On 04/29/2011 04:54 PM, Ben Chobot wrote:
We have a bunch of their cards, purchased when we were still on 8.1 and were having difficulty with vacuums. (Duh.) They helped out a bunch for that. They're fast, no question about it. Each FusionIO device (they have cards with multiple devices) can do ~100k iops. So that's nifty. On the downside, they're also somewhat exotic, in that they need special kernel drivers, so they're not as easy as just buying a bunch of drives. More negatively, they're $$$. And even more negatively, their drivers are inefficient - expect to dedicate a CPU core to doing whatever they need done.
I would recommend to have a look a Texas Memory Systems for a comparison. FusionIO does a lot of work in software, as Ben noted correctly, while TMS (their stuff is called RAMSAN) is a more all-in-hardware device.
Haven't used TMS myself, but talked to people who do know and their experience with both products is that TMS is problem-free and has a more deterministic performance. And I have in fact benchmarked FusionIO and observed non-deterministic performance, which means performance goes down siginificantly on occasion - probably because some software-based house-keeping needs to be done.
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