IBM Flash Memory Breaks 1 Million IOPS Barrier 77
alphadogg writes to tell us that IBM is claiming a victory on the flash storage front. Their new research project "Quicksilver" is claiming data transfer speeds of more than 1 million input/output operations per second (IOPS). "IBM said Quicksilver is two and a half times faster than its own SAN Volume Controller coupled with IBM's DS4700 storage. It would also be two and a half times faster than technology from Texas Memory Systems, which says it has the world's fastest storage with an IOPS rate of 400,000. "
Re:Bit error rate? (Score:5, Informative)
It has a limit to the number of writes, the number of reads is pretty unlimited. The expected average lifetime is similar to a hard drive, and in some cases better.
It's not a fucking barrier (Score:2, Informative)
It's the 1 MIOPS /mark/. If it was a barrier, you wouldn't be /able/ to break it.
Re:Bit error rate? (Score:3, Informative)
The bigger the flash drive, the more area in which to spread the wear, the longer it lasts.
Re:It's not a fucking barrier (Score:3, Informative)
Usenet-isms.
*Bold* /Italic/ _Underline_
But I wouldn't expect you to understand that.
Re:soooooo... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:soooooo... (Score:5, Informative)
By the way, for a workload with a lot of independent reads or writes you'd be surprised how slow a hard disk is. With a 512byte block (common on hard drives) you get a maximum throughput of around 50KB/s for a random access pattern on a cheap drive, going up to around 125KB/s on an expensive one. Even very cheap flash can do better than this, so for moderate sized databases (a few GBs) with a very heavy access load flash works out a lot cheaper.
Oh, and for reference each of the ops in this test was up to 640KB, giving a maximum of around 640GB/s data transfer.
Re:soooooo... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:soooooo... (Score:5, Informative)
How does this translate into normal transfer speed units like MB/s? Otherwise I have no point of reference to tell if I am impressed or indifferent.
I'll try to help.
MB/s is a measure of IO throughput. Often this isn't the most relevant figure for 'enterprise' storage. Certain applications do a lot of random access IO so IOPS becomes more important than throughput.
Today a typical desktop disk is capable of about 100-150 IOPS. That's a rule of thumb range that varies based on operation size, cache, etc. It works pretty well usually. You can aggregate disks and get almost linear scaling; 12 disks, for instance in a device like this [cdw.com], will give you a maximum of 1200 IOPs, roughly. A common USB Flash device can break 1000 IOPS with certain access patterns.
The second graph on this page [tomshardware.com] illustrates the extreme IOPS advantage of Flash for certain applications. Disks are limited by head actuation and rotation latency. This is why enterprise storage vendors have been pursuing [theregister.co.uk] Flash aggressively [forbes.com]. That's what this story is all about.
The dream is to host the same IOPS in with an order of magnitude less physical space, power, heat, etc. If you don't need thousands of IOPS (and most PC users don't) then it isn't very interesting. If you happen to run an OLTP system with thousands of reads/write per second it means a great deal.
Re:Bit error rate? (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously, there's not a whole lot of independent research out there, but here are some of the claims:
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-11408-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=39451&messageID=725468&start=0 [zdnet.com]
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7676844023.html [linuxdevices.com]
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9007518 [computerworld.com]
Re:I'm waiting for price/performance and benchmark (Score:4, Informative)
Re:soooooo... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bit error rate? (Score:3, Informative)
...the more you wear it down by using it. (eg. bigger files, more files used.)
Isn't that the whole point of a bigger drive?