension, an enabling technology for this level of performance.
Fusion-io pulled out all the stops for this announcement, showing a video of Mini Me from the Austin Powers series plotting a Denial of Service attack, then getting foiled by the throughput of the billion-IOPS system. Then Fusion-io Chief Scientist Steve Wozniak joined Leonard Nemoy for a chat about the future.
This was more than simply an announcement for the company, though. Fusion-io first publicly unveiled its business at DEMOfall 2007 . This was a homecoming of sorts for Fusion-io co-founders David Flynn and Rick White, and it was an opportunity for DEMO to show off a success story to its investor and entrepreneur guests.
Keep in mind that one key reason that IBM decided to build a million-IOPS system was to prove that their DB2 database management software could handle this transaction level. Objective Analysis believes that it is unlikely that any existing software is capable of dealing with one billion IOPS. Perhaps the Fusion-io demonstration gives software developers a new goal to overcome.
We are putting the finishing touches on the Objective Analysis Enterprise SSD report, which covers the market for high-IOPS storage. If you would like a copy, please visit The Objective Analysis Reports Page.
