Tag Archives: latency

ion SR-71mach6 adds Enthusiast-series Optane™ drive options

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ion has added a new option to its SR-71mach6 SpeedServer™ Configurator to allow the selection of Intel® Optane™ SSDs from the 905P Enthusiast series. Compared to Intel’s Optane DC P4800X series, this family continues to deliver an Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate (UBER) of 1 sector per 10^17 bits read but the endurance drops from an astounding 60 full drive writes per day to only Continue reading ion SR-71mach6 adds Enthusiast-series Optane™ drive options→

SSD vs HDD RAID in Servers and Storage

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SSDs in servers deliver performance, whether measured in IOPS or GBps or latency, that is just plain impossible with disks. SSD capacity is now greater than that of performance disks. Price is the factor that still keeps many organizations away from deploying servers with SSD storage when the improved performance is not a significant benefit. The better reliability of SSD might be more important. Continue reading SSD vs HDD RAID in Servers and Storage→

Observations on NVMe SSDs in Server Applications

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2019 Update: Intel Xeon Scalable Processors have added significant support for NVMe SSDs.  We believe that these improvements make NVMe SSDs the high performance storage approach of choice, but have not yet been able to complete testing of that theory.  Our recommendations at this point are to use NVMe where performance matters.  And where the highest level of performance with the lowest possible latency Continue reading Observations on NVMe SSDs in Server Applications→

Cache: Nondeterministic Storage Feature #1

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Every producer of storage software (including what is hidden inside of “hardware”) has spent years and many engineering hours developing their cache algorithms.  Disks have cache; controllers have cache; subsystems have cache; operating systems have cache.  The better the algorithm is, the better the ratio of cache hits to cache misses.  Ultimately though, the decision of what to have in cache is a guess.  Continue reading Cache: Nondeterministic Storage Feature #1→

Disk-Impossible File Server

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ION® Computer Systems, Inc. recently published benchmark results for its SR-71mach5 SpeedServer™ running Microsoft® Windows® Server 2012 R2 with the SMB 3.1 protocol.  Yes, the performance is “Disk-Impossible!”.  A single 2U “mach5” system costing under $80k served 64kB random reads at 10 Gigabytes per second and delivered 8kB random reads at 1 million Input/Output Operations per second.  Average latency as low as 1ms was Continue reading Disk-Impossible File Server→

SR-71mach5 SpeedServer

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ION recently launched it’s flagship SR-71mach5 SpeedServer™ which continues to deliver on the SR-71 legacy of all-SSD storage for “disk-impossible performance”.  This new server incorporates new technology throughout yielding more processor cores, more and faster memory and much more random I/O performance. Standard processors in the “mach5” are two 12-core 2.6GHz Intel® Xeon® E5-2690 V3, but the full Xeon E5-2600V3 processor lineup is available.  Continue reading SR-71mach5 SpeedServer→

SSD RAID

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There are many opinions on the benefits and liabilities of SSD RAID floating around the Internet; ION’s experience with SSD RAID differs dramatically from some of it.  ION’s SR-71mach4 SpeedServer™ is a server and storage platform optimized for and with SSD RAID.  This article shares some observations on the performance and endurance of SSDs in RAID usage, and examines and compares performance in different Continue reading SSD RAID→

Storage Sizing for Capacity and Performance

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Or, How Many Eggs in One Basket? Huge storage systems are available today supporting large numbers of disks, allowing the creation of massive storage resources.  Storage Servers and storage enclosures suporting up to (60) 3.5″ disk drives are now common.  Filling those bays with 6TB disks yields a system with 360TB raw capacity – one third of a petabyte!  That is now an easy Continue reading Storage Sizing for Capacity and Performance→

Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 3, SSD Price vs. Performance

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Finally, we get to the question, “What replaces hard disk drives?” As many people already know, the answer is solid state disks or SSDs. SSDs are made today to fit the shape, size and interfaces used by hard disk drives (HDDs), but they consist mostly of Flash memory instead of spinning rust, plus a controller and some RAM for buffering, just like a rotating Continue reading Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 3, SSD Price vs. Performance→

Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 2, Disk Drive Physics

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That brings us back to spinning rust. To understand the limitations of rotating hard disk drives, it is important to understand the technology.  With a basic grasp of how a disk drive works, the mechanical limitations  quickly become obvious. If you are accessing data sequentially in big long chunks, where the disk can read an entire track, move over just one track and read Continue reading Spinning Rust is (almost) Dead, Part 2, Disk Drive Physics→