Fusion-io has achieved 9.608 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) from a single 365GB Fusion ioDrive2 solid-state drive. This performance breakthrough is made possible using application programming interfaces (APIs) that integrate flash into host systems, allowing it to bypass bottlenecks in the operating system. These APIs are now being used by dozens of industry-leading software companies to update their apps to embrace the future of software defined datacenters.

 The 9.6 million IOPS was accomplished with auto-commit memory, which maintains the persistence of flash at performance levels in the nanoseconds, running on directFS. A nonvolatile memory optimized file system developed by Fusion-io, directFS eliminates duplicate work between the host file system and flash memory management software. The performance numbers were achieved utilizing single threaded, single queue depth 64 byte writes to the auto-commit memory log.

“We believe software defined datacenters will be built on industry collaboration and open platforms, not proprietary closed systems. The future of software defined datacenters will be based on an open, unified platform architected to leverage powerful CPUs, which need new programing primitives and APIs to deliver the flexibility and efficiency required to meet rapidly growing data demands,” said David Flynn, Fusion-io chairman and chief executive officer.

Fusion-io is leading the development of new APIs including auto-commit memory and directFS, which are part of the ioMemory software development kit, the first SDK designed to integrate flash memory as a new computing tier in the datacenter. Other SDK APIs include atomic writes, which enables a processor to simultaneously write multiple independent storage sectors as a single storage transaction, helping to accelerate transactions in popular enterprise databases like MySQL by up to 75% compared to traditional storage architectures.

“With new primitives being introduced for nonvolatile memory technologies, we are at a crossroads in computing that will profoundly increase the value of IT to businesses. The demand for data increases every day, and new and more effective ways to leverage all that data are absolutely essential for powerful applications and datacenter servers to be fully exploited. The future of data center infrastructure is being defined by software and software-led advances like the file system and APIs being developed by Fusion-io increase application performance by astounding levels. We believe these innovations will be instrumental in the ongoing evolution of IT architectures and data center designs,” said David Vellante, chief research analyst at Wikibon.

Tags: Fusion-io, SSD, NAND, Flash