IBM breaks 1 million IOPS barrier with Solid State Disk

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IBM once again delivers storage innovation!

(Note: The following paragraphs have been updated to clarify the performance tests involved.)

This time, IBM breaks the 1 million IOPS barrier, achieved by running a test workload consisting of a 70/30 mix of random 4K requests. That is 70 percent reads, 30 percent writes, with 4KB blocks. The throughput achieved was 3.5x times that obtained by running the identical workload on the fastest IBM storage system today (IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller 4.3),



and an estimated EIGHT* times the performance of EMC DMX. With an average response time under 1 millisecond, this solution would be ideal for online transaction processing (OLTP) such as financial recordings or airline reservations.

(*)Note: EMC has not yet published ANY benchmarks of their EMC DMX box with SSD enterprise flash drives (EFD). However, I believe that the performance bottleneck is in their controller and not the back-end SSD or FC HDD media, so I have givenEMC the benefit of the doubt and estimated that their latest EMC DMX4 is as fast as an[IBMDS8300 Turbo] with Fibre Channel drives. If or when EMC publishes benchmarks, the marketplace can make more accurate comparisons. Your mileage may vary.

IBM used 4 TB of Solid State Disk (SSD) behind its IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) technology to achieve this amazing result. Not only does this represent a significantly smaller footprint, but it uses only 55 percent of the power and cooling.

The SSD drives are made by [Fusion IO] and are different than those used by EMC made by STEC.

The SVC addresses the one key problem clients face today with competitive disk systems that support SSD enterprise flash drives: choosing what data to park on those expensive drives? How do you decide which LUNs, which databases, or which files should be permanently resident on SSD? With SVC's industry-leading storage virtualization capability, you are not forced to decide. You can move data into SSD and back out again non-disruptively, as needed to meet performance requirements. This could be handy for quarter-end or year-end processing, for example.

For more on this, see the [IBM Press Release] or thearticles in [Network World] by Jon Brodkin, and [Cnet News] by Brooke Crothers.

Our clients have often told us at IBM that performance is one of their top purchase criteria. IBM once again has shown that it listens to the marketplace!

technorati tags: IBM, SVC, million, IOPS, EMC, DMX, Network World, Cnet, Jon Brodkin, Brooke Crothers, benchmark, leading, performance, SSD, EFD, FC, HDD, disk, systems, media