Fusion-io

Back in December 2008 the Fusion-io ioDrive humbled traditional solid state devices with its innovative PCIe design. In our tests the drive showed excellent results in every test we put it in. Fusion-io brought a speaker from Wine.com to talk about how the ioDrive changed the company's infrastructure for the better.

Their infrastructure was so taxed that people in one department could not be active concurrently with people in another department. Invoicing had to occur at 10:00 pm, after shipments had gone out. They replaced Netapp infrastructure with 2 pairs of 320GB ioDrives and witnessed the following:

- 1200% write performance increase

- 1400% read performance increase

- AQL transaction went from 345ms to 89ms

- Mandatory backups, which slow down the customer experience, went from 8 hours to 10 minutes.

- Read latency went from 12 to 1ms

- Write latency went from 4 to 1ms

- Full database backup went from 2 hrs to 6 minutes

To achieve these gains with other products the projected cost was over 1 Million USD. Wine.com purchased four ioDrive 320GB drives with an MSRP of 14,400 USD (available from DVNation). Each pair was then placed in RAID1 for nearline piece of mind, but the speaker acknowledged that they could have ran RAID 0 for even more performance since the system was being backed up to traditional HDDs.

In our review of the Fusion-io ioDrive we observed similar performance. In the above chart we see the ioDrive compared to three different RAID arrays that used eight Seagate 15K.6 drives and an Intel X25-M. The results were incredible and I can easily see how Wine.com was able to achieve the level of performance they did.