10x application performance boost with next gen HP IO Accelerators for HP ProLiant Gen8 servers.

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Guest blog by Thomas Brooks, HP ISS Options

Worldwide Product Marketing Manager, Solid State Products

In a perfect world my flights would always be on time, drivers would always remember to signal, and people would respond to my texts immediately.  But the world is far from perfect – especially when it comes to data center infrastructure.

For example, as we all know, Moore’s law dictates that computer technology has an exponential growth rate, doubling roughly every 18 to 24 months. Unfortunately, while there are powerful storage offerings on the market, storage technology - especially rotational media - has not always advanced at the same pace. The result is often a performance gap between the compute power available in today’s powerful multi-core processors and large-footprint memory and storage. While more spindles have led to some throughput improvements, this evolutional discrepancy can cause IO bottlenecks, slow applications, performance limitations, latency problems, and database blocking.

You can try and solve the problem by adding drives, memory, or even more servers. Application optimization is also a possibility if you can hire enough people. In fact, many processors are being under-utilized by as much as 50% due to IO bottlenecks. The challenge is that these solutions may require more operational or capital expenditures than you’re prepared to offer up.

There’s a simpler solution. HP IO Accelerators, powered by Fusion-io, can accelerate application performance more than 10x. We've even seen customers reach higher performance boosts -- occasionally up to 30x.. How? These server-based memory cards sit directly on the PCIe bus within your rack, tower, or blade server. HP IO Accelerators accelerate applications by bypassing traditional storage controllers and unlocking trapped compute cycles.  They’re made from solid state NAND FLASH, not simply a NAND-based device that emulates a hard disk like a Solid State Drive (SSD). And, because they sit inside the server, they’re not being accessed in the storage array via much slower links.

Sound too good to be true? HP IO Accelerators have been used by innovative companies such as Wine.com and Answers.com to dramatically enhance application performance – a 10x increase for Answers.com – and even consolidate their database tier. (Check out the Wine.com  story on the Reality Check: Server Insights blogs to learn more.)

This week the next generation of HP IO Accelerators – with even greater performance enhancements – was launched as part of the second wave of HP ProLiant Gen8 innovations. In February, HP announced the ProLiant Gen8 server line. This revolutionary new generation represents the world’s most self-sufficient servers, with built-in intelligence to give our customers the highest quality experience over the server’s entire lifecycle. (Read more information on the new HP ProLiant rack, tower, and blade servers released today.)

Dynamic workload acceleration is a huge part of the Gen8 story, and the new HP IO Accelerator ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo can provide significant gains over the first generation of IO Accelerators. In fact, they can roughly reduce access latency by half, deliver five times more read IOPS and three times more write IOPS, as well as twice the read bandwidth. That means you now have outsized performance to unlock applications such as:

• Database Acceleration (SQL, Oracle, MySQL, Sybase, etc.)
• Virtualization (VMware, Hyper V, etc.)
• Tier 1 Apps: CRM, ERP, Exchange, SharePoint, etc.
• Web / Cloud / SAAS
• Data Warehousing
• Entertainment / Multimedia / Imaging
• Finance / Trading

HP IO Accelerators are available now for HP ProLiant Gen8 servers in a variety of options ranging in capacity from 365GB to 2410GB, for PCI-Express 2.0 x4 and PCI-Express 2.0 x8 bus interfaces. List prices range from $6,499 to $38,699.

You can find more information about the next generation of HP IO Accelerators here.

And, finally, if you haven’t yet registered for HP Discover do it today. We’ll be showing a live demo of HP IO Accelerators at work with HP ProLiant Gen8 servers. There’s no better place to see and prepare for the future of IT – not to mention network with your peers and see live performances by Grammy-winning artists.