Fusion-iO just announced the new ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo on Oct 2011 (at some conference of no importance). The MLC models will be available late November and the SLC models afterwards. See the Fusion-iO press release for more info. Below are the Fusion-IO ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo specifications. The general idea seems to be for the ...

Over the last two years, I have stood up several proof-of-concept (POC) database server systems with consumer grade SSD storage at cost $2-4K per TB. Of course production servers are on enterprise class SSD, Fusion-IO and others, typically $25K+ per TB. (There are some special situations where it is viable to deploy a pair ...

After years of anticipation and false starts, the SSD is finally ready to take a feature role in database server storage. There were false starts because NAND flash is very different from hard disks and cannot be simply dropped into a storage device and infrastructure built around hard disk characteristics. Too many simple(ton) people became ...

I’m watching the FedEx page as my shiny new Dell E4300 travels across country – and bummed that I won’t have it in time for the MVP Summit. The first thing I’m going to do is install a Crucial 256Gb SSD drive. I‘ve heard good things about SSD drives, but some have reported that they can get burned out from repeated constant writes. One forum post ...

Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) recently made some comments about the FusionIO SSD drives.  Basically, he was able to break three drives in a row - simply by doing load testing against them (using SQLIO).  The symptom is simple: the drives go offline and disappear from the O/S, and need to be physically pulled from the machines.  Kind ...

A recently published TPC-H benchmark result, along with previously published results provide some insight into to the relative impact of SSD to disk drives, and SSD versus system memory. The TPC-H configurations are shown below. All results are at SF 100. The first two are on Windows Server 2003 sp1, and SQL Server 2005 sp1 and sp2 ...

Dell recently published a TPC-H report for the PowerEdge T610, 2 x Xeon 5570, with 4 FusionIO 80GB SSD storage devices at 100GB scale factor. So why have we not seen TPC-C or TPC-E OLTP benchmark results published?   Now it is much more feasible to run the TPC-H data warehouse benchmark on SSD because the Scale Factor 100 size is ...

Samsung has announced a new 256Gb solid state drive. Production will begin later this year. The initial market is for notebooks, but the real market is for databases.  SSD drives are faster than hard disks, more reliable, and have different access method performance patterns. Hard drives perform best while sequentially accesses ...