One Billion IOPS Barrier Broken

One billion input and output operations per second (IOPS) were achieved in a technology demonstration conducted at DEMO Enterprise: An Evening of Innovation, during a preview of Fusion-io’s latency reducing Auto Commit Memory (ACM) extension, part of the Fusion ioMemory subsystem.

“Rethinking how to provide powerful modern CPUs with the data they need through sophisticated software architectures has enabled us to deliver the ultra low latency performance needed to achieve one billion IOPS with existing hardware and Fusion ioMemory solutions,” said David Flynn, Fusion-io Chairman and CEO. “This breakthrough is not something that could be achieved with hardware alone. Intelligent software that optimizes NAND flash as a low latency, high-capacity, non-volatile memory solution for enterprise servers can transform the way organizations process the immense amounts of data that powers our lives today.”

This demonstration used eight HP ProLiant DL370 servers, each equipped with eight ioDrive2 Duos, to break the one billion IOP barrier when transferring 64 byte data packets. This was a preview of an extension to the ioMemory architecture called Auto Commit Memory, which significantly reduces latency and system overhead in transferring data. Auto Commit Memory leverages the unique architecture of ioMemory to reliably deliver data at peak performance levels. Data integrity is assured by the ioMemory architecture’s ability to flush all in-flight data, even if the power is abruptly cut, without the need for super capacitors or batteries. The Auto Commit Memory extension will provide developers with new semantics to directly control the datapath to persistent memory, introducing a fundamentally new building block for how modern data systems are designed.

“Breaking the one billion IOPS barrier is certainly a powerful way to demonstrate our ioMemory architecture. As an engineer, what really excites me about extensions to our core technology such as ACM are the possibilities introduced when flash is utilized as a new memory tier,” said Steve Wozniak, Fusion-io Chief Scientist. “Instead of treating flash like storage, where data passes through all of the OS kernel subsystems that were built and optimized for traditional storage, our core ioMemory technology offers a platform with new programming primitives that can provide system and application developers direct access to non-volatile memory.”