IOPS – The SSD Guy Blog

Latency, IOPS & NVDIMMs

Sometimes it’s enlightening to compare several viewpoints on similar data. At yesterday’s SNIA Persistent Memory Summit a number of presentations provided interesting overlapping views on certain subjects.

One of particular interest to The SSD Guy was latency vs. IOPS. Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates and I presented the findings from our recently-published IOPS survey report and in Slide 19 displayed the basic chart behind this post’s graphic (click to enlarge, or, better yet, right-click to open in a new tab). This chart compares how many IOPS our respondents said they need for the storage in their most important application, and compared that to the latency they required from this storage. For comparison’s sake we added a reference column on the left to roughly illustrate the latency of various standard forms of storage and memory.

You can see that we received a great variety of inputs spanning a very wide range of IOPS and latency needs, and that these didn’t all line up neatly as we would have anticipated. One failing of this chart format is that it doesn’t account for multiple replies for the same IOPS/latency combination: If we had been able to include that the chart would have shown a clearer trendline running from the top left to the lower right. Instead we have a band that broadly follows that trend of upper-left to lower-right.

Two other speakers presented the IOPS and latency that could be Continue reading “Latency, IOPS & NVDIMMs”

Five-Minute IOPS Survey

Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates and Yours Truly: The SSD Guy are once again polling as many IT professionals as we can with a very simple 5-minute survey asking about your IOPS needs.

This is an update of the same survey we ran in 2012. We want to see how things have changed over the past four years.

Please click HERE and let us know what kind of storage performance you need. Even a hunch is good.

Many thanks!

New Report Posts Results of IT Manager IOPS Survey

Tom Coughlin and I have just released a new report that helps shed a lot of light on a pretty challenging subject: We asked nearly 200 IT managers to tell us how much storage performance their systems require. They provided candid replies about their IOPS, latency, and capacity needs for a number of leading applications.

The results of this survey are compiled in a 80-page report titled How Many IOPS do you Really Need? This one-of-a-kind report provides responses for all of Continue reading “New Report Posts Results of IT Manager IOPS Survey”

Kaminario Seizes SPC1 Title Again

For the second year in a row little Kaminario has beat the large established storage array vendors to produce the highest SPC1 benchmark rating at 1.24 million SPC-1 IOPS.

The results of the Storage Performance Council’s SPC-1 report, show Kaminario surpassing last year’s record performance by 20k IOPS.

Interestingly enough Kaminario set the 2012 record using DRAM while this year the company was able to do it with its fourth-generation all-flash K2.

Why is the SPC1 test so highly respected in Continue reading “Kaminario Seizes SPC1 Title Again”

Webinar: How Many IOPS Do You Really Need?

Earlier today Tom Coughlin and I presented a BrightTalk webinar in league with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) to discuss our joint report: How Many IOPS is Enough?

The report is based upon a survey that asked IT managers about their enterprise IOPS requirements. The webinar gives a taste of the report’s contents, and explains the survey methodology. During the course of the webinar and at the end Tom and I answered a number of listener questions relating to the content.

The presentation also includes a little plug for SNIA’s client IOPS survey which is being run by downloading a program called the Workload I/O Capture Program, or “WIOCP.”

A replay of this webinar is available on the BrightTalk website.

The presentation was well received by our audience. Have a listen.

WDC’s HGST Intros 12G SAS MLC SSDs

In case you didn’t have enough abbreviations in your life, The SSD Guy brings you the headline above, with the promise that the news below is really interesting: HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technology, but now a division of WDC – Western Digital Corp.) has brought out a new line of 12Gb/s SAS SSDs based on MLC flash. These are a part of the UltraStar line.

Whereas HGST’s first-generation UltraStar SAS SSDs used SLC flash, the new SSDs are based on 25nm MLC flash but offer the same warranties as HGST’s prior generation. Even so, performance for the new SSDs is significantly faster than that of their SLC-based predecessors, with no reduction in wear or lifetime specifications.

These SSDs are the first to support Continue reading “WDC’s HGST Intros 12G SAS MLC SSDs”

Intel Intros Fast Datacenter SATA SSD

Today Intel announced a new SATA III SSD, the DC S3700 Series. The new product is fast, supporting 75,000 random 4K read IOPS and 36,000 random 4K write IOPS. Average read latency is 45microseconds (µs) with writes averaging 65µs. Sustained sequential reads are 500 megabytes/sec with sustained sequential writes at 460. The read performance of this SSD, although a SATA device, is twice that of Intel’s 710 PCIe SSD announced in April, and writes are a full 15 times faster. Intel calls this performance: “Scary fast!”

Intel says this device is its best Continue reading “Intel Intros Fast Datacenter SATA SSD”

IOPS Survey – Still Seeking Participants

Tom Coughlin and I are still seeking IT professional inputs for our 5-minute IOPS survey.

Please take a brief moment to share your thoughts on the importance of I/O in your system. It’s only 5 multiple-choice questions.

Click HERE and let us know what kind of storage performance you need. Even a hunch is good.

Many thanks!

OCZ: Three Solid State Storage Products in Three Weeks

SSD maker OCZ has been on something of a tear recently, introducing three new solid state storage products in three weeks:

Two weeks ago the company introduced the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCIe SSD, designed for the data center, in single-card capacities ranging from 300GB-16TB. This product can transfer data at multiple gigabytes per second rates to deliver over a million IOPS.
Last week saw the introduction of the OCZ-SANRAD VXL enterprise storage accelerator, after OCZ’s January acquisition of SANRAD. This product is flash cache acceleration software for VMware ESX and Citrix Xen virtualized environments that allows Continue reading “OCZ: Three Solid State Storage Products in Three Weeks”

Fusion-io’s Billion IOPS Monster

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.

Continue reading “Fusion-io’s Billion IOPS Monster”