Speaking of rumors...

Ok, while OTC was feeling funny and seeing big invisible rabbits named Harvey and trying to be silly... Here's a rumor I heard, but I decided to sit on it for a while... (Note: I wasn't explicitly told to keep it a secret, so I may get in trouble for spilling the beans.) But since its a beautiful spring morning in Chicago, and I don't have to worry about the road construction projects... (I walk to work :-) I thought I'd share this little tidbit with you... I don't know if you saw Dell did a benchmark... http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_result_detail.asp?id=109060201 It was a TPC-H benchmark based on microsoft and using SSD cards provided by FusionIO. If you haven't heard, FusionIO has this new product out. http://www.fusionio.com/load/media-docsProduct/kcb62o/Octal-Study.pdf The Octal card can have up to 5TB of SSD on the card. So its perfect for those who need really high density of drives but also don't want to get in to high energy costs of running a large data center. (You can read the PDF and I'm not a marketing rep for FusionIO.) Well if you can't figure it out by now... IBM / FussionIO doing a benchmark. Since FusionIO's Octal isn't priced, the benchmark isn't *official* and won't be published. Care to guess which database they used? Again, since the card isn't available outside of government sales, and there's no release date, IBM ran this benchmark... (Methinks that its because someone in a govt site was using a certain database and wanted to get a performance benchmark on this new technology...) No, I don't know the results. No, I don't know if IBM will ever release the results. I'd usually end with a ... but hey! What do I know? But here I really don't know anything except that its possible that they were going to announce something at the upcoming IIUG conference and I probably blew their big surprise. Oh well, you heard it hear first. :-) -G _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your inbox. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID27925::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:032010_2

"Ian Michael Gumby" <im_gumby@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:mailman.100.1270127822.1071.informix-list@iiug.org... >> It was a TPC-H benchmark based on microsoft and using SSD cards provided >> by FusionIO. If you haven't heard, FusionIO has this new product out. The Octal card can have up to 5TB of SSD on the card. So its perfect for those who need really high density of drives but also don't want to get in to high energy costs of running a large data center. (You can read the PDF and I'm not a marketing rep for FusionIO.) Well if you can't figure it out by now... IBM / FussionIO doing a benchmark. >> Care to guess which database they used? Not really germane to your point, but we've been testing these Fusio I/O cards. Fantatic performance!! I'd be nervous about using them for high-availability, simply because I don't know how reliable they are (I guess you could mirror them at the o/s level, and certainly at the IDS level, but we only had one card for eval). But I thought they'd be brilliant for intermediate storage such as temp dbspaces. However they currently only support Windows and Linux, and it's the bigger customers who'd be more likely to pay for the card, and our bigger IDS customers still tend to be on proprietary UNIX.

> From: neil.truby@ardenta.com > Subject: Re: Speaking of rumors... > Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2010 17:44:14 +0100 > To: informix-list@iiug.org > Well if you can't figure it out by now... IBM / FussionIO doing a benchmark. > >> Care to guess which database they used? > > Not really germane to your point, but we've been testing these Fusio I/O > cards. Fantatic performance!! I'd be nervous about using them for > high-availability, simply because I don't know how reliable they are (I > guess you could mirror them at the o/s level, and certainly at the IDS > level, but we only had one card for eval). > > But I thought they'd be brilliant for intermediate storage such as temp > dbspaces. However they currently only support Windows and Linux, and it's > the bigger customers who'd be more likely to pay for the card, and our > bigger IDS customers still tend to be on proprietary UNIX. > Uhm... On the PCIe cards, there are supposed to be 'sub cards' which are the SSD themselves. If you have a problem, you can replace the sub card. You can also raid the SSDs if not already. This would give you better reliability. Or you could get two cards in a box and raid them that way too. According to what I've heard, these cards are as reliable as your regular disk drives so I'd say don't just put your temp tables. Plus its 4+ friggin TBs on a card. How large is your database where you need such high performance? ;-) But hey! What do I know? Now the entire IIUG board is peeved cause I just stole IBM's thunder. -G _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your inbox. http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID27925::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:032010_2

"Ian Michael Gumby" <im_gumby@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:mailman.101.1270146727.1071.informix-list@iiug.org... >> On the PCIe cards, there are supposed to be 'sub cards' which are the SSD >> themselves. If you have a problem, you can replace the sub card. You can >> also raid the SSDs if not already. This would give you better >> reliability. Or you could get two cards in a box and raid them that way >> too. According to what I've heard, these cards are as reliable as your regular disk drives I'd not run a serious IDS OLTP system from straightforward disks these days, but use a "SAN".

