Fusion-io Validates SSD Performance

At Storage Networking World Fall, Fusion-io announced the results of an independent lab test which confirm the high-performance claims the company has made of its first product, the ioDrive.

Finisar’s Medusa Labs, the network and storage test systems provider, independently performed benchmark tests confirming Fusion-io’s initial performance claims regarding the ioDrive, a high performance Solid-State Drive (SSD) on a single PCI-Express (PCIe) card. In addition to proving the performance numbers stated by Fusion-io, Medusa Labs was also able to independently confirm performance in excess of initial Fusion-io claims by thousands of input/output transactions per second (IOPS) using the Medusa Labs Test Tool Suite.

“We are excited to be working with Fusion-io and validating the performance of the ioDrive,” said Nick Kriczky, director of Finisar’s Medusa Labs. “Through our validation and Test Tool Suite, we have been able to determine that Fusion-io has met and exceeded their performance claims for their product.”

By achieving these incredible transaction rates, and exceeding the performance claims of any other single solid-state drive, Fusion-io stakes a powerful claim as the world’s fastest SSD, putting it in league with proprietary solid state storage appliances and multi-rack SANs that use highly-tuned disk drives to achieve this type of sustained performance.

“In addition to validating our initial assertions about the performance we can achieve from a single ioDrive, these tests also confirm that we have exceeded these claims,” said David Flynn, CTO of Fusion-io. “With one ioDrive – unlike appliance vendors who claim their external rack-mounted box is a drive – we topped 100,000 IOPS read and 90,000 IOPS write speeds. When you RAID multiple ioDrives together, you can scale beyond anything else available today, as demonstrated through Project Quicksilver, which used our ioDrives to easily achieve over 1,000,000 IOPS.”

The tests confirmed Fusion-io’s assertion that the SSD performs on the order of 700-Megabytes per second (MB/s) read and 600-MB/s write, IOPS on the order of 100,000 4-Kilobyte (kB) random reads per second and 120,000 1-kB random reads per second. Fusion-io’s claims were greatly exceeded in further testing, establishing the company as one of the undisputed market leaders in solid state storage.

TESTING RESULTS:
Industry standard Linux benchmark Iozone testing:
Large 64-K packets

• 730 MB/s random read
• 630 MB/s random write

4-K packets, random

• IOPS in excess of 102,000 reads per second
• IOPS in excess of 101,000 writes per second

1-kB packet, random

• IOPS in excess of 140,000 reads per second
• IOPS in excess of 115,000 writes per second

Medusa Labs Test Tool Suite proprietary testing software:
4-K or smaller packets, sequential

• 141,000 IOPS for read
• 110,000 IOPS for write

50/50 mix reads and writes on 4-K or smaller packets, sequential

• More than 101,000 IOPS