Test of Calypso Single RAM Disk Block IO

Calypso Systems, Inc. reported measuring over 3 million write and 4.3 million read IO/s for a random 4K block size workload when tested on a single Linux based RAM disk.

“3.0 million and 4.3 million IO/s for random 4K 100% writes and 100% reads are the highest IO/s we have measured for any class of storage, including SAS, PCIe and NVDIMM SSDs,” said Eden Kim, CEO, Calypso.

The measurements were taken on a Calypso Reference Test Platform, the industry standard test environment for measuring SSD performance. “RAM disk Block IO measurements are important because they represent ‘in-memory’ storage performance potential for both NVDIMM SSD Block IO R/W and Memory Mapped Load / Store storage,” said Kim.

The RAM disk response times were 0.011 and 0.015ms for the RND 4K write and read IO/s. This compares to IO/s of 87,419 and 742,674 and response times of 2.198 and 0.259ms for the same workload measured on a PCIe x8 SSD.

Calypso regularly tests various classes of SSD performance and publishes bi-annual Performance by Storage Class Comparison data. SSD performance continues to increase with more IO/s, higher bandwidth and lower latencies. The latest movement to ‘in-memory’ storage presents the potential for very high performance for computationally intensive applications and advanced storage tiering strategies. In-memory storage takes advantage of faster memory lanes and closer proximity to the cpu thus increasing performance and decreasing response times.