NextIO, Fusion-io Set Array Speed Record of 2.2M IOPS

A couple of I/O-focused storage companies have teamed up to set a new IOPS world record.

NextIO, a provider of I/O acceleration appliances for storage systems, and Fusion-io, which makes flash-based solid-state (ioMemory) memory cards, announced May 24 that they have broken the land speed record for IOPS performance in a single rack-mount flash array.

One NextIO vSTOR Application Acceleration Appliance was loaded with six ioDrive Duo ioMemory cards and two SuperMicro servers equipped with six-core AMD Opteron chips. It reached rather quick performance levels of 2.2 million read input/output operations per second (IOPS), easily wiping out the previous single-box flash performance record of 1.7 million IOPs.

If there were traffic cops on the information highway, they wouldn’t bother trying to catch that machine, because they wouldn’t have been able to do so.

Interesting to know that the previous record, set in January 2010, also was set by a NextIO/Fusion-io-based system, NextIO marketing director Mike Lance told The Station.

“We connected each processor to a 640GB ioMemory card, put an iometer between that and the vSTOR, and got it up to 2.2 million,” Lance said. “It’s a straight, direct-attached system. We had some third-party tests to verify the record.”

vSTOR is a straight PCI-Express connection between the server and I/O device, Lance said. This provides significantly higher host connection bandwidth than flash arrays using Fibre Channel or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) host interfaces.

That last line, by the way, was an understatement.

In the meantime, NextIO and Fusion-io have signed a new OEM agreement with Fusion-io to build new vSTOR and ioMemory systems and make them available to more vertical markets.