Fusion-io super-server handles billions of transactions

by Steven Williamson on 3 December 2011, 11:04

Tags: Fusion-io

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Fusion-io, a developer of high-speed Flash memory modules and software for accelerating storage performance, has demonstrated how its solid state drives have handled billions of credit transactions on a single server.

A single test on a 64-core AMD Server with four 1.2TV ioDrive 2 NAND arrays achieved 1.11 million transactions per second, inserting all the data – all 50 billion rows of it - into a single database in Microsoft SQL Server.

Fusion-io believes that the test on the VSL software subsystem, which also processed update statements, achieving 2.5 million updates per second, shows how the company could meet increasing demand for new solutions to data processing in the retail sector.

"Given how consumers are embracing online shopping, we believe this achievement showcases how Fusion-io can help meet demand for servicing more digital transactions with an efficient, rapid and reliable solution," said Neil Carson, Fusion-io chief technology officer



To show-off just how impressive the feat is, the company calculated that the server handled enough transactions to be able to process the daily credit card spend of every single individual of the planet right up until the year 2050.

“The transaction rates achieved in these tests demonstrate the high scalability and efficiency of today’s Microsoft SQL Server databases when powered by Fusion-io,” concluded Carson.

To learn more about Fusion-io, go to http://www.fusionio.com.

HEXUS Forums :: 9 Comments

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Posted by Tattysnuc - Sat 03 Dec 2011 12:07
Sounds great, but I don;t know what SQL Server can achieve on a standard piece of kit, ie raid 5/6/50/60 array. What would be the performance increase by using this bit of kit…?
Posted by Mblaster - Sat 03 Dec 2011 13:57
A standard (I.e. non SSD) storage array at the same capacity would be much slower and much less expensive (you're looking at £50k for the 5TB storage alone), but non-SSD storage at the same price would be many times larger, and still slower, especially in these kind of workloads.

The price of these setups means they don't really get sent out to review sites like Hexus, but I'm pretty sure there are some reviews of the cheaper version of this card (still about £4k I think) around online to give you an idea.
Posted by semo - Sun 04 Dec 2011 17:40
There is absolutely no way that a mechanical storage array can beat even a single consumer level SSD. RAID does not improve latency or seek/latency. You can have a building full of HDDs but that array will never have latency of less than 1ms. HDDs should have died a long time ago
Posted by vrykyl - Sun 04 Dec 2011 18:27
Would be interesting to know the life span of those IO drives under that kind of sustained usage… little point having that massive write capability if the drives are dead in a few months!

That said I appreciate you'd never see that kind of hammering in real world daily use!
Posted by shaithis - Mon 05 Dec 2011 08:55
You can mitigate a lot of the cost by only using these SSD arrays for the transaction logs though.

But all this talk of disk detracts from the main jaw-dropper of the article for me…. “64-core AMD Server”

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