I was introduced to an product today that caught my eye.
HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator for BladeSystem c-Class
So what is this IO module. It is a mezzanine card that is currently available in HP Blades (it will be available in the near future also for the Proliant Series as well).
It comes in different capacities: 80GB, 160GB and 320GB
Now what caught my eye, is the Maximum IOPS 100,000 IO/sec
Now of course this not certified for ESX (YET!!)
But I am thinking could this an amazing solution for certain use cases. If you have an intensive I/O VM it could use this device as its storage.
True, the biggest issue here is that the disk here is local and not shared storage. Which of course is a major issue and limits this solution to very specific use cases, but to get 100,000 IOPS would need something like this (100,000 I/O Operations Per Second, One ESX Host)
The next step was to get our hands on enough storage to run the experiments on a large scale. We went to the Midrange Partner Solutions Engineering team at EMC, Santa Clara and they were kind enough to let us use the storage infrastructure in their lab. They loaned us three CLARiiON CX3-80 storage arrays, each with 165 15K RPM disks, for a total of 495 disks and 77TB of storage. Our experiments used the Iometer I/O stress tool running in virtual machines on a server equipped with ESX 3.5 Update 1. The server was a quad-core, quad-socket (16 cores total) system with 32GB of physical memory.
Now all that is needed is to find a way and technology to share this storage device for use in a cluster..
Hrmmmm..
4 comments:
Looks like an OEM'ed version of the well known Fusion-IO's ioDrive :)
I like their ioXtreme for workstation :P
And BTW if you want to share that disk, have a look at StorMagic SVSAN product (http://www.stormagic.com/SvSAN.php). Free for up to 2TB of storage!
Hey,
I got one of these to try a while ago and the guy at fusion-io said that ESX support would be soon (about a year ago) so I would not hold your breath waiting for it. Did some quick benchmarks and they do seem to be as good as them claim, http://www.thattommyhall.com/2009/07/06/fusionio-iodrive/
@PiroNet - they have avoided legacy protocols in the IODrives as the latency is too high, serving it up in software would slow it right down. I interviewed with them a while ago and they told me about http://www.fusionio.com/press/Fusion-io-Achieves-One-Terabyte-per-Second-Sustained-Bandwidth/ , it uses RDMA as a really low latency SAN-like storage pool. This is seriously cool, though they have not quite productised it yet.
Tom
It will b einteresting to see if there can be use cases made for this in future releases.
Post a Comment