HP Z820 with Fusion-io ioFX 420 Benchmarks

[Mark Noland]

I'm benchmarking a new HP Z820 Dual 8 core Xeon 2.70GHz. with 32GB RAM with the new ioFX 420 from Fusion-io.


BMD Disk Speed Test for one ioFX 420:

BMD Disk Speed Test for two ioFX 420s striped together:

More to come.


Best
Mark

 

[Bob Gundu]

yowzaaaaa

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

So, what exactly does the IoFX give you, besides blazing fast access to it's memory?

 

[Bob Gundu]

Possibly some insight here:

http://www.fusionio.com/blog/curtains-up-on-the-fusion-iofx/

So, what exactly does the IoFX give you, besides blazing fast access to it's memory?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

So, what exactly does the IoFX give you, besides blazing fast access to it's memory?

Where they justify their pricing vs. other SSD solutions is the consistency and stability of that performance too. Handing over a precious PCIe slot for what is really a small amount of storage is a tall order. Especially when for less money, we can stripe a few more conventional SSDs together and beat their advertised numbers. But if you look at the performance of these SSDs in a system that graphs their performance like the ATTO or AJA tools, HD Tune is a really good one for that... you see they they perform very consistently. You can also see it in the BMD tests in real time as the "needles" on the speed gauges shoot don't bounce like they do on most other conventional storage solutions, or nowhere near as much as we see with typical SSDs and simple RAIDs.

As intriguing as the option is, I only have one free PCIe slot in my Z820 and have plans for it. So....

FWIW, two OCZ Vertex 4 512GB SSDs striped together gives me just shy of 950GB and in these benchmarks, like the BMD test, I'm getting 760MB/s writes and 820MB/s reads. But I didn't leave that configuration in place. I'm just running one of them as my system / apps drive. Put the other one in a 2011 Macbook Pro. The OCZ performance is good, but can be a bit erratic at times. Same with most every SSD I've ever used / tested.

 

[Mark Noland]

So, what exactly does the IoFX give you, besides blazing fast access to it's memory?

You also get true enterprise class stability and integrity of your data. (72 bit ECC)

SSD drives use standard SAS hard drive controllers to control the NAND memory, these controllers use standard hard drive commands to control the memory which is not the most efficient way to communicate with RAM.

Since SSD drives use actual disk controllers and disk raid controllers it is easy to make them communicate with your operating system the downside is that all SSDs talk to your computer through the operating systems Storage Layer which is one of the reasons that you will not see an SSD with an access latency of less than 1 millisecond.

The average access time of the ioFX is about 0.029 milliseconds.


One word about HD Tune Pro, I swear by it on my HP Z800 it's great, but there's something about PCIe3 in the Z820 that make HD Tune Pro give inacurate results

The best way to think about the ioFX is not to compare it to a hard disk drives or SSD drive but compare it to RAM.
It is slightly slower than system RAM but it is persistent, so that if the power is turned off, all of your data is secure.
The Virtual Storage Layer or VSL software for the ioFX is a new memory tier that has more in common with how your system RAM is accessed than any "drive".

Best
Mark

 

[Mark Noland]

Here's the ATTO and AJA benchmark scores for one ioFX.

I like the AJA and BMD since they will quickly point out if you are set up right to get the best performance out of your system.

Next up is to test the KONA 3G with the new Eizo 4K monitor.
Hopefully we can do 4K 444 playback from 2 ioFX out to the Eizo!

Best
Mark

 

[Tom.Wong]

Where they justify their pricing vs. other SSD solutions is the consistency and stability of that performance too. Handing over a precious PCIe slot for what is really a small amount of storage is a tall order. Especially when for less money, we can stripe a few more conventional SSDs together and beat their advertised numbers. But if you look at the performance of these SSDs in a system that graphs their performance like the ATTO or AJA tools, HD Tune is a really good one for that... you see they they perform very consistently. You can also see it in the BMD tests in real time as the "needles" on the speed gauges shoot don't bounce like they do on most other conventional storage solutions, or nowhere near as much as we see with typical SSDs and simple RAIDs.

As intriguing as the option is, I only have one free PCIe slot in my Z820 and have plans for it. So....

FWIW, two OCZ Vertex 4 512GB SSDs striped together gives me just shy of 950GB and in these benchmarks, like the BMD test, I'm getting 760MB/s writes and 820MB/s reads. But I didn't leave that configuration in place. I'm just running one of them as my system / apps drive. Put the other one in a 2011 Macbook Pro. The OCZ performance is good, but can be a bit erratic at times. Same with most every SSD I've ever used / tested.

you can also get a pci expander and start stacking cards in it

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

you can also get a pci expander and start stacking cards in it

True. But that's getting pretty expensive.

The Fusion IOFX is an X4 card, so the 4-slot Cubix should do nicely to hold 4 of those cards and have adequate bandwidth via its X16 host. That makes for about a $12K storage solution with a fuzz under 2TB of real capacity. Hey, if you have the money to burn... Although for that budget, you can still build a disk based system with over 10X the capacity and equivalent transfer speeds. The only thing you lose by going to the disk solution is the extremely low latency. Not sure if you will notice it much under most situations. The PCIe expander also adds latency into the mix...

 

[Mark Noland]

Here's the benchmark for ATTO & AJA on 2 ioFX striped together.

1.3GB/s write and 2.9GB/s read.

Looks like I'll get the Kona3G for testing on Monday.

:-D

Best
Mark

 

[DJ Meyer]

1.6 TB versions are out soon.:smilewinkgrin: