Ben Chobot wrote:
Also, while I would say they seem reliable (they have a supercap and succeeded every power-pull test we did) we just recently we've had some issues which /appear/ to be fio driver-related that effectively brought our server down. Fusion thinks its our kernel parameters, but we're unconvinced, given the length of time we've run with the same kernel settings. I'm not yet ready to say these cards are unreliable, but I'm no longer willing to say they're problem-free, either.
Ben has written a nice summary of the broader experience of everyone I've talked to who has deployed Fusion IO. The race car anology is a good one. Fast, minimal concerns about data loss, but occasional quirky things that are frustrating to track down and eliminate. Not much transparency in terms of what it's doing under the hood, which makes long-term reliability a concern too. A particularly regular complaint is that there are situations where the card can requite a long consistency check time on system boot after a crash. Nothing lost, but a long (many minutes) delay before the server is functioning again is possible.
The already mentioned TI RAMSAN at an ever higher price point is also a possibility. Another more recent direct competitor to FusionIO's products comes from Virident: http://www.virident.com/ They seem to be doing everything right to make a FusionIO competitor at the same basic price point. They've already released good MySQL performance numbers, and they tell me that PostgreSQL ones are done but just not published yet; going through validation still. The "Performance Relative to Capacity Used" graph at http://www.ssdperformanceblog.com/2010/12/write-performance-on-virident-tachion-card/ is one anyone deploying on FusionIO should also be aware of.
-- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us "PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance": http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/books -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
