Third I/O, AMD and Emulex Together to Break One Million IO/s

Third I/O Incorporated announced the results of a collaborative benchmark with AMD and Emulex Corporations, which achieved a sustained data rate of over 1.1 million I/O operations per second (IOPS), using Third I/O’s Iris Storage Platform. These results mark the first time that over one million IOPS has been achieved on a single server or storage hardware platform. In addition, 100% of the benchmarked configuration was created using shipping and proven hardware and software.

The configuration consisted of two HP DL 585 G5 servers connected via Emulex LPe12002 8Gb/s Fibre Channel adapters. Both servers were populated with four AMD Opteron Quad Core 8360 processors, which allowed for an extraordinary level of IOPS and bandwidth performance. The first system was configured as a storage initiator, running Windows 2008 Enterprise Server x64. The second system was configured running Third I/O’s Iris Storage Platform, allowing it to operate as a high speed Fibre Channel solid state disk device. The open source IOmeter benchmark was used to verify I/O data rates and disk access times. In addition to the ground breaking IOPS performance, Third I/O’s Iris access times averaged an extraordinary 470 microseconds.

"Third I/O is very supportive of open benchmarking with full disclosure on our results." said Mark Lanteigne, founder of Third I/O. "For the last several months, the storage industry has seen several unsubstantiated claims of extraordinary IOPS and bandwidth performance. In fact, some vendors are hyping products that are prototype or several months away from shipping level stability. And rarely do these same vendors provide any reasonable level of benchmark configuration details. It is our hope to bring more clarity to high speed storage initiatives by being the first to publish a performance brief on our experiments."

"The technology that Third I/O, Emulex, and AMD have collaborated to enable provides a ‘perfect storm’ that helps to realize the true potential of each company’s technology, which is illustrated by surpassing the 1 Million IOPS mark on a single server for the first time," said Margaret Lewis, director, Commercial Solutions and Software Strategy, AMD. "We fully expect that future enhancements to Third I/O’s software, Emulex’s hardware and software, and AMD’s processors and chipsets will extend these benchmark results even further."

"The Third I/O benchmark highlights the critical I/O performance and features Emulex’s LightPulse 8Gb/s Host Bus Adapters provide, such as support for the Message-Signaled Interrupts eXtended (MSI-X) standard," said Taufik Ma, vice president of product marketing, Emulex Corporation, "Emulex’s MSI-X supported HBAs deliver the reduced host CPU utilization and greater I/O scalability required for transaction intensive environments. such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008."

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