Originally Posted by Brad Mitchell

This is great technology, we've been using FusionIO in dedicated solutions for years. Bringing those IOPs to a cloud environment is brilliant. To help everyone here understand exactly how profound this can be, I have a client example I like to give. Specifically, a 300gb FIO deployment for a client where we 10gig NICd a server and pushed 3.5 gigabit without the server being higher than a load of 1. Worth noting, the client only had 3.5 gigabit of traffic for that data. I had calculated that we could have pushed 15+ gigabit if the demand was there. This replaced more than a dozen servers in a load balanced cluster using regular SATA RAID1s.

IOPs (input output per second)
7200rpm 100
15000rpm 300
FusionIO and other similar products up to 100,000s

Because they haven't explained it yet.. its like this: the PCIe storage card is functioning at the speed of the system bus, mo longer bottlenecked by SAS or SATA controller limitations. That combined with 50000 to more than 100000 IOP options makes this unbeatable. See, when you read the 5-12ms random seek times on drives that is representative of them not being under load. On a webserver, they sure as heck are especially with lots of connections and that figure increases. The random access times on these are a fraction and don't really change notably with high session demands.

And yes, killer on databases, media, all file types. If you have an IO problem, this will kill it.

Kudos Webair!

Brad