This PCI card is their new product, they already have a rack mounted "drive" cabinet. Art Art S. Kagel Advanced DataTools (www.advancedatatools.com) IIUG Board of Directors (art@iiug.org) See you at the 2010 IIUG Informix Conference April 25-28, 2010 Overland Park (Kansas City), KS www.iiug.org/conf Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that my own opinions are my own opinions and do not reflect on my employer, Advanced DataTools, the IIUG, nor any other organization with which I am associated either explicitly, implicitly, or by inference. Neither do those opinions reflect those of other individuals affiliated with any entity with which I am affiliated nor those of the entities themselves. On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Neil Truby <neil.truby@ardenta.com> wrote: > "Ian Michael Gumby" <im_gumby@hotmail.com> wrote in message > news:mailman.100.1270127822.1071.informix-list@iiug.org... > > >> It was a TPC-H benchmark based on microsoft and using SSD cards provided > >> by FusionIO. > If you haven't heard, FusionIO has this new product out. > > The Octal card can have up to 5TB of SSD on the card. So its perfect for > those who need really high density of drives but also don't want to get in > to high energy costs of running a large data center. > (You can read the PDF and I'm not a marketing rep for FusionIO.) > > Well if you can't figure it out by now... IBM / FussionIO doing a > benchmark. > >> Care to guess which database they used? > > Not really germane to your point, but we've been testing these Fusio I/O > cards. Fantatic performance!! I'd be nervous about using them for > high-availability, simply because I don't know how reliable they are (I > guess you could mirror them at the o/s level, and certainly at the IDS > level, but we only had one card for eval). > > But I thought they'd be brilliant for intermediate storage such as temp > dbspaces. However they currently only support Windows and Linux, and it's > the bigger customers who'd be more likely to pay for the card, and our > bigger IDS customers still tend to be on proprietary UNIX. > > _______________________________________________ > Informix-list mailing list > Informix-list@iiug.org > http://www.iiug.org/mailman/listinfo/informix-list >

Neil Truby schrieb: > "Ian Michael Gumby" <im_gumby@hotmail.com> wrote in message > news:mailman.100.1270127822.1071.informix-list@iiug.org... > >>> It was a TPC-H benchmark based on microsoft and using SSD cards >>> provided by FusionIO. > If you haven't heard, FusionIO has this new product out. > > The Octal card can have up to 5TB of SSD on the card. So its perfect for > those who need really high density of drives but also don't want to get > in to high energy costs of running a large data center. > (You can read the PDF and I'm not a marketing rep for FusionIO.) > > Well if you can't figure it out by now... IBM / FussionIO doing a > benchmark. >>> Care to guess which database they used? > > Not really germane to your point, but we've been testing these Fusio I/O > cards. Fantatic performance!! I'd be nervous about using them for > high-availability, simply because I don't know how reliable they are (I > guess you could mirror them at the o/s level, and certainly at the IDS > level, but we only had one card for eval). > > But I thought they'd be brilliant for intermediate storage such as temp > dbspaces. However they currently only support Windows and Linux, and > it's the bigger customers who'd be more likely to pay for the card, and > our bigger IDS customers still tend to be on proprietary UNIX. > Hi Neil, let me point you to http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-videos.html to have something to look at. The near future of those customers in need of 4-20 times the performance at less then 33% of the $$$ might be - throw out FC 4Gbit networks and their sluggish switches - bring in bonded (4x) 10 Gbit Ethernet over copper, dedicated to storage network ( ~ 3 G Bytes / second, yes! 3 G BYTES == 1 TB is 5:30 to read sequential ) in elephant mode ( 16-64 KB blocksize ) - build 2 storage servers like the video shows, or like the one in project Artemis by Pariot Memory (which I saw in Hannover, CeBit) http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Patriot-SSD-Intel-Xeon-LSI,9791.html#xtor=RSS-18111 Key here is that inside the storage server it is a combination of -- X58 Intel MoBo, which has 2 times PCI 2.0 x 16 and DDR3 1333 memory -- SSDs - cheap ones are good enough *** wear levelling: no problem until you need more than a sustained 100,000 IOPS for 12 hrs a day 7x24 of ALL parts of the SSDs with data on it -- usual usage is less than 5% of the data on it [ It still has to be tested what happens in month 25 - we are stress testing different MLC SSDs for 23 months and 1 week only atm. No mechanical disk was able to stand this type of stressing longer than 36 months, by the way ] and this combination is DAS style inside the box and the usage is like to use a NFS server, which has reliable and low latency locking (like NFS 4.0), but it is at least 4 times faster in seq writes, 6-8 times faster in seq reads and 12-16 times faster in doing random I/O (50% read, 50% write) - all this is real world testing, no power point thing, no vapour ware, no marketing. To keep it short: I already saw 1TB+ databases, which I had to tune by reducing the equivalent of BUFFERS and upping I/O on similar ^^ storage servers, mainly because memory thruput on 'Big Iron' Unix/AIX/Slowaris Machines is very slow (DDR2 400 memory mostly in those boxes) I also was able to test that you can win each and every comparison <any DB system you like> using SSDs versus <any [RAC, but not limited to RAC] cluster you like> NOT using SSDs. You can showcase or deliver PoC and it does no longer depend on a failry near to 100% tuned IDS engine doing the work :( This is new facts (at least for me) I had to learn since Jan 2009. For those shops still having 'endless money' and no budget constraints: There is always the Big Guys of storage: http://www.superssd.com/ Look for RamSan-620, or if it has to be real fast: RamSan-500 :) Dic_k on his way from DB expert to storage architekt, chanting his mantra: If you want 2 times the performance, you must learn to spend half the money -- Richard Kofler SOLID STATE EDV Dienstleistungen GmbH Vienna/Austria/Europe