1 Million IOPS with solid state storage technology

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By Calvin Zito

One thing I wanted to mention last week and I forgot was the results of some performance testing our partner Fusion-io and HP did.  We were able to achieve over 1 million IOPS in a single HP ProLiant Server running four Quad-Core processors and with Fusion-io solid state storage technology.  There's an article in eWeek that does a good job describing the test that you can read here: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Fusionio-HP-Team-Up-for-1M-IOPs-8GBs-Throughput-Ben-362772/.  I'm guessing you'll hear more about this kind of technology with our recently announced HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator and HP BladeSystem in the near future. 

While EMC has been running around claiming market leading innovation with SSDs (or whatever name they came up with to give the appearance of leadership), HP was proving leadership with this testing.  It also goes to the point we've made in this blog that solid state technology is an end-to-end system play and that storage only vendors like EMC are at a big disadvantage in helping address that end-to-end system.  It explains why EMC is so keen to partner with Cisco on storage and blade servers but don't expect them to catch up anytime soon.

One last thing on a totally unrelated subject.  A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned my spring break trip to Juarez, Mexico on this blog.  It was an amazing trip that I find myself thinking about often.  One of the places we visited in Juarez was the Colonia Campesina.  A colonia is like a shanty town with houses built from cardboard, wooden pallets, plywood, and/or cinder blocks (here's a link to a picture of a house on a personal blog about the trip to give you an idea of what I mean).  Our team had just finished serving a hot lunch (another link to a picture) to about 300 people when I noticed a woman leaving.  My eye quickly zoomed to a plastic cup she was carrying with an HP logo on it.  As I looked closer, I could see that it said HP SureStore.  SureStore was our sub-brand for HP storage prior to joining forces with Compaq.  I wanted to go ask her how she got an HP SureStore cup in the Mexican colonia.  I was talking to someone at the time and before I could finish the conversation, I lost sight of her.  While I didn't find out where the cup came from, it was a reminder to me just how blessed we are even in tough economic times.