News

posted on 19 June 2008 08:28

HP is radically increasing the I/O rates of its servers, including blade servers, by using flash memory caches from Fusion-io.

These caches are solid state drives (SSDs), which Fusion-io terms ioDrives, and have up to 320GB of capacity. HP c-Class blade servers would have an ioDrive mounted on their mother board to cache I/O to storage resources. Fusion-io is modifying and developing its technology for HP.

It says the aim is to revolutionize how enterprises access and store large amounts of active data with breakthrough performance for I/O intensive applications. Fusion-io’s ioMemory architecture reduces the server/storage performance gap, enabling read-intensive I/O applications to run much faster while also increasing performance of high-transaction, write-intensive I/O applications. This, Fusion-io claims, provides customers with unparalleled performance — virtually eliminating latency and bottlenecks at the application level — at a lower overall cost, while consuming dramatically less power than traditional solutions.

'Traditional solutions' is code for short-stroking Fibre Channel drives.

Don Basile, Fusion-io's CEO, described it this way: “Fusion-io’s work with HP is an acknowledgment of the benefits of a solid-state storage solution that addresses latency and bottlenecks at the server level. Adapting this technology specifically for HP servers offers radical increases in associated performance for a broad range of applications and workloads and can dramatically improve the effectiveness of data center architectures. With our ioMemory architecture, we’re getting more than 200,000 IOPS within HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades today.”

Lee Johns, an HP StorageWorks director of marketing, played the greencard: “Combining Fusion-io’s ioMemory architecture with HP servers will allow customers to deploy high-performance storage solutions for their application needs while reducing requirements for data center space, power and cooling.”

We could take a view here that there are two places a systems vendor could put SSDs to boost storage I/O rates. One is in the storage array; a tier zero as EMC is doing with Symmetrix. The other is in the servers as a front-end cache for the storage. The net effect would roughly be the same and it applies immediately to all storage connected to SSD-enhanced servers. That means your non-SSD-enhanced storage continues to sell well when connected to HP servers compared to EMC'c Symmetrix on SSD steroids, and expected CLARiiON on SSD steroids as well.

It also gets over the problem that only one SSD supplier, STEC, has a Fibre Channel-interfacing SSD controller.

HP is following a route flagged by Sun, also Dell, and putting its tier zero storage flash cache on its servers.

This could a cue for intense technical discussions about the ideal location for tier zero flash storage, like those about whether storage virtualisation should be in the SAN fabric (IBM and SVC) or in the array controller (HDS). We may even end up with both on offer; flash-enhanced servers talking to flash SSD-enhanced storage arrays.

When might we expect HP flash blade server product? Perhaps next year.

^{[Chris Mellor.]}