Fusion- Io drives, What about those?

[Björn Benckert]

Any one here that use Fusion I/O drives / boards?

http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodrive2-duo/

How many of those together with a rocketX can be fitted in a Z820?

Can a couple of IODrive 2 Duo's be set up as a raid for even faster read/writes or how does it work.

Our current raids creates to much heat, especially now when the summer comes. It gotten to the point where I need to defrost the cooler once a week which is a bit of a hassle, so instead of changing the cooler I'm thinking of getting rid of our stone&wire raids and get some of those fusion boards instead but I do not know much about them. So before I jump to something stupid I figure I ask here.

They would be used as work storage. Render to and from and playback. So not super important with security as the material is always stored in other places as well so I'm more looking for reliable speed and less heat created than what I get with HDD arrays.

Another question if I put one of these in a Thunderbolt enclosure together with a rocketX would I be able to render at 1.5GB/s speed or would the thunderbolt slow things down?

 

[Jason Osterday]

TB2 caps out at 1375MB/s so you're just burning cash on something like Fusion drives in that environment. Checkout Samsung XP941 PCIe SSD's in a raid on PCIe 4x and 8x host cards for around $1500 (2 drives and 1 card). They're essentially Mac Pro SSD's with a slightly different pin arrangement. They max out TB2 with just 2 of them (1TB total storage) and can reach 1500+ in a proper 8x slot.

 

[Björn Benckert]

TB2 caps out at 1375MB/s so you're just burning cash on something like Fusion drives in that environment. Checkout Samsung XP941 PCIe SSD's in a raid on PCIe 4x and 8x host cards for around $1500 (2 drives and 1 card). They're essentially Mac Pro SSD's with a slightly different pin arrangement. They max out TB2 with just 2 of them (1TB total storage) and can reach 1500+ in a proper 8x slot.

Thanks, ok so in a thunderbolt 2 chassi they are a bit over due. But for the other scenario, like having 2 of the IPdrive Duos set up as a raid and one rocket X all together in a Z820 would that give me 3GB/s speeds or no?

 

[DJ Meyer]

The FusionIO cards are great. Expensive, but great. I run a couple of iofx and yes you can RAID-O them with a nearly linear increase in speed.

Whether they are worth it though is really dependent on the use case. They really excel in multithreaded read and write ops and access latency more than straight-line speed. Although not to shabby there either.

As an example, I saw a big speedup in render times in heavy multi-layer composites over an existing 8-drive RAID of enterprise 7200 RPM disks due to the access latency and multi-thread strength, while both volumes have similar sequential benchmarks.

 

[Björn Benckert]

The FusionIO cards are great. Expensive, but great. I run a couple of iofx and yes you can RAID-O them with a nearly linear increase in speed.

Whether they are worth it though is really dependent on the use case. They really excel in multithreaded read and write ops and access latency more than straight-line speed. Although not to shabby there either.

As an example, I saw a big speedup in render times in heavy multi-layer composites over an existing 8-drive RAID of enterprise 7200 RPM disks due to the access latency and multi-thread strength, while both volumes have similar sequential benchmarks.

Thanks for that info. Yes, I know a lot of people use them for running nuke and flame from them which is all about multithreaded reads and layer comping so yes that makes sense.

 

[John Bellari]

Any one here that use Fusion I/O drives / boards?

http://www.fusionio.com/products/iodrive2-duo/

How many of those together with a rocketX can be fitted in a Z820?

Can a couple of IODrive 2 Duo's be set up as a raid for even faster read/writes or how does it work.

Our current raids creates to much heat, especially now when the summer comes. It gotten to the point where I need to defrost the cooler once a week which is a bit of a hassle, so instead of changing the cooler I'm thinking of getting rid of our stone&wire raids and get some of those fusion boards instead but I do not know much about them. So before I jump to something stupid I figure I ask here.

They would be used as work storage. Render to and from and playback. So not super important with security as the material is always stored in other places as well so I'm more looking for reliable speed and less heat created than what I get with HDD arrays.

Another question if I put one of these in a Thunderbolt enclosure together with a rocketX would I be able to render at 1.5GB/s speed or would the thunderbolt slow things down?

Bjorn,

Intel just dropped "the bomb" on Fusion I/O to get at those fat margins.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storage/Intel-SSD-DC-P3700-800GB-Review-Ludicrous-Speed-Masses

Looks pretty awesome, we need competition in that space and boy I could use a couple of those Intel Cards...

From the Article:

"Pricing and Availability:

We don't yet have street prices, but extrapolating from the 400GB model pricing given on the slide earlier, we get these rough prices:
DC P3700:

• 400GB - $1207 ($3.02/GB)
• 800GB - $2414
• 1.2TB - N/A
• 1.6TB - $4828
• 2.0TB - $6035

DC P3600:

• 400GB - $783 ($1.95/GB)
• 800GB - $1566
• 1.2TB - $2349
• 1.6TB - $3132
• 2.0TB - $3915

DC P3500:

• 400GB - $599 ($1.50/GB)
• 800GB - N/A
• 1.2TB - $1797
• 1.6TB - N/A
• 2.0TB - $2995

Warranty:
All Intel DC P3x00 parts come with a 5-year warranty.
Final Thoughts:
The speed advantages of the NVMe interface are now indelibly clear, especially as demonstrated by Intel's new fire breathing Data Center product lines. This new interface removes many of the bottlenecks associated with SATA and AHCI, bringing the flash much closer to the CPU, both physically and logically. The end results are impressive to say the least, with Intel's 18-channel controller turning in figures close to 3GB/sec and 4k random IO pushing half a million IOPS. The market segmentation of three separate SKU lines is welcome, in that it is accompanied by step reductions in cost/GB ranging from $3/GB down to $1.50/GB. Enterprise products with such staggering performance, averaging $2/GB is absolutely game changing.
I, for one, welcome our new flash memory overlords..."

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Agree that the Fusion solution is terrific, other than cost. Will be interesting to see how Fusion responds to Intel's new tech, both in pricing and, I'd wager, new products. Totally with JB on how great it is to see more competition in the space.

Full disclosure: I do have some personal friends at Fusion, but no specifics on their product roadmap, my comments above are simply logical conjecture.

Cheers - #